The farther back one goes in film history, the more it resembles archaeology. The films themselves, the artifacts, are scant, they may exist in fragmentary form, and one is forced to generalize from a small sample. Occasionally, the artifacts come from actual excavations. The Oubliette (1914), an early Lon Chaney title, was recovered from the fill underneath a farmhouse porch in Georgia. An Even Break (1917), an Olive Thomas feature, was one of several films found in a filled-in swimming pool in Yukon Territory. Cans of film from a film exchange had been dumped into the pool back in the teens. For some buffs, the rarity alone of the earliest features makes them fascinating.

A feature is usually understood as a film of four or more reels, with a minimum run time of about 45 minutes, designed as the main attraction in a theater's program. The first feature film is thought to be The Story of the Kelly Gang (Australia, 1906), running about 70 minutes. Roughly a reel of the film exists today in an Australian archive. Historians believe the first American feature film was Oliver Twist (May, 1912.) Four of its five reels exist. Richard III (October 1912) is the earliest U.S. feature that exists in a complete print. At least four other 1912 features circulate in collector's copies: Cleopatra, Custer's Last Fight, From the Manger to the Cross, and Queen Elizabeth.

In America, the silent feature film was an art form confined to an 18-year span (1912-1929) when one leaves out the obvious outliers, such as silent versions of talkies, City Lights, Mel Brooks' Silent Movie, etc. Surviving features from the teens show us an astonishing eight-year trajectory of growth, sophistication, and consolidation; those eight years made the flamboyant cinema of the 20's possible. Arguably, there have been other art forms that advanced as rapidly: cubist painting, still photography in the 20's, bebop jazz; but even in that grouping, film is a special case. In the teens, filmmakers developed not just refinements on a style, but the basic theory of cinema, the editing of filmed images to set moods and tell stories. At the same time, the industry stabilized the production system. The major studios, as they emerged (Universal in 1912, Paramount in 1914, Metro in 1915) advanced the technical arts (lighting, photography, editing), the aesthetic (writing, acting, production design, direction) and corporate functions (publicity and distribution.)

One reason so many early features are lost is that artistic standards changed fast. Few films from 1912 could be reissued in, say, 1917. (Of course, another reason is proper care of old films was a lesson that took decades to learn.) By 1919, Variety's reviewer could say, of a film called Children of Banishment, 'It is of the type that was played in the old days of five or six years ago...(when) reason and continuity didn't matter.' (All citations from Variety are from the indispensable Variety Film Reviews 1907-1920.) Imagine a reviewer of today going on about the old days of five or six years ago.

To understand the period, film buffs need good connections. It is easy to find classic titles on Griffith, Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks and Hart on DVD, but after that, the search gets interesting. There are public domain labels, small reissue outfits, the collector's market, and a few film festivals that show the early features. One still needs histories and period sources to fill in the gaps, such as the film reviews of the New York Times and Variety, because what survives on film is so sketchy.

Early films have a stark appearance. Very early on, directors used natural light, even for interiors. Highlit glamour photography came late in the period, and became the norm. Set decoration was undernourished. Acting styles betray the transition from stage to film performance. One gets accustomed to these qualities the way a fan of early jazz develops '78 ears' and learns to listen past foggy acoustics. Films of the teens do not, as a group, have the same level of stylization as the late silents, but they are often fascinating, and they are more than rough drafts for later film makers to build on. The teens were a distinct era in which a mass audience developed the movie-going habit. In the pre-scandal Hollywood, stars were idolized to an extreme. Plot devices that were stale and ripe for satire in the 20's had their first tryouts. Most of the basic genres emerged, with melodrama, westerns, and comedies heading the release schedules.

There were a few genres that were unique to the teens. In 1913-1915 came a series of vice pictures. White slavery was portrayed in Traffic in Souls (1913), Inside of the White Slave Traffic (1913), The Lure (1914), The Voice of Satan (1915), and The Only Way Out (1915). Venereal disease was covered in A Victim of Sin (1913), Damaged Goods (1914), and The Price He Paid (1914). Dope addiction figured in Conscience (1913), Cocaine Traffic (1914), Dope (1914), The Opium Smugglers (1914), The Opium Smoker (1914) and The Secret Sin (1915). By the time The Devil's Needle was released in July 1916, Variety's critic was jaded: 'The drug story has been so often sheeted there is nothing left for it.'

While stories of vice and corruption would figure wider in exploitation films of the 30's and 40's, the vice films of the teens were a different case. Some of them played long engagements at major theaters. Early on, they were profitable, some of them turning into major hits, and some featured popular stars. Blanche Sweet has a dual role in The Secret Sin as twin sisters, one of whom becomes an addict and hides her works all over the house. The Library of Congress has a print of this film, and it played at Cinesation a few years ago. Norma Talmadge becomes a morphine addict in The Devil's Needle. By the 30's, these stories were filmed on the cheap, with amateur casts, and hawked for roadshow engagements in small town theaters.

Theda Bara launched the vamp cycle with A Fool There Was (1914). The vamp was an exotic, seductive woman who set her sights on rich men and brought them to ruin. She invariably smoked, often using a long-stemmed cigarette holder, and wore high-maintenance furs, gowns, feathers, and headdresses that in real life would have monopolized her time and energy. Few of these films survive, but we have stills and reviews to fill in the details. Bara's success attracted such copycats as Louise Glaum and Valeska Suratt, and, because it was a limited story form from the start, the vamp picture faded out in 1918.

The double identity plot was made for the movies. Since its perfection in the teens, the double identity story has been performed by such actors as William S. Hart, Laurel and Hardy, Ronald Colman, Fredric March, Edward G. Robinson, and Bette Davis. It is not a genre so much as a technique, since it can be comic or dramatic, and it is a pure expression of the plasticity of film. By 1912, film makers were using double exposures to show an actor playing two roles in the same frame. It was the kind of movie magic that fascinated the original audiences and made them aware of the unique capabilities of cinema. By 1916 it was commonplace. Reviewing The Catspaw (1916), Variety's critic remarked that it was 'another of those double identity films that are having so great a vogue at present. It seems as though there wasn't (sic) a director or star at present who is satisfied unless they turn out at least one picture in which someone can play a double role that will permit of double exposure work.' The technique was far from worn out. Mary Pickford would use it to great effect in Stella Maris (1918), and spectacularly in Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921), in which, playing mother and son, she kisses herself on the cheek.

The star system predates the teens by a year or two. Florence Lawrence, the Biograph Girl, may have been the first star known by name to the audience. By the mid-teens, there were dozens of screen idols, their box office power was proven, and the first million dollar contracts had been signed. Three stars shared the top position in the pantheon: Mary Pickford, Charles Chaplin, and Douglas Fairbanks. Each of their releases was an event. Their fame, in fact, was global. Their characters, the lovable, spirited, golden-haired girl, the tramp, and the brash, all-American go-getter, were beloved archetypes.

Under them was a second rank of screen royalty, with names are well known to buffs a century later: Enid Bennett, Billie Burke, Francis X. Bushman, Marguerite Clark, Viola Dana, Dustin and Franklyn Farnum, Pauline Frederick, Lillian Gish, William S. Hart, Mary Miles Minter, Tom Mix, Mabel Normand, Seena Owen, Charles Ray, Wallace Reid, Blanche Sweet, Constance and Norma Talmadge, and Clara Kimball Young.

There was a class of leading men that, from their studio portraits and few surviving films, seem too mature to have been matinee idols: Hobart Bosworth, Maurice Costello, Thomas Meighan, and Eugene O'Brien, sort of a high school faculty of screen stars. (In fairness, Meighan's films of the teens and 20's showcase his fine, rugged acting. He had a Harrison Ford quality...the modern Harrison Ford, one hastens to add.) The silent Harrison Ford was a popular star of the late teens, but today seems awkward and simpering. He was one of several 'sensitive' male leads who brought out the mothering instinct in the fans; others were Charles Ray, Gareth Hughes, and Richard Barthelmess.

Dozens of other bankable stars of the teens are unknown today, their surviving films, if any, confined to film vaults. June Caprice, Dorothy Dalton, Ella Hall, Vivian Martin, Virginia Pearson, Anita Stewart (a major star), Lillian Walker (a stunning blonde), Carlyle Blackwell, William Desmond, House Peters, Bryant Washburn: each of these players worked steadily through the teens and had a substantial following. Olga Petrova, forgotten today, launched a career as an exotic femme fatale in late 1914, billed at first as Mme. Petrova, and starred in dozens of well-received melodramas.

Twenty years ago I chatted with an elderly lady who clearly remembered the films of the mid-teens. I asked who her favorite star had been, and she beamed as she said, 'Bert Lytell!' the way one would name a favorite friend. 'You don't know who that is, do you?' she said. I had to look up Bert Lytell. He was a dashing star of comedy, romance, and adventure, with a long filmography extending through the early sound period. Those who have seen the 1925 Lady Windermere's Fan have seen Lytell in the supporting role of Lord Windermere, but his prime starring vehicles are either lost or kept deep in the archives.

A surprising number of talkie stars made their first films in the teens. Both Loretta Young (in 1917-19) and Milton Berle appeared as juveniles, although Berle's claim to be the newsboy in Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914) has been disputed. Mary Boland made a series of well-reviewed dramas beginning in 1915. She took straight dramatic roles in her early films. Edward Arnold, Tallulah Bankhead, Marion Davies, Ralph Graves, Alan Hale, Henry Hull, Colleen Moore, Frank Morgan, Conrad Nagel, Will Rogers, C. Aubrey Smith, and Warren William also appeared in the early features.

Cinema, like any emerging art, was shaped by its pioneers. Three of the most influential figures, D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, and Cecil B. DeMille, deserve space in any overview of the period.

D.W. Griffith left a large and ungainly legacy. There are problematic masterpieces, old-fashioned melodramas, and musty studio assignments in his credit list. He has attracted hyperbolic critics who either lionize him or look cynically at his stature. Those who lionize him credit him with bringing the grammar of film into being and raising the stature of film to an art with The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). His detractors find him, variously, sentimental, pretentious, and racist, and claim that antecedents for most of his supposed innovations can be found in earlier films, especially Italian films of the early teens.

I view Griffith the way I view Charles Dickens, as an outsize talent whose masterworks are irresistible, who at his peak tells a story as well as it can be told. His lesser works, like Dickens' are often dashed off and lack artistic unity. I also think one must trust the endorsements of such directors as Hitchcock, Ford, and Kurosawa, who named Griffith as their formative influence. If he did not invent the close up, the pan, or the lap dissolve, he certainly showed how to use them to build sequences, and finally epic films. What Griffith was doing with scene dissection by the early teens put his contemporaries in the shade. The typical feature of 1912-1916 had long, static, set-ups without visual rhythm. Griffith used camera placement, shot composition, and length of shot to advance his stories. As stodgy as parts of Intolerance can be (particularly the scenes of the French royal court), to see the final blistering minutes is to be amazed at Griffith's audacity and his use of pure cinema. He showed his contemporaries that cinema was a difficult, detail-driven art, which required meticulous work and artistic vision to unleash its power. Griffith raised the artistic standards of the industry and accounts in a large measure for the rapid advancement of film technique in the teens.

Mary Pickford brought the modern concept of the production team into play. She began her feature career in 1913 with In the Bishop's Carriage and Caprice (both lost.) By 1916, she had a contract with Paramount that gave her a percentage of profits and artistic control of her pictures. She was the first woman to produce her own films, and from 1916 on, the films show a burnished, painstaking quality, even while Pickford's acting remained spontaneous. Mary Pickford believed that the scenarist, the cinematographer, and the director were her key collaborators, and she picked each with care.

Non-buffs know Pickford as a trivia item, America's Sweetheart, and they have seen stills of her as a flaxen-haired beauty, smiling shyly for the camera. Those who see the films know that she was seldom docile; her characters were scrappy and adventurous. She cusses in M'liss and commits murder in Stella Maris (both 1918). Her star vehicles range from romantic comedy to tearjerkers to melodramas to children's classics. They are attractively shot and edited and have strong story values. While most stars took studio assignments, Pickford showed how a star could control her own career. Soon, other actresses, such as Olga Petrova, Norma Talmadge, and Clara Kimball Young formed their own production companies. Of those three, only Talmadge had a comparable run at the top. Pickford's example was hard to duplicate, but she had shown that quality work from the key players in a production team could bring career longevity. In time, studios would use the concept of a core production team in support of a star. A textbook example is Universal's Deanna Durbin unit of the late 30's and early 40's.

Cecil B. DeMille is remembered now for his epics, but in the teens, beginning with The Squaw Man (1914), he worked in at least ten distinct genres, including westerns, farce, period drama, war propaganda, mystery, and, by the end of the decade, the boudoir comedies that made him the most successful director of the early 20's. As a commercial director, DeMille is without peer. He had hit films in five decades and, besides the boudoir comedies, launched the Biblical epic as a box office draw. The films are never dull. They can be trite and implausible, but they are filled with grand gestures: large sets, oversize props, bold acting, masses of extras, over-the-top climaxes. In the smaller scope of his early features, DeMille was still the showman. There was a commercial hook to the stories and rich set design. There is always a lot to look at in his films. Where Griffith advanced the aesthetics, DeMille advanced the commercial side, crafting a popular art for the masses, finding the stories that pulled in an audience.

As the earliest feature films pass the century mark, we can see their decade, imperfectly at best, as a time of rich cultural ferment. The film makers of the teens created an art from the ground up.