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

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