Whenever I see a movie made at the cutting edge of a new technology getting grief for not being an utterly refined example of said technology, I think, “Well, of course not! They were the first!” I think of this often whenever I think of the early days of sound and how much criticism the early sound period films get. Hell, I’ve done it myself. There are plenty of early sound movies that are unnervingly quiet except for the talking. No ambient sounds, no musical scores, no sound effects. And early sound comedies had awkwardly long pauses between lines because they thought they had to hold for laughter like they do on a stage. The Marx Brothers were among those who understood pauses between jokes was deadly and a part of the pleasure of watching something like the last frenetic ten minutes of Duck Soup is that you’ll miss some of the jokes from laughing too hard at the previous joke. But all of this extends too things cinematic far beyond sound. Movies change, quickly, and if wasn’t for filmmakers experimenting with things in their early stages, we’d never get to the refined stages we enjoy so much.
When sound came in, there was a rush to be the first all talking picture. Lights of New York, in 1928, was indeed all talking and as many critics noted, even at the time, talking was about all it did. But other movies followed and just because no one considers The Broadway Melody to be a great musical, or even a very good movie period, it still had to be made so the language of musicals could start to be deciphered. This would wind its way from 42nd Street and The Smiling Lieutenant to The Band Wagon and Singin’ in the Rain. And movies like All Quiet on the Western Front and Frankenstein and The Front Page worked out the kinks for war movies, horror, and comedy, and managed to be great while doing it. Advances were happening by the day so that when you watch a movie like It Happened One Night or The Thin Man, both from 1934, a mere six years after Lights of New York, it feels like they were made decades apart.
Some advances were more expensive, like Technicolor, and took longer to catch on. Still, it couldn’t catch on at all if some filmmakers and companies hadn’t spent the money to give it a try, like The Toll of the Sea from 1922, or The Phantom of the Opera from 1925, which is in black and white but has a color sequence. Eventually, three-color Technicolor was perfected and movies like Becky Sharp, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, A Star is Born, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind wowed thirties audiences with their vibrant colors. And those early saturated colors had to be perfected themselves, until a more natural desaturated color became the norm and color was no longer something we even noticed when watching a movie.
Cultural trends also take time to work through. As realism became something that more dramas turned to after World War II, adult themes became more accepted and, eventually, a ratings system was employed in the late sixties to acknowledge the changing attitudes of filmmakers who wanted their characters to sound more like people sounded in real life (not that they have always succeeded, mind you) and wanted the violence to register more viscerally with viewers. Maybe the language and violence in a movie like Bonnie and Clyde seems tame today but you can’t just blast your way out of the starting gate with wall to wall blood and guts. But again, the learning curve, as with talkies, was quick. By the early seventies, profane language, nudity, and stark violence were already commonly accepted in the movies.
But cultural trends are different from technological ones. Cultural trends come and go but a technological breakthrough is here for good. Sometimes, that technological breakthrough is only evident to a few early adopters who put their blood and sweat into it while everyone else ignores it for years and when it finally takes hold, the early adopters are forgotten. Probably the biggest example of this in film history has to do with computers and the early adopters here deserve a lot of credit.
John Whitney began experimenting with computer generated imagery as far back as the 1940s. Yes, the forties. These were mechanical animations produced long before someone could sit at a keyboard and use software to construct scenery. This led to several techniques he developed that were used by major filmmakers in the fifties and sixties, including Alfred Hitchcock (the opening credits of Vertigo) and Stanley Kubrick (the slit-screen technique used for the star gate sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey). You can see Whitney’s own early analog computer animation here, from 1961. And while there were definite advances done in digital imaging for decades after, it wasn’t until the eighties that actual three dimensional computer generated imagery (CGI) was used for major theatrical releases. They don’t look nearly as polished and mind-blowing as the CGI we’re used to today, but without them, we couldn’t have come as far as we have.
Tron and The Last Starfighter were two of the first movies to really employ CGI for more than just a few shots. Prior to these two movies, CGI had been used for wire frame animations like the Death Star hologram in Star Wars. The CGI scenes in Tron are intended to look like CGI so it isn’t like they were trying to emulate real world, or outer space, landscapes and machines like The Last Starfighter. The CGI in The Last Starfighter is easy enough to spot immediately today by anyone with even a passing knowledge of special effects but without that advance work we wouldn’t have gotten to the advanced CGI just a few years later in The Abyss or the even more advanced work in Jurassic Park. While movies like Toy Story get a lot of (deserved) recognition for their pioneering work in CGI, movies like Tron and The Last Starfighter don’t get nearly enough. CGI is one of the most momentous technological steps forward in movie history. It has allowed filmmakers to portray things on the screen they would never have been able to realistically portray before, or at least not without a lot of difficulty.
There are plenty of other early adopters of other techniques and trends in the movies that we could mention, I’m sure. Whatever they are, the problems are the same: They’re either lambasted (Lights of New York) or forgotten (The Last Starfighter) while the movies that stood on their shoulders get all the credit. Movie history, like all of history, is about a journey, not the destination. Sure we should celebrate Citizen Kane, with its mastery of sound and light but not at the expense of all those films that came before it that struggled so that Welles could make the movie he wanted. We should celebrate the amazing effects of Ex Machina but not at the expense of Tron. Sometimes, being the first means taking the hits when it doesn’t quite work. But if someone wasn’t willing to take the punishment, the rest of us couldn’t enjoy the rewards.