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Introduction
| Modernism 1900-1950 Popular culture 1900-1950Film The 20th century witnessed a revolution in popular culture from its very beginning, when films began to be made and cinemas sprang up in every city. Because they did not rely on speech, silent movies had more of an international appeal than the subsequent talkies. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton starred in a host of Hollywood slapstick comedies. However, occasionally even these had a political edge – Chaplin's Modern Times and The Great Dictator are good examples. Weimar Germany and the early Soviet Union produced such silent classics as Battleship Potemkin, Pandora's Box and Metropolis. The introduction of soundtracks to films, first in Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer in 1927, did much to spread the use of English as an international language. Hollywood's dominance of the industry was such that, by 1939, it produced as many movies as the rest of the world put together (excluding Japan and India, which soon had mass industries). Most of the movie genres that dominated popular culture for the rest of the century – westerns, musicals, history films, horror films – were soon established. Hollywood welcomed refugees from Nazi Germany such as Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and Ernst Lubitsch. Stars from Europe such as Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich joined US stars. France produced the directors René Clair, Jean Renoir and Marcel Carne. During the late 1930s and 1940s, films became essential leisure for millions of people all over the world, with many making several trips to the cinema a week. Music As well as films, the century saw the birth of popular music that had the power to change the way people lived their lives. Pioneered in New Orleans and elsewhere in the southern United States, jazz evolved from ragtime and blues in the second decade of the 20th century. With its syncopation (strongly accented rhythms that conflict with the basic pulse of the music), collective improvisation and use of unusual timbres, Dixieland jazz would eventually blossom into the jazz of Duke Ellington, who argued that it was as valid as classical music. And George Gershwin's 1923 Rhapsody in Blue proved his point. The world-wide vogue for jazz made the careers of musicians such Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Count Basie and performers such as Billie Holiday. The dances that went with it – such as the Charleston and jitterbug – expressed the hectic energy and joy of the generation that had survived World War I. By the 1940s, jazz had become immensely popular, especially in its smoother idioms such as the swing music played by the big bands led by such bandleaders as Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Modern life became unimaginable without a soundtrack of popular music.
Although the gramophone had been invented years before, the 1920s and
1930s saw the introduction of affordable players and inexpensive records.
Radio The record industry was dependent on radio for publicising its products. Radio was a completely new invention, unknown at the end of World War I but enjoyed by 10 million American households 10 years later – the audience doubled during the Great Depression. About 9 million sets had been sold in Britain by 1939. And as sets became cheaper, radio transformed the lives of social groups such as the poor and women who did not go out to work, by bringing the whole world into their kitchens and parlours. By the 1930s, President Roosevelt was using radio for fireside chats, and the British monarch George V began Christmas broadcasts in 1933. Radio – especially during World War II, when demand for news was intense – pioneered the news bulletin, as well as the sports commentary, celebrity guest show, soap opera and comedy show. All this profoundly changed daily life, imposing a timetable on leisure and giving strangers a common culture. Because of radio, television (when it became available) had a ready-made form and a ready market for its broadcasts. Reading Newspapers witnessed an amazing growth, especially during the crisis years of the 1930s. For every 1,000 people in Europe and the US, 300-350 papers were bought, with the British buying double that amount. This was also the golden age of reportage and photojournalism, with picture magazines such as Life, Picture Post and Vu being as popular as the March of Time documentary newsreels shown in cinemas. Some modern novelists were easier to read than the avant-garde experimenters and were thus much more popular. In 1930s' Britain, the detective novel – pioneered by Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L Sayers – was a conservative but addictive reading experience. In the US, the hard-boiled private-eye stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler perhaps better suited the Americans. Sports Unlike much popular culture, where American pre-eminence was quickly asserted, world sports were not dominated by the US. Baseball remained a local passion, only being adopted by the Canadians and the Japanese (following World War II). However, British football (soccer) went international. In 1930, the first World Cup football competition was held, which was won by Uruguay. Although sports were now watched by mass audiences, the players and athletes remained mainly amateurs or, if professionals, were paid not much more than skilled industrial workers. Totalitarian art But what about the art of the great dictators? Under Fascist and Communist dictatorships, individual modern artists soon found themselves labelled decadents and trouble-makers, and many of them fled (especially from Nazi Germany in the 1930s) to the United States. The state art and architecture of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini – often called 'new realism' or 'social realism' – favoured the monumental (huge concrete buildings, plus massive avenues in cities to make room for parades), the neo-classical (temples with columns to praise the leader or the party) and the theatrical (immense rallies with massive statues and symbolic icons, plus torch-lit parades and military marches). The painting, literature, music and film favoured by these regimes tended to be very conventional, with a propensity for sentimental stories about hard-working peasants and clean-cut youngsters – all propaganda for the regime and praise for the leader. Occasional exceptions, such as the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich, suffered whenever they stepped out of line. Modernism was seen as politically suspect because it criticised the conventions of normal society and suggested that not everything in the garden was rosy. |
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