FILM FILM - University of Macau Library

A European in Hollywood – Name the Man and the Shift of Production Systems 37
al difficulties for European directors and actors to acclimatize to the new production
context:
He had a very difficult time at first – as we all had. We didn’t understand each other!
We had acquired the habit of working playfully, joking and chatting! But I have to
admit that you Europeans have introduced another spirit in the studios. There came
Pola, Lubitsch and Seastrom. All were alike and took work most seriously, which nobody
had done before out there. And this has contaminated the whole of Hollywood!
29
Nagel thus pointed out what he considered to be a European influence on the
studio system, if not in the manner of organizing the work, at least in the spirit.
The Europeans are framed as “different”, as“other”, but according to Nagel,
the “otherness” also succeeded in contaminating the Hollywood norms. Only
fragmentary comments that might be of help in measuring such a “contamination”
have survived. 30 British critic Frank A. Tilley offers a good example of the
same viewpoint as a comment from 1923 demonstrates:
Seastrom had some little difficulty in acclimatising himself to America. There the
methods are almost exactly opposite from those in Sweden, where perfection of
theme and convincing sincerity of story, direction and acting are the first considerations.
He found the atmosphere of the American studio entirely different. There the
first consideration is putting the “movie stuff” into the picture which inevitably
means casting the story in a stereotype mould. 31
In addition to the already mentioned different production practices, to the recycling
of plots or the acclimatization of directors, this question of stereotypes
about both European and US cinema plays an important role within the transitional
process described between film cultures which is here taking place. Sjöström’s
own comments concerning audience expectations also testify to a similar
genre of dichotomies between European seriousness and American superficiality
or playfulness: “The old world has an older cultural heritage. And Americans
are a happy race. They don’t care about feeling pain in their free time. They
don’t care very much about truth. Mostly, they care for entertainment.” 32 Both
these stereotypical comments share one implicit assumption that seems to have
become conceptualized towards the mid-1920s, not least by Europeans: the idea
of two entirely different production cultures. The first one is represented by the
giant in the west, and the other one by several comparatively small national
cinema industries in Europe, which are often compared to each other or even
considered interchangeable.