MOTION PICTURE PATENTS COMPANY

also called Movie Trust, Edison Trust, or The Trust, trust of 10 film producers and distributors who attempted to gain complete control of the motion-picture industry in the United States from 1908 to 1912. The original members were the American companies Edison, Vitagraph, Biograph, Essanay, Selig, Lubin, and Kalem; and the French companies Path, Mlis, and Gaumont. The company, which was sometimes called the Movie Trust, possessed most of the available motion-picture patents, especially those of Thomas A. Edison, for camera and projection equipment. It entered into a contract with Eastman Kodak Company, the largest manufacturer of raw film stock, to restrict the supply of film to licensed members of the company. The company was notorious for enforcing its restrictions by refusing equipment to uncooperative filmmakers and theatre owners and for its attempts to terrorize independent film producers. It limited the length of films to one and two reels (10 to 20 minutes) because movie audiences were believed incapable of enjoying more protracted entertainment. The company also forbade the identification of actors because popular entertainers might demand higher salaries. By 1912, however, the success of European and independent producers and the violent opposition of filmmakers outside the company weakened the Movie Trust, which, in 1917, was dissolved by court order. The Movie Trust, which was based in New York and other cities of the East Coast, was indirectly responsible for the establishment of Hollywood, Calif., as the nation's film capital, since many independent filmmakers migrated to the latter town to escape the Trust's restrictive influence in the East. Types of motion pictures Most connoisseurs of the art of motion pictures feel that the greatest films are the artistic and personal expression of strong directors. The cinema exists, however, for many social functions, and its art has served many types of film that do not set out to be artistic. In practical terms these functions divide films into what are usually termed modes, including the documentary, the experimental, and the fictional. The documentary mode incorporates those films relying primarily on cinema's power to relay events in the world automatically. The experimental includes the variety of approaches that have tested and played with the technological limits and capabilities of the medium, including animated (nonphotographic) and computer-generated images. The fictional is the mode most often thought of as simply the movies. It has adopted the forms of storytelling that have always existed in culture, creating various cinematic languages to convey its tales. Each of these three modes can in turn be subdivided into genres (i.e., commonly recognized types of stories or forms). The documentary The turn of the century witnessed not only the invention of the motion picture but also tremendous growth of popular interest in journalism, picture postcards, lectures by travelers (frequently illustrated with slides), and so forth. The motion picture quickly came to serve society's need to learn about the geography and social conditions of the world at large. Some of the first motion pictures depicted exotic locations, contemporary events (battles, coronations), and unknown cultures. Indeed as late as 1908 such a major company as Biograph actually produced more nonfiction films than narratives. This would soon change, in part because the production of documentary films is dependent on world events and is therefore more haphazard and more difficult than the fully controlled process of making fiction films in studios. The decline of the nonfiction film has also been attributed to the belief that, after a decade, audiences were saturated with views and actualities, as such films were called. Moviegoers were no longer drawn to the sheer recording ability of motion pictures; they demanded imaginative entertainment instead.