Towards a natural history of film form: silver salts and the aesthetics of early studio-era Hollywood cinema

Abstract

In 1948, outspoken émigré director Erich von Stroheim offered a now-famous account of the troubled post-production history of his notorious 1924 exercise in naturalism, Greed. According to von Stroheim, a cadre of MGM studio executives, led by Irving Thalberg, had pressured him to cut his gritty, sprawling masterpiece – an attempt to ‘reproduce life as it actually was’ – from its eight-hour, 42-reel initial assembly down to a more studio-friendly 12 reels.1 When he refused, the film was given to a cutter at thirty dollars a week who [sic] had never read the book nor the script, and on whose mind was nothing but a hat [ …] my picture was arbitrarily cut to nine or ten [reels]. The rest of the negative was burned to get the forty-three cents of silver out.2 In standard production histories of the film, this anecdote has served to reinforce a familiar narrative about the consolidation of classical Hollywood film aesthetics across the course of the 1920s.3 For proponents of this narrative, these aesthetic changes were a function of industrial developments in Hollywood’s ‘mode of production’, which between 1914 and 1930 saw the will of the director increasingly subordinated to that of the producer within a newly integrated studio system.4 Yet closer attention to von Stroheim’s anecdote demands a revision of this narrative. For by the end of the story it would appear that the director’s true object is neither the studio system at large, nor its functionary, the ‘cutter’, but the silver content of the photographic film stock itself – cast here as pettily desirable scrap metal, or, as von Stroheim puts it, ‘forty-three cents [worth] of silver’. In this respect, the reminiscence obliquely suggests a relationship between two things we commonly keep apart. The first is an aesthetic outcome that has become a byword for the vicissitudes of the early studio system; the second is one of the key ingredients of early motion picture film stock – light-sensitive silver halide crystals.