Interpreting Classical Hollywood Films From The 1920's Or The Golden Age

When the average Friday night cinemagoer sits down to watch a film in this country they would most probably be waiting to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster projected onto the screen. Film director John Ford once said, “Hollywood is a place you cant geographically define. We don’t really know where it is.” (Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1985) However, the term ‘Classical Hollywood style’ can be defined if we critically examine a body of films from the 1920s to the 1960s or the Golden Age. The classical Hollywood narrative is called ‘classical’ because it is clear and simple, free of extraneous details. It became the dominant style throughout the western world against all other styles were judged.

Classic Hollywood style is mostly invisible

‘The Jazz Singer’, the first of its kind, was a film about a young boy who runs away from home to pursue his dream of becoming a jazz singer. This historic film was billed as the first ‘talkie’, live action... met sound! The inception of The Jazz Singer, lead to the decline of silent films and the popularity of the

The most important goal of continuity editing is to make the cut invisible to the audience. The film is edited in such a way that the audience becomes oblivious to the many jumps or discontinuities that would alert them to non-reality. The continuity editing style is largely credited to D. W. Griffith who freed the camera from conventional methods by breaking the actions of the scenes into many different shots and editing them according to the action. Griffith made more than 400 short films and in them we can see the developments that would lead to the basic principles of continuity editing. The storytelling was consistent; the flow of the characters and story was logical and progression linearly. Narrative flow is pieced together in such a way that the action appears continuous. Adding shot sequences that happen at the same time but in a different place introduced narrative tension. Over-the-shoulder shots were used to show dialogue between two people, it is a shot of someone taken from the camera angle from the shoulder of another person. Griffith was also conducive in establishing the crosscutting or intercutting narrative device. Crosscutting is when two or more scenes of action in different locales are woven together. The filmmaker can show the audience what was going on somewhere else, or what was happening ‘meanwhile’ or ‘later the same day’. Shots placed side by side were being