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Although the advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined, the commercial, public screening of ten of Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895 can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. There had been earlier cinematographic results and screenings by others like the Skladanowsky brothers, who used their self-made Bioscop
to display the first moving picture show to a paying audience on 1
November 1895 in Berlin, but they lacked either the quality, financial
backing, stamina or the luck to find the momentum that propelled the
cinématographe Lumière into a worldwide success.
Soon film production companies
and studios were established all over the world. The first decade of
motion picture saw film moving from a novelty to an established mass
entertainment industry. The earliest films were in black and white,
under a minute long, without recorded sound and consisted of a single
shot from a steady camera.
Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed over the years with editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films.
Special effects became a feature in movies since the late 1890s, popularized by Georges Méliès'
fantasy films. Many effects were impossible or impractical to perform
in theater plays and thus added more magic to the experience of movies.
Technical improvements added length (reaching 60 minutes for a feature film
in 1906), synchronized sound recording (mainstream since the end of the
1920s), color (mainstream since the 1930s) and 3D (temporarily popular in the early 1950s and mainstream since the 2000s). Sound ended the necessity of interruptions of title cards, revolutionized the narrative possibilities for filmmakers, and became an integral part of moviemaking.
Popular new media, including television (mainstream since the 1950s), home video (mainstream since the 1980s) and internet
(mainstream since the 1990s) influenced the distribution and
consumption of films. Film production usually responded with content to
fit the new media, and with technical innovations (including widescreen (mainstream since the 1950s), 3D and 4D film) and more spectacular films to keep theatrical screenings attractive.
Systems that were cheaper and more easily handled (including 8mm film, video and smartphone cameras) allowed for an increasing number of people to create films of varying qualities, for any purpose (including home movies and video art). The technical quality was usually lower than that of professional movies, but improved with digital video and affordable high quality digital cameras.
Improving over time, digital production methods became more and
more popular during the 1990s, resulting in increasingly realistic visual effects and popular feature-length computer animations.
Different film genres emerged and enjoyed variable degrees of success over time, with huge differences between for instance horror films (mainstream since the 1890s), newsreels (prevalent in U.S. cinemas between the 1910s and the late 1960s), musicals (mainstream since the late 1920s) and pornographic films (experiencing a Golden Age during the 1970s).
Before 1890s
Film as an art form has drawn on several earlier traditions in the fields such as (oral) storytelling, literature, theatre and visual arts.
Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving and/or
projected images before the advent of film technology included shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, camera obscura, magic lantern, and various stroboscopic "persistence of vision" animation devices.
Thought to have originated in the Far East, shadowgraphy (and later developments in shadow puppetry) used shadows cast by hands or objects to tell stories. Shadow puppetry enjoyed popularity for centuries around Asia, notably in Java, and eventually spread to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment.
The use of camera obscura in storytelling was infrequent due to
its projection of an upside down image when viewed, but the findings
predicated upon the later use of the magic lantern.
Some ancient sightings of gods and spirits may have been conjured up by
means of (concave) mirrors, camera obscura or unknown projectors. By
the 16th century, necromantic ceremonies and the conjuring of ghostly apparitions by charlatan "magicians" and "witches" seemed commonplace.
The very first magic lantern shows seem to have continued this
tradition with images of death, monsters and other scary figures. Around 1790, this practice was developed into a type of multimedia ghost show known as phantasmagoria
that was much more accessible since it was usually advertised as
scientifically produced apparitions to prove that ghosts were not real.
These very popular shows could feature mechanical slides, rear
projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolves, live actors, smoke (sometimes to project images upon), odors, sounds and even electric shocks.
While the first magic lantern shows were mainly intended to
frighten viewers, advances by projectionists allowed for creative and
even educational storytelling that appealed to wider family audiences. Newly pioneered techniques such as the use of dissolving views and the chromatrope allowed for smoother transitions between two projected images and aided in providing stronger narratives.
Stroboscopic animation devices displayed short looping motion and
were usually intended for entertainment, with surprising and often
comical drawings. Occasionally the technique was used for scientific
demonstration, for instance by physiologist Jan Purkyně to show the beating of a heart and by physicist Johann Heinrich Jakob Müller, who published a set of 8 discs depicting several wave motions (of sound, air, water, etcetera). Inventor Joseph Plateau supposed it could be adapted for use in Phantasmagoria
and in 1847 Magician Ludwig Döbler used his Phantaskop to project
animated acrobats, jugglers and dancers for a segment of his show that
toured very successfully through several European cities.
1878–1887 Chronophotography and early animated recordings
"Abe
Edgington," owned by Leland Stanford; driven by C. Marvin, trotting at a
2-24 gait over the Palo Alto track, 15th June, 1878
Most early photographic sequences, known as chronophotography,
were not initially intended to be viewed in motion and were typically
presented as a serious, even scientific, method of studying movement.
The sequences almost exclusively involved humans or animals performing a
simple movement in front of the camera. Starting in 1878 with the publication of The Horse in Motion cabinet cards, photographer Eadweard Muybridge
began making hundreds of chronophotographic studies of the motion of
animals and humans in real-time. He was soon followed by other
chronophotographers like Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, Albert Londe and Ottomar Anschütz. In 1879, Muybridge started lecturing on animal locomotion and used his Zoopraxiscope
to project animations of the contours of his recordings, traced onto
glass discs. Long after the introduction of cinema, Muybridge's
recordings would occasionally be animated into very short films with
fluent motion (relatively often the footage can be presented as a loop
that repeats the motion seamlessly).
In 1887, Ottomar Anschütz
started presenting his chronophotographic recordings as animated
photography on a small milk-glass screen and later in peep-box automats.
For public presentations of the short Electrotachyscope
loops, he started recording and adding topics that were more amusing
than the usual motion studies, such as wrestlers, dancers, acrobats,
scenes of everyday life (Two Carpenters Breakfasting, Family Eating from
a Single Bowl, Boys Fighting, Card Players, Two Men Taking a Pinch of
Snuff, Lathering Up at The Barber's). Some scenes probably depicted
staged comical scenes and many may have directly influenced later works
by the Edison Company, such as the 1894 film, Fred Ott's Sneeze.
1888–1895: First motion pictures and early film projection
Limited
in part by technologies of the era, films in the late 19th century were
usually brief and unsophisticated in narrative form. Instead,
filmmakers largely focused on displaying the objective role of the
camera as an "unblinking human eye" with which to record reality through
the production of actuality films.
On 10 January 1888, the French artist and inventor Louis Le Prince registered the first British patent for a camera that was capable of filming motion. He recorded the earliest known motion picture in extant on 14 October 1888. The film, later known as Roundhay Garden Scene, was an actuality film that lasted 1.66 seconds and briefly depicted Le Prince's family in motion. The following year, Le Prince filmed a short sequence of traffic on Leeds Bridge in England and successfully created a device that could project images in rapid succession using a Geneva drive. Le Prince mysteriously disappeared on 16 September 1890 en route to Paris to present his invention.
In June 1889, American inventor Thomas Edison assigned a lab assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, to help develop a device that could produce visuals to accompany the sounds produced from the phonograph. Building upon contributions by Muybridge, Marey, and other predecessors, Dickson and his team created the Kinetoscope.
The device allowed a singular watcher to look through a peep-hole to
view a motion picture loop that could be presented for about half a
minute before starting over. On 20 May 1891, Edison introduced the
device to an audience for the first time. Many of the movies presented on the Kinetoscope showcased well-known vaudeville acts performing simple movements in Edison's Black Maria studio. The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895.
During that same period, inventors (building upon the success of
earlier magic lantern shows) began advancing technologies towards film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format.
1890s
Advances
towards motion picture projection technologies evolved upon the
popularity of magic lanterns, chronophotographic demonstrations, and
other closely related forms of projected entertainment such as illustrated songs. From October 1892 to March 1900, inventor Émile Reynaud exhibited his Théâtre Optique ("Optical Theatre") film system at the Musée Grévin in Paris. Reynaud's device, which projected a series of animated stories such as Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une cabine, was displayed to over 500,000 visitors over the course of 12,800 shows. On 25, 29 and 30 November 1894, Ottomar Anschütz projected moving images from Electrotachyscope
discs on a large screen in the darkened Grand Auditorium of a Post
Office Building in Berlin. From 22 February to 30 March 1895, a
commercial 1,5-hour program of 40 different scenes was screened for
audiences of 300 people at the old Reichstag and received circa 4,000
visitors.
Illustrated songs were a trend that began in 1894 in vaudeville houses and persisted as late as the late 1930s in film theaters. Live performance or sound recordings were paired with hand-colored glass slides projected through stereopticons
and similar devices. In this way, song narrative was illustrated
through a series of slides whose changes were simultaneous with the
narrative development. Later, with the birth of film, illustrated songs
were used as filler material preceding films and during reel changes.
The Berlin Wintergarten theater hosted an early movie presentation by the Skladanowsky brothers
during the month of November 1895. Their picture show, which lasted
approximately 15-minutes, was part of an evening program that lasted
over three hours, which further included all kinds of variety acts. The
Skladanowskys showed eight short films (circa 6 to 11 seconds if played
at 16 fps), looped repeatedly, while a specially composed score was
played especially loud to drown out the noise of the machinery.
On 28 December 1895, the Lumière brothers gave their first commercial screening with the Cinématographe
in Paris. The screening consisted of ten films and lasted roughly 20
minutes. The most advanced demonstration of film projection thus far,
the Cinématographe was an instant success, bringing in an average of
2,500 to 3,000 francs daily by the end of January 1896. Following the first screening, the order and selection of films were changed often. The brothers favoured actuality films such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as truthful documents of the world they lived in, but their show also included the staged comedy L'Arroseur Arrosé.
1896–1900: novelty attraction, cheap entertainment, early narratives
Following the successful exhibition of the Cinématographe,
development of a motion picture industry rapidly accelerated. This era
of filmmaking, dubbed by film historian Tom Gunning as "the cinema of
attractions", offered a relatively cheap and simple way of providing
entertainment to the masses. Rather than focusing on stories, Gunning
argues, filmmakers mainly relied on the ability to delight audiences
through the "illusory power" of viewing sequences in motion.
Films were mostly screened inside temporary storefront spaces, in tents
of traveling exhibitors at fairs, or as "dumb" acts in vaudeville
programs. During this period, before the process of post-production
was clearly defined, exhibitors were allowed to exercise their creative
freedom in their presentations. To enhance the viewers' experience,
some showings were accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a
theatre organ, live sound effects and commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist.
Actualities and vaudeville acts comprised a majority of films of the early industry and usually lacked narratives. In 1896, La Fée aux Choux (The Fairy of the Cabbages) was first released. Directed and edited by Alice Guy, the story is arguably the earliest narrative film in history, as well as the first film to be directed by a woman. That same year, Edison Manufacturing Company released The May Irwin Kiss
in May to widespread financial success. The film, which featured the
first kiss in cinematic history, led to the earliest known calls for film censorship.
Strengthened by the development of a portable camera in May 1896,
the Edison Manufacturing Company became a principal producer of early
films in the United States. Drawing inspiration from previous films by
the Lumière brothers, Edison's crew created actualities, travelogues,
and short comedies. According to film historian, Charles Musser, the company held a "virtual monopoly over American subjects" throughout the summer of 1896. Early Edison films were projected using the Vitascope, a device which Edison had obtained the rights to use in association with the film distribution company Raff & Gammon. Created by Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins, the Vitascope was one of the first film projection devices to use the Latham loop, which allowed for longer runtimes. By the end of the year, exhibitions of the Cinematograph, the Biograph,
and the Vitascope had been presented across the country. The Biograph,
with its superior image quality, quickly surpassed the popularity of its
competitors in the United States and contributed to a premature end of
the partnership between The Edison Company and Raff & Gammon.
Advancement of film language
Development of editing techniques and special effects,
along with the capacity for increased runtimes provided by the Latham
loop, allowed for the advancement of narratives to flourish as audiences
grew more familiar to the novelty of seeing motion captured on screen
and competing inventors sought newer material.
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced by the Edison Company for viewing with the Kinetoscope, showed Mary Queen of Scots being executed in full view of the camera. The effect was achieved by replacing the actor with a dummy for the final shot. The technique used in the film is seen as one of the earliest known uses of special effects in film. Georges Méliès also utilized this technique in the making of Escamotage d'un dame chez Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady). The woman is seen to vanish through the use of stop motion techniques.
A scene inset inside a circular vignette showing a "dream vision" in Santa Claus (1899)
The other basic technique for trick cinematography was the double exposure of the film in the camera. This was pioneered by George Albert Smith
in July 1898 in England. The set was draped in black, and after the
main shot, the negative was re-exposed to the overlaid scene. His The Corsican Brothers was described in the catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company
in 1900: "By extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite
transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a
sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A 'vision'
then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow."
At the end of 1896, French magician Georges Méliès established the Star Film Company and started producing, directing, and distributing an oeuvre that would eventually contain over 500 short films.
Having previously used film as an illusion in his magic acts, Méliès
realized that film afforded him the ability to "produce visual
spectacles not achievable in the theater". He is often regarded as "the godfather of special effects" for his advancement of techniques such as the stop trick and double exposures. The use of these techniques allowed for more imaginative narratives to be created, such as the 1896 film Le Manoir du Diable (The House of the Devil), regarded as a first in the horror film genre, and the 1899 film Cendrillon (Cinderella).
G.A. Smith also initiated the special effects technique of reverse motion.
He did this by repeating the action a second time, while filming it
with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second
negative to that of the first. The first films made using this device were Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and The Awkward Sign Painter. The earliest surviving example of this technique is Smith's The House That Jack Built, made before September 1900.
Cecil Hepworth took this technique further, by printing the negative
of the forwards motion backwards frame by frame, so producing a print
in which the original action was exactly reversed. To do this he built a
special printer in which the negative running through a projector was
projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving a
same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a "projection
printer", and eventually an "optical printer".
The use of different camera speeds also appeared around 1900 in the films of Robert W. Paul and Hepworth. Paul shot scenes from On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus
(1899) with the camera turning very slowly. When the film was projected
at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing
at great speed. Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder
(1901). The Chief's movements are sped up by cranking the camera much
faster than 16 frames per second. This gives what we would call a "slow motion" effect.
Film editing and continuous narrative
The
first films to consist of more than one shot appeared toward the end of
the 19th century. A notable example was the French film of the life of Jesus Christ, La vie du Christ (The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ), by Alice Guy.
These weren't represented as a continuous film, the separate scenes
were interspersed with lantern slides, a lecture, and live choral
numbers, to increase the running time of the spectacle to about 90
minutes. Another example of this is the reproductions of scenes from the
Greco-Turkish war, made by Georges Méliès in 1897. Although each scene was sold separately, they were shown one after the other by the exhibitors. Even Méliès' Cendrillon (Cinderella)
of 1898 contained no action moving from one shot to the next one. To
understand what was going on in the film the audience had to know their
stories beforehand, or be told them by a presenter.
Real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, is attributed to British film pioneer Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898 and one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition
having lunch and then follow other people inside through the door. The
second shot shows what they do inside. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No.
1' of 1895 was the first camera to feature reverse-cranking, which
allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times and thereby to
create super-positions and multiple exposures. This technique was first used in his 1901 film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost.
The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899 at the Brighton School in England. In the latter part of that year, George Albert Smith made The Kiss in the Tunnel.
This film started with a shot from a "phantom ride" at the point at
which the train goes into a tunnel, and continued with the action on a
set representing the interior of a railway carriage, where a man steals a
kiss from a woman, and then cuts back to the phantom ride shot when the
train comes out of the tunnel.
A month later, the Bamforth company in Yorkshire made a restaged
version of this film under the same title, and in this case they filmed
shots of a train entering and leaving a tunnel from beside the tracks,
which they joined before and after their version of the kiss inside the
train compartment.
1900s
Innovation and early storytelling
The
first successful permanent theatre showing nothing but films was "The
Nickelodeon", which was opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. By this date there
were finally enough films several minutes long available to fill a
programme running for at least half an hour, and which could be changed
weekly when the local audience became bored with it. Other exhibitors in
the United States quickly followed suit, and within a couple of years
there were thousands of these nickelodeons in operation. The American situation led to a world-wide boom in the production and exhibition of films from 1906 onwards.
Movie theaters became popular entertainment venues and social hubs in the early 20th century, much like cabarets and other theaters.
In most countries, intertitles
came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus
dispensing with narrators, but in Japanese cinema, human narrators known
as benshi remained popular throughout the silent era. The technical problems were resolved by 1923.
In 1900, continuity of action across successive shots was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James Williamson, who also worked in Brighton. In that year, Smith made As Seen Through a Telescope,
in which the main shot shows a street scene with a young man tying the
shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an old man
observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of
the hands on the girl's foot shown inside a black circular mask, and
then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even more remarkable is James Williamson's 1900 film, Attack on a China Mission. The film, which film historian John Barnes
later described as having "the most fully developed narrative of any
film made in England up to that time", opens as the first shot shows
Chinese Boxer rebels at the gate; it then cuts to the missionary family
in the garden, where a fight ensues. The wife signals to British sailors
from the balcony, who come and rescue them. The film also used the first "reverse angle" cut in film history.
G.A Smith pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his 1900 films, As Seen Through a Telescope and Grandma's Reading Glass.
He further developed the ideas of breaking a scene shot in one place
into a series of shots taken from different camera positions over the
next couple of years, starting with The Little Doctors of 1901 (the film, now thought lost, was remade as The Sick Kitten in 1903).
In a series of films he produced at this time, he also introduced the
use of subjective and objective point-of-view shots, the creation of
dream-time and the use of reversing. He summed up his work in Mary Jane's Mishap
of 1903, with repeated cuts to a close shot of a housemaid fooling
around. He combined these effects, along with superimpositions, use of wipe transitions to denote a scene change, and other devices, before going on to invent the Kinemacolor system of colour cinematography. His films were the first to establish the basics of coherent narrative and what became known as film language, or "film grammar".
James Williamson pioneered making films that had continuous action from shot to shot such as in his 1901 film Stop Thief!.
Films of this genre were later termed "chase films". These were inspired by James Williamson's Stop Thief!
of 1901, which showed a tramp stealing a leg of mutton from a butcher's
boy in the first shot, then being chased through the second shot by the
butcher's boy and assorted dogs, and finally being caught by the dogs
in the third shot. Several British films made in the first half of 1903 extended the chase method of film construction. These included An Elopement à la Mode and The Pickpocket: A Chase Through London, made by Alf Collins for the British branch of the French Gaumont company, A Daring Daylight Burglary, made by Frank Mottershaw at the Sheffield Photographic Company, and Desperate Poaching Affray, made by William Haggar. Haggar in particular innovated the first extant panning shots; the poachers are chased by gamekeepers and police officers and the camera pans along, creating a sense of urgency and speed. His films were also recognised for their intelligent use of depth of staging and screen edges, while film academic Noël Burch praised Haggar's effective use of off-screen space. He was also one of the first filmmakers to purposefully introduce violence for entertainment; in Desperate Poaching Affray, the villains are seen firing guns at their pursuers.
Other filmmakers took up all these ideas including the American Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in 1901. Porter, a projectionist, was hired by Thomas Edison to develop his new projection model known as the Vitascope.
When he began making longer films in 1902, he put a dissolve between
every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he frequently
had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film, The Great Train Robbery
(1903), had a running time of twelve minutes, with twenty separate
shots and ten different indoor and outdoor locations. He used cross-cutting editing method to show simultaneous action in different places. The time continuity in The Great Train Robbery
was actually more confusing than that in the films it was modeled on,
but nevertheless it was a greater success than them due to its Wild West violence. The Great Train Robbery served as one of the vehicles that would launch the film medium into mass popularity.
The Pathé
company in France also made imitations and variations of Smith and
Williamson's films from 1902 onwards using cuts between the shots, which
helped to standardize the basics of film construction. The sheer
volume of Pathé's production led to their filmmakers giving a further
precision and polish to the details of film continuity.An influential French film of the period was Méliès's 14-minute-long A Trip to the Moon. It was extremely popular at the time of its release, and is the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès. It was one of the first known science fiction films, and used innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in the Moon's eye.
Early animation
El Apóstol, the world's first animated feature film, and
Peludópolis, the first animated feature film with sound, were produced in cutout animation by Italian-Argentinian cartoonist
Quirino Cristiani.
When cinematography was introduced, animation was familiar from
various optical toys (in stroboscopic form), magic lantern shows (in
mechanical form) and from Emile Reynaud's Pantomimes Lumineuses. It took over a decade before animation started to play a role in cinemas with stop motion short films like Segundo de Chomón's Le théâtre de Bob (1906) and J. Stuart Blackton's The Haunted Hotel (1907) as well as hand-drawn short animation films like Blackton's 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (with some cut-out animation) and Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908).[citation needed]
The world's first animated feature film was El Apóstol (1917), made by Italian-Argentine cartoonist Quirino Cristiani utilizing cutout animation. Cristiani also directed the first animated feature film with sound, Peludópolis,
released with a vitaphone sound-on-disc synchronization system
soundtrack. Unfortunately, a fire that destroyed producer Federico
Valle's film studio incinerated the only known copies of the movies, and
they are now considered lost films.
Feature film
Films at the time were no longer than one reel, although some
multi-reel films had been made on the life of Christ in the first few
years of cinema. The first feature-length multi-reel film in the world
was the 1906 Australian production called The Story of the Kelly Gang.
It traced the life of the legendary infamous outlaw and bushranger Ned Kelly (1855–1880) and ran for more than an hour with a reel length of approximately 4,000 feet (1,200 m). It was first shown at the Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia on 26 December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.
Maturation and film business
The first successful permanent theatre showing only films was "The Nickelodeon", which was opened in Pittsburgh in 1905.
By then, there were enough films several minutes long available to fill
a programme running for at least half an hour, and which could be
changed weekly when the local audience became bored with it. Other
exhibitors in the United States quickly followed suit, and within two
years, there were 8,000 of these nickelodeons
in operation across the United States. The American experience led to a
worldwide boom in the production and exhibition of films from 1906
onwards.
By 1907, purpose-built cinemas for motion pictures were being opened
across the United States, Britain and France. The films were often shown
with the accompaniment of music provided by a pianist, though there
could be more musicians. There were also a very few larger cinemas in
some of the biggest cities. Initially, the majority of films in the
programmes were Pathé
films, but this changed fairly quickly as the American companies
cranked up production. The programme was made up of just a few films,
and the show lasted around 30 minutes. The reel of film, of maximum
length 1,000 feet (300 m), which usually contained one individual film,
became the standard unit of film production and exhibition in this
period. The programme was changed twice or more a week, but went up to
five changes of programme a week after a couple of years. In general,
cinemas were set up in the established entertainment districts of the
cities. In 1907, Pathé began renting their films to cinemas through film
exchanges rather than selling the films outright.
The litigation over patents between all the major American film-making
companies had continued, and at the end of 1908 they decided to pool
their patents and form a trust to use them to control the American film
business. The companies concerned were Pathé, Edison, Biograph,
Vitagraph, Lubin, Selig, Essanay, Kalem, and the Kleine Optical Company,
a major importer of European films. The George Eastman company, the
only manufacturer of film stock in the United States, was also part of
the combine, which was called the Motion Picture Patents Company Motion Picture Patents Company
(MPPC), and Eastman Kodak agreed to only supply the members with film
stock. License fees for distributing and projecting films were extracted
from all distributors and exhibitors. The producing companies that were
part of the trust were allocated production quotas (two reels, i.e.
films, a week for the biggest ones, one reel a week for the smaller),
which were supposed to be enough to fill the programmes of the licensed
exhibitors. But the market was bigger than that, for although 6,000
exhibitors signed with the MPPC, about 2,000 others did not. A minority
of the exchanges (i.e. distributors) stayed outside the MPPC, and in
1909 these independent exchanges immediately began to fund new film
producing companies. By 1911 there were enough independent and foreign
films available to programme all the shows of the independent
exhibitors, and in 1912 the independents had nearly half of the market.
The MPPC had effectively been defeated in its plan to control the whole
United States market, and the government anti-trust action, which only
now started against the MPPC, was not really necessary to defeat it.
In the early 20th century, before Hollywood, the motion picture industry was based in Fort Lee, New Jersey across the Hudson River from New York City. In need of a winter headquarters, moviemakers were attracted to Jacksonville, Florida
due to its warm climate, exotic locations, excellent rail access, and
cheaper labor, earning the city the title of "The Winter Film Capital of
the World." New York-based Kalem Studios was the first to open a permanent studio in Jacksonville in 1908. Over the course of the next decade, more than 30 silent film companies established studios in town, including Metro Pictures (later MGM), Edison Studios, Majestic Films, King-Bee Film Company, Vim Comedy Company, Norman Studios, Gaumont Studios and the Lubin Manufacturing Company. The first motion picture made in Technicolor and the first feature-length color movie produced in the United States, The Gulf Between, was also filmed on location in Jacksonville in 1917.
Jacksonville was especially important to the African American film industry. One notable individual in this regard is the European American producer Richard Norman, who created a string of films starring black actors in the vein of Oscar Micheaux and the Lincoln Motion Picture Company. In contrast to the degrading parts offered in certain white films such as The Birth of a Nation,
Norman and his contemporaries sought to create positive stories
featuring African Americans in what he termed "splendidly assuming
different roles."
Jacksonville's mostly conservative residents, however, objected
to the hallmarks of the early movie industry, such as car chases in the
streets, simulated bank robberies and fire alarms in public places, and
even the occasional riot. In 1917, conservative Democrat John W. Martin was elected mayor on the platform of taming the city's movie industry. By that time, southern California was emerging as the major movie production center, thanks in large part to the move of film pioneers like William Selig and D.W. Griffith to the area. These factors quickly sealed the demise of Jacksonville as a major film destination.
Another factor for the industry's move west was that up until
1913, most American film production was still carried out around New
York, but due to the monopoly of Thomas A. Edison, Inc.'s film patents and its litigious attempts to preserve it, many filmmakers moved to Southern California, starting with Selig in 1909.
The sunshine and scenery was important for the production of Westerns,
which came to form a major American film genre with the first cowboy
stars, G.M. Anderson ("Broncho Billy") and Tom Mix.
Selig pioneered the use of (fairly) wild animals from a zoo for a
series of exotic adventures, with the actors being menaced or saved by
the animals. Kalem Company sent film crews to places in America and abroad to film stories in the actual places they were supposed to have happened. Kalem also pioneered the female action heroine from 1912, with Ruth Roland playing starring roles in their Westerns.
In France, Pathé retained its dominant position, followed still
by Gaumont, and then other new companies that appeared to cater to the
film boom. A film company with a different approach was Film d'Art. Film
d'Art was set up at the beginning of 1908 to make films of a serious
artistic nature. Their declared programme was to make films using only
the best dramatists, artists and actors. The first of these was L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the Duc de Guise), a historical subject set in the court of Henri III. This film used leading actors from the Comédie-Française, and had a special accompanying score written by Camille Saint-Saëns.
The other French majors followed suit, and this wave gave rise to the
English-language description of films with artistic pretensions aimed at
a sophisticated audience as "art films".
By 1910, the French film companies were starting to make films as long
as two, or even three reels, though most were still one reel long. This
trend was followed in Italy, Denmark, and Sweden.
In Britain, the Cinematograph Act 1909 was the first primary legislation to specifically regulate the film industry. Film exhibitions often took place in temporary venues and the use of highly flammable cellulose nitrate for film, combined with limelight
illumination, created a significant fire hazard. The Act specified a
strict building code which required, amongst other things, that the
projector be enclosed within a fire resisting enclosure.
Regular newsreels were exhibited from 1910 and soon became a popular way for finding out the news – the British Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole was filmed for the newsreels as were the suffragette demonstrations that were happening at the same time. F. Percy Smith was an early nature documentary pioneer working for Charles Urban and he pioneered the use of time lapse and micro cinematography in his 1910 documentary on the growth of flowers.
1910s
New film producing countries
With the worldwide film boom, more countries now joined Britain,
France, Germany and the United States in serious film production. In
Italy, production was spread over several centres, with Turin being the first and biggest hub for film activity. There, Ambrosio
was the first company in the field in 1905, and remained the largest in
the country through this period. Its most substantial rival was Cines in Rome, which started producing in 1906. The great strength of the Italian industry was historical epics, with large casts and massive scenery. As early as 1911, Giovanni Pastrone's two-reel La Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) made a big impression worldwide, and it was followed by even bigger glasses like Quo Vadis? (1912), which ran for 90 minutes, and Pastrone's Cabiria of 1914, which ran for two and a half hours.
Italian companies also had a strong line in slapstick comedy, with actors like André Deed,
known locally as "Cretinetti", and elsewhere as "Foolshead" and
"Gribouille", achieving worldwide fame with his almost surrealistic
gags.
The most important film-producing country in Northern Europe up until the First World War was Denmark. The Nordisk company was set up there in 1906 by Ole Olsen,
a fairground showman, and after a brief period imitating the successes
of French and British filmmakers, in 1907 he produced 67 films, most
directed by Viggo Larsen, with sensational subjects like Den hvide Slavinde (The White Slave), Isbjørnejagt (Polar Bear Hunt) and Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt). By 1910, new smaller Danish companies began joining the business, and besides making more films about the white slave trade, they contributed other new subjects. The most important of these finds was Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (The Abyss), directed by Urban Gad
for Kosmorama, This combined the circus, sex, jealousy and murder, all
put over with great conviction, and pushed the other Danish filmmakers
further in this direction. By 1912, the Danish film companies were
multiplying rapidly.
The Swedish film industry was smaller and slower to get started than the Danish industry. Here, Charles Magnusson, a newsreel cameraman for the Svenskabiografteatern
cinema chain, started fiction film production for them in 1909,
directing a number of the films himself. Production increased in 1912,
when the company engaged Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller
as directors. They started out by imitating the subjects favoured by
the Danish film industry, but by 1913 they were producing their own
strikingly original work, which sold very well.
Russia began its film industry in 1908 with Pathé shooting some
fiction subjects there, and then the creation of real Russian film
companies by Aleksandr Drankov and Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. The Khanzhonkov company quickly became much the largest Russian film company, and remained so until 1918.
In Germany, Oskar Messter
had been involved in film-making from 1896, but did not make a
significant number of films per year until 1910. When the worldwide film
boom started, he, and the few other people in the German film business,
continued to sell prints of their own films outright, which put them at
a disadvantage. It was only when Paul Davidson,
the owner of a chain of cinemas, brought Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad to
Germany from Denmark in 1911, and set up a production company,
Projektions-AG "Union" (PAGU),
that a change-over to renting prints began. Messter replied with a
series of longer films starring Henny Porten, but although these did
well in the German-speaking world, they were not particularly successful
internationally, unlike the Asta Nielsen films. Another of the growing
German film producers just before World War I was the German branch of
the French Éclair
company, Deutsche Éclair. This was expropriated by the German
government, and turned into DECLA when the war started. But altogether,
German producers only had a minor part of the German market in 1914.
Overall, from about 1910, American films had the largest share of
the market in all European countries except France, and even in France,
the American films had just pushed the local production out of first
place on the eve of World War I.
While the war hindered European producers, the technical qualities of
American films made them increasingly attractive to audiences
everywhere.
Film technique
New film techniques that were introduced in this period include the use of artificial lighting, fire effects and Low-key lighting (i.e. lighting in which most of the frame is dark) for enhanced atmosphere during sinister scenes.
Continuity of action from shot to shot was also refined, such as in Pathé's le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907) where cross-cutting between parallel actions is used. D. W. Griffith also began using cross-cutting in the film The Fatal Hour, made in July 1908. Another development was the use of the Point of View shot, first used in 1910 in Vitagraph's Back to Nature. Insert shots were also used for artistic purposes; the Italian film La mala planta (The Evil Plant), directed by Mario Caserini had an insert shot of a snake slithering over the "Evil Plant".
As films grew longer, specialist writers were employed to
simplify more complex stories derived from novels or plays into a form
that could be contained on one reel. Genres began to be used as categories; the main division was into comedy and drama, but these categories were further subdivided.
Intertitles containing lines of dialogue began to be used consistently from 1908 onwards, such as in Vitagraph's An Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cup and How It Was Won.
The dialogue was eventually inserted into the middle of the scene and
became commonplace by 1912. The introduction of dialogue titles
transformed the nature of film narrative. When dialogue titles came to
be always cut into a scene just after a character starts speaking, and
then left with a cut to the character just before they finish speaking,
then one had something that was effectively the equivalent of a
present-day sound film.
During World War I and industry
The years of the First World War
were a complex transitional period for the film industry. The
exhibition of films changed from short one-reel programmes to feature
films. Exhibition venues became larger and began charging higher prices.
In the United States, these changes brought destruction to many
film companies, the Vitagraph company being an exception. Film
production began to shift to Los Angeles during World War I. The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was formed in 1912 as an umbrella company. New entrants included the Jesse Lasky Feature Play Company, and Famous Players, both formed in 1913, and later amalgamated into Famous Players-Lasky. The biggest success of these years was David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith followed this up with the even bigger Intolerance (1916), but, due to the high quality of film produced in the US, the market for their films was high.
In France, film production shut down due to the general military mobilization
of the country at the start of the war. Although film production began
again in 1915, it was on a reduced scale, and the biggest companies
gradually retired from production. Italian film production held up
better, although so called "diva films", starring anguished female leads
were a commercial failure. In Denmark, the Nordisk company increased
its production so much in 1915 and 1916 that it could not sell all its
films, which led to a very sharp decline in Danish production, and the
end of Denmark's importance on the world film scene.
The German film industry was seriously weakened by the war. The most important of the new film producers at the time was Joe May, who made a series of thrillers and adventure films through the war years, but Ernst Lubitsch also came into prominence with a series of very successful comedies and dramas.
New techniques
At this time, studios were blacked out to allow shooting to be
unaffected by changing sunlight. This was replaced with floodlights and
spotlights. The widespread adoption of irising-in and out to begin and
end scenes caught on in this period. This is the revelation of a film
shot in a circular mask, which gradually gets larger until it expands
beyond the frame. Other shaped slits were used, including vertical and
diagonal apertures.
A new idea taken over from still photography was "soft focus". This began in 1915, with some shots being intentionally thrown out of focus for expressive effect, as in Mary Pickford starrer Fanchon the Cricket.
It was during this period that camera effects intended to convey
the subjective feelings of characters in a film really began to be
established. These could now be done as Point of View (POV) shots, as in Sidney Drew's The Story of the Glove
(1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole
represents the POV of a drunken man. The use of anamorphic (in the
general sense of distorted shape) images first appears in these years
with Abel Gance directed la Folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of people was suggested by shooting the scenes reflected in a distorting mirror of the fair-ground type.
Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and
artistic tradition continued to make some appearances in films during
these years. In D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience
(1914), the title "The birth of the evil thought" precedes a series of
three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an
insect. Symbolist art and literature from the turn of the century also
had a more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and
Russia. The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and
forbidden longings was a major feature of this art, and states of
delirium dwelt on at length were important as well.
The use of insert shots,
i.e. close-ups of objects other than faces, had already been
established by the Brighton school, but were infrequently used before
1914. It is really only with Griffith's The Avenging Conscience
that a new phase in the use of the Insert Shot starts. As well as the
symbolic inserts already mentioned, the film also made extensive use of
large numbers of Big Close Up shots of clutching hands and tapping feet
as a means of emphasizing those parts of the body as indicators of
psychological tension.
Atmospheric inserts were developed in Europe in the late 1910s.
This kind of shot is one in a scene which neither contains any of the
characters in the story, nor is a Point of View shot seen by one of
them. An early example is in Maurice Tourneur directed The Pride of the Clan
(1917), in which there is a series of shots of waves beating on a rocky
shore to demonstrate the harsh lives of the fishing folk. Maurice Elvey's Nelson; The Story of England's Immortal Naval Hero (1919) has a symbolic sequence dissolving from a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II to a peacock, and then to a battleship.
By 1914, continuity cinema was the established mode of commercial
cinema. One of the advanced continuity techniques involved an accurate
and smooth transition from one shot to another. Cutting to different
angles within a scene also became well-established as a technique for
dissecting a scene into shots in American films. If the direction of the
shot changes by more than ninety degrees, it is called a reverse-angle
cutting. The leading figure in the full development of reverse-angle
cutting was Ralph Ince in his films, such as The Right Girl and His Phantom Sweetheart
The use of flash-back
structures continued to develop in this period, with the usual way of
entering and leaving a flash-back being through a dissolve. The
Vitagraph company's The Man That Might Have Been (William J. Humphrey,
1914), is even more complex, with a series of reveries and flash-backs
that contrast the protagonist's real passage through life with what
might have been, if his son had not died.
After 1914, cross cutting
between parallel actions came to be used – more so in American films
than in European ones. Cross-cutting was often used to get new effects
of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus
(1918), in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a
Chinese prostitute in an opium den, while simultaneously his unknowing
wife is being remarried in church.
Silent film tinting, too, gained popularity during these periods. Amber tinting meant daytime, or vividly-lit nighttime, blue tints
meant dawn or dimly-lit night, red tinting represented fire scenes,
green tinting meant a mysterious atmosphere, and brown tints (aka sepia toning) were used usually for full-length films instead of individual scenes. D.W. Griffiths' groundbreaking epic, The Birth of a Nation, the famous 1920 film Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and the Robert Wiene epic from the same year, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, are some notable examples of tinted silent films.
The Photo-Drama of Creation,
first shown to audiences in 1914, was the first major screenplay to
incorporate synchronized sound, moving film, and color slides. Until 1927, most motion pictures were produced without sound. This period is commonly referred to as the silent era of film.
Film art
The general trend in the development of cinema, led from the United
States, was towards using the newly developed specifically filmic
devices for expression of the narrative content of film stories, and
combining this with the standard dramatic structures already in use in
commercial theatre. D. W. Griffith
had the highest standing amongst American directors in the industry,
because of the dramatic excitement he conveyed to the audience through
his films. Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat
(1915), brought out the moral dilemmas facing their characters in a
more subtle way than Griffith. DeMille was also in closer touch with the
reality of contemporary American life. Maurice Tourneur
was also highly ranked for the pictorial beauties of his films,
together with the subtlety of his handling of fantasy, while at the same
time he was capable of getting greater naturalism from his actors at appropriate moments, as in A Girl's Folly (1917).
Sidney Drew was the leader in developing "polite comedy", while slapstick was refined by Fatty Arbuckle and Charles Chaplin, who both started with Mack Sennett's
Keystone company. They reduced the usual frenetic pace of Sennett's
films to give the audience a chance to appreciate the subtlety and
finesse of their movement, and the cleverness of their gags. By 1917
Chaplin was also introducing more dramatic plot into his films, and
mixing the comedy with sentiment.
In Russia, Yevgeni Bauer put a slow intensity of acting combined with Symbolist overtones onto film in a unique way.
In Sweden, Victor Sjöström
made a series of films that combined the realities of people's lives
with their surroundings in a striking manner, while Mauritz Stiller
developed sophisticated comedy to a new level.
In Germany, Ernst Lubitsch got his inspiration from the stage work of Max Reinhardt, both in bourgeois comedy and in spectacle, and applied this to his films, culminating in his die Puppe (The Doll), die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess) and Madame DuBarry.
1920s
Hollywood triumphant
At the start of the First World War, French and Italian cinema had been the most globally popular. The war came as a devastating interruption to European film industries.
The German cinema, marked by those times, saw the era of the German Expressionist film movement. Berlin was it's center with the Filmstudio Babelsberg, which is the oldest large-scale film studio in the world.
The first Expressionist films made up for a lack of lavish budgets by
using set designs with wildly non-realistic, geometrically absurd
angles, along with designs painted on walls and floors to represent
lights, shadows, and objects. The plots and stories of the Expressionist
films often dealt with madness, insanity, betrayal and other "intellectual" topics triggered by the experiences of World War I. Films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931), similar to the movement they were part of, had a historic impact on film itself. Many German and German-based directors, actors, writers and others emigrated to the US when the Nazis gained power.
The American industry, or "Hollywood", as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in California,
gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: film factory
for the world and exporting its product to most countries on earth.
By the 1920s, the United States reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow,
to cite just a few examples, made these performers' faces well known on
every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical continuity editing was developed and exported – although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan.
This development was contemporary with the growth of the studio system and its greatest publicity method, the star system,
which characterized American film for decades to come and provided
models for other film industries. The studios' efficient, top-down
control over all stages of their product enabled a new and ever-growing
level of lavish production and technical sophistication. At the same
time, the system's commercial regimentation and focus on glamorous escapism
discouraged daring and ambition beyond a certain degree, a prime
example being the brief but still legendary directing career of the
iconoclastic Erich von Stroheim in the late teens and the 1920s.
1930s
Sound era
Don Juan
is the first feature-length film to utilize the Vitaphone sound-on-disc
sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects,
though it has no spoken dialogue.
During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer,
which was mostly silent but contained what is generally regarded as the
first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this
process was actually accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone.
The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking
pictures", or "talkies", were the future. A lot of attempts were made
before the success of The Jazz Singer, that can be seen in the List of film sound systems.
The change was remarkably swift. By the end of 1929, Hollywood
was almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be
standardized). Total changeover was slightly slower in the rest of the
world, principally for economic reasons. Cultural reasons were also a
factor in countries like China and Japan,
where silents co-existed successfully with sound well into the 1930s,
indeed producing what would be some of the most revered classics in
those countries, like Wu Yonggang's The Goddess (China, 1934) and Yasujirō Ozu's I Was Born, But... (Japan, 1932). But even in Japan, a figure such as the benshi, the live narrator who was a major part of Japanese silent cinema, found his acting career was ending.
Sound further tightened the grip of major studios in numerous
countries: the vast expense of the transition overwhelmed smaller
competitors, while the novelty of sound lured vastly larger audiences
for those producers that remained. In the case of the U.S., some
historians credit sound with saving the Hollywood studio system in the
face of the Great Depression
(Parkinson, 1995). Thus began what is now often called "The Golden Age
of Hollywood", which refers roughly to the period beginning with the
introduction of sound until the late 1940s. The American cinema reached
its peak of efficiently manufactured glamour and global appeal during
this period. The top actors of the era are now thought of as the classic
film stars, such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Greta Garbo, and the greatest box office draw of the 1930s, child performer Shirley Temple.
Creative impact of sound
Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in
some ways, film briefly reverted to the conditions of its earliest
days. The late '20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in
front of and behind the camera struggled with the stringent limitations
of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to
utilize the new medium. Many stage performers, directors and writers
were introduced to cinema as producers sought personnel experienced in
dialogue-based storytelling. Many major silent filmmakers and actors
were unable to adjust and found their careers severely curtailed or even
ended.
This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with Chinatown Nights and The Man I Love, Rouben Mamoulian with Applause, Alfred Hitchcock with Blackmail
(Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring
greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of
sound (Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed
further, technical advances in microphones and cameras, and capabilities
for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all
sound directly at the time of filming).
Walt Disney introduces each of the seven dwarfs in a scene from the original 1937
Snow White theatrical trailer.
Sound films emphasized black history and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was The Broadway Melody (1929) and the form would find its first major creator in choreographer/director Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, 1933, Dames, 1934). In France, avant-garde director René Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and Le Million (1931). Universal Pictures began releasing gothic horror films like Dracula and Frankenstein (both 1931). In 1933, RKO Pictures released Merian C. Cooper's classic "giant monster" film King Kong. The trend thrived best in India,
where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama
made the musical the basic form of most sound films (Cook, 1990);
virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian
popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. (See also Bollywood.)
At this time, American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman's The Public Enemy
(both 1931) became popular. Dialogue now took precedence over
"slapstick" in Hollywood comedies: the fast-paced, witty banter of The Front Page (1931) or It Happened One Night (1934), the sexual double entrendres of Mae West (She Done Him Wrong, 1933) or the often subversively anarchic nonsense talk of the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, 1933). Walt Disney,
who had previously been in the short cartoon business, stepped into
feature films with the first English-speaking animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; released by RKO Pictures in 1937. 1939, a major year for American cinema, brought such films as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with The Wind.
Color in cinema
Previously, it was believed that color films were first projected in 1909 at the Palace Theatre in London (the main problem with the color being that the technique, created by George Smith, (Kinemacolor)
only used two colors: green and red, which were mixed additively). But
in fact, it was in 1901 when the first color film in history was
created. This untitled film was directed by photographer Edward Raymond Turner and his patron Frederick Marshall Lee.
The way they did it was to use black and white film rolls, but have
green, red, and blue filters go over the camera individually as it shot.
To complete the film, they joined the original footage and filters on a
special projector. However, both the shooting of the film and its
projection suffered from major unrelated issues that, eventually, sank
the idea.
Subsequently, in 1916, the technicolor
technique arrived (trichromatic procedure (green, red, blue). Its use
required a triple photographic impression, incorporation of chromatic
filters and cameras of enormous dimensions). The first audiovisual piece
that was completely realized with this technique was the short of Walt Disney "Flowers and Trees", directed by Burt Gillett
in 1932. Even so, the first film to be performed with this technique
will be "The Vanities Fair" (1935) by Rouben Mamoulian. Later on, the
technicolor was extended mainly in the musical field as "The Wizard of Oz" or "Singin' in the Rain", in films such as "The Adventures of Robin Hood" or the animation film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs".
1940s
World War II and its aftermath
The desire for wartime propaganda against the opposition created a
renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas
like 49th Parallel (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and Noël Coward and David Lean's celebrated naval film In Which We Serve in 1942, which won a special Academy Award. These existed alongside more flamboyant films like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), as well as Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V, based on the Shakespearean history Henry V. The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
The onset of US involvement in World War II also brought a proliferation of films as both patriotism and propaganda. American propaganda films included Desperate Journey (1942), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Forever and a Day (1943) and Objective, Burma! (1945). Notable American films from the war years include the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine (1943), scripted by Dashiell Hammett; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's direction of a script by Thornton Wilder; the George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney, and the immensely popular Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and 1942 including John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the first films now considered a classic film noir. In 1941, RKO Pictures released Citizen Kane made by Orson Welles.
It is often considered the greatest film of all time. It would set the
stage for the modern motion picture, as it revolutionized film story
telling.
The strictures of wartime also brought an interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's Gainsborough melodramas (including The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady), and films like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, I Married a Witch and Blithe Spirit. Val Lewton also produced a series of atmospheric and influential small-budget horror films, some of the more famous examples being Cat People, Isle of the Dead and The Body Snatcher. The decade probably also saw the so-called "women's pictures", such as Now, Voyager, Random Harvest and Mildred Pierce at the peak of their popularity.
1946 saw RKO Radio releasing It's a Wonderful Life directed by Italian-born filmmaker Frank Capra. Soldiers returning from the war would provide the inspiration for films like The Best Years of Our Lives, and many of those in the film industry had served in some capacity during the war. Samuel Fuller's experiences in World War II would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One. The Actors Studio was founded in October 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, and the same year Oskar Fischinger filmed Motion Painting No. 1.
In 1943, Ossessione was screened in Italy, marking the beginning of Italian neorealism. Major films of this type during the 1940s included Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City, and La Terra Trema. In 1952 Umberto D was released, usually considered the last film of this type.
In the late 1940s, in Britain, Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including Whisky Galore!, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit, and Carol Reed directed his influential thrillers Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. David Lean was also rapidly becoming a force in world cinema with Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.
1950s
The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in the early 1950s. Protested by the Hollywood Ten before the committee, the hearings resulted in the blacklisting of many actors, writers and directors, including Chayefsky, Charlie Chaplin, and Dalton Trumbo, and many of these fled to Europe, especially the United Kingdom.
The Cold War era zeitgeist translated into a type of near-paranoia manifested in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The War of the Worlds) and communist fifth columnists (The Manchurian Candidate).
During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was
also threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the
medium meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close. The
demise of the "studio system" spurred the self-commentary of films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
In 1950, the Lettrists avante-gardists caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Treatise on Slime and Eternity was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin and split with the movement, the Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they showed their new hypergraphical techniques.
The most notorious film is Guy Debord's Howls for Sade of 1952.
Distressed by the increasing number of closed theatres, studios
and companies would find new and innovative ways to bring audiences
back. These included attempts to widen their appeal with new screen
formats. Cinemascope, which would remain a 20th Century Fox distinction until 1967, was announced with 1953's The Robe. VistaVision, Cinerama, and Todd-AO boasted a "bigger is better" approach to marketing
films to a dwindling US audience. This resulted in the revival of epic
films to take advantage of the new big screen formats. Some of the most
successful examples of these Biblical and historical spectaculars include The Ten Commandments (1956), The Vikings (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and El Cid (1961). Also during this period a number of other significant films were produced in Todd-AO, developed by Mike Todd shortly before his death, including Oklahoma! (1955), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), South Pacific (1958) and Cleopatra (1963) plus many more.
Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The fad for 3-D film would last for only two years, 1952–1954, and helped sell House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Producer William Castle
would tout films featuring "Emergo" "Percepto", the first of a series
of gimmicks that would remain popular marketing tools for Castle and
others throughout the 1960s.
In the U.S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early activism of the civil rights movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), On the Waterfront (1954), Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men (1957). Disney continued making animated films, notably; Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). He began, however, getting more involved in live action films, producing classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and Old Yeller
(1957). Television began competing seriously with films projected in
theatres, but surprisingly it promoted more filmgoing rather than
curtailing it.
Limelight is probably a unique film in at least one interesting respect. Its two leads, Charlie Chaplin and Claire Bloom,
were in the industry in no less than three different centuries. In the
19th century, Chaplin made his theatrical debut at the age of eight, in
1897, in a clog dancing troupe, The Eight Lancaster Lads. In the 21st
century, Bloom is still enjoying a full and productive career, having
appeared in dozens of films and television series produced up to and
including 2013. She received particular acclaim for her role in The King's Speech (2010).
Golden age of Asian cinema
Following the end of World War II in the 1940s, the following decade, the 1950s, marked a 'golden age' for non-English world cinema, especially for Asian cinema. Many of the most critically acclaimed Asian films of all time were produced during this decade, including Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), Satyajit Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) and Jalsaghar (1958), Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1954) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951), Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955), Guru Dutt's Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), and the Akira Kurosawa films Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957).
During Japanese cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s, successful films included Rashomon (1950), Seven Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) by Akira Kurosawa, as well as Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953) and Ishirō Honda's Godzilla (1954). These films have had a profound influence on world cinema. In particular, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai has been remade several times as Western films, such as The Magnificent Seven (1960) and Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), and has also inspired several Bollywood films, such as Sholay (1975) and China Gate (1998). Rashomon was also remade as The Outrage (1964), and inspired films with "Rashomon effect" storytelling methods, such as Andha Naal (1954), The Usual Suspects (1995) and Hero (2002). The Hidden Fortress was also the inspiration behind George Lucas' Star Wars (1977). Other famous Japanese filmmakers from this period include Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Inagaki and Nagisa Oshima. Japanese cinema later became one of the main inspirations behind the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s to 1980s.
During Indian cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s, it was producing 200 films annually, while Indian independent films gained greater recognition through international film festivals. One of the most famous was The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) from critically acclaimed Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, whose films had a profound influence on world cinema, with directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan, François Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, Carlos Saura, Jean-Luc Godard, Isao Takahata, Gregory Nava, Ira Sachs, Wes Anderson and Danny Boyle being influenced by his cinematic style. According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous debt to the Apu trilogy". Subrata Mitra's cinematographic technique of bounce lighting also originates from The Apu Trilogy. Other famous Indian filmmakers from this period include Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, K. Asif and Mehboob Khan.
The cinema of South Korea also experienced a 'Golden Age' in the 1950s, beginning with director Lee Kyu-hwan's tremendously successful remake of Chunhyang-jon (1955). That year also saw the release of Yangsan Province by the renowned director, Kim Ki-young,
marking the beginning of his productive career. Both the quality and
quantity of filmmaking had increased rapidly by the end of the 1950s.
South Korean films, such as Lee Byeong-il's 1956 comedy Sijibganeun nal (The Wedding Day),
had begun winning international awards. In contrast to the beginning of
the 1950s, when only 5 films were made per year, 111 films were
produced in South Korea in 1959.
The 1950s was also a 'Golden Age' for Philippine cinema,
with the emergence of more artistic and mature films, and significant
improvement in cinematic techniques among filmmakers. The studio system
produced frenetic activity in the local film industry as many films were
made annually and several local talents started to earn recognition
abroad. The premiere Philippine directors of the era included Gerardo de Leon, Gregorio Fernández, Eddie Romero, Lamberto Avellana, and Cirio Santiago.
1960s
During the 1960s, the studio system in Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà
in Rome. "Hollywood" films were still largely aimed at family
audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced
the studios' biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music
(1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade. The growth in
independent producers and production companies, and the increase in the
power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of
traditional Hollywood studio production.
There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema
in America during this period. During the late 1950s and 1960s, the French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard produced films such as Les quatre cents coups, Breathless and Jules et Jim which broke the rules of Hollywood cinema's narrative structure. As well, audiences were becoming aware of Italian films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963) and the stark dramas of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman.
In Britain, the "Free Cinema" of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and others lead to a group of realistic and innovative dramas including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and This Sporting Life. Other British films such as Repulsion, Darling, Alfie, Blowup and Georgy Girl (all in 1965–1966) helped to reduce prohibitions of sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the James Bond films, beginning with Dr. No in 1962 would render the series popular worldwide.
During the 1960s, Ousmane Sembène produced several French- and Wolof-language films and became the "father" of African Cinema. In Latin America, the dominance of the "Hollywood" model was challenged by many film makers. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino called for a politically engaged Third Cinema in contrast to Hollywood and the European auteur cinema.
In Egypt, the golden age of Egyptian cinema continued in the 1960s at the hands of many directors, and Egyptian cinema greatly appreciated women at that time, such as Soad Hosny. The Zulfikar brothers; Ezz El-Dine Zulfikar, Salah Zulfikar and Mahmoud Zulfikar were on a date with many productions, including Ezz El Dine Zulfikar’s The River of Love (1960), Mahmoud Zulfikar’s That’s What Love Is and Soft Hands (1964), and Dearer Than My Life (1965) starring Salah Zulfikar and Salah Zulfikar’s production; My Wife, the Director General (1966) as well as Youssef Chahine’s Saladin (1963).
Further, the nuclear paranoia of the age, and the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange (like the 1962 close-call with the USSR during the Cuban Missile Crisis) prompted a reaction within the film community as well. Films like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe with Henry Fonda were produced in a Hollywood that was once known for its overt patriotism and wartime propaganda.
In documentary film the sixties saw the blossoming of Direct Cinema, an observational style of film making as well as the advent of more overtly partisan films like In the Year of the Pig about the Vietnam War by Emile de Antonio.
By the late 1960s however, Hollywood filmmakers were beginning to
create more innovative and groundbreaking films that reflected the
social revolution taken over much of the western world such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Bonnie and Clyde is often considered the beginning of the so-called New Hollywood.
In Japanese cinema, Academy Award-winning director Akira Kurosawa produced Yojimbo
(1961), which like his previous films also had a profound influence
around the world. The influence of this film is most apparent in Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing (1996). Yojimbo was also the origin of the "Man with No Name" trend.
1970s
The New Hollywood was the period following the decline of the studio system during the 1950s and 1960s and the end of the production code, (which was replaced in 1968 by the MPAA film rating system).
During the 1970s, filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual
content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic
images of bloody deaths – a good example of this is Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972).
Post-classical cinema is the changing methods of storytelling of the New Hollywood producers. The new methods of drama
and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during
the classical/Golden Age period: story chronology may be scrambled,
storylines may feature unsettling "twist endings", main characters may behave in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The beginnings of post-classical storytelling may be seen in 1940s and 1950s film noir films, in films such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's Psycho. 1971 marked the release of controversial films like Straw Dogs, A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. This sparked heated controversy over the perceived escalation of violence in cinema.
During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, and Robert Altman. This coincided with the increasing popularity of the auteur theory
in film literature and the media, which posited that a film director's
films express their personal vision and creative insights. The
development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these
directors far greater control over their projects than would have been
possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial
successes, like Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Coppola's The Godfather films, William Friedkin's The Exorcist, Altman's Nashville, Allen's Annie Hall and Manhattan, Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven, and Polish immigrant Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It also, however, resulted in some failures, including Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino's hugely expensive Western epic Heaven's Gate, which helped to bring about the demise of its backer, United Artists.
The financial disaster of Heaven's Gate marked the end of
the visionary "auteur" directors of the "New Hollywood", who had
unrestrained creative and financial freedom to develop films. The
phenomenal success in the 1970s of Spielberg's Jaws originated the concept of the modern "blockbuster". However, the enormous success of George Lucas' 1977 film Star Wars
led to much more than just the popularization of blockbuster
film-making. The film's revolutionary use of special effects, sound
editing and music had led it to become widely regarded as one of the
single most important films in the medium's history, as well as the most
influential film of the 1970s. Hollywood studios increasingly focused
on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive
marketing and promotional campaigns. This trend had already been
foreshadowed by the commercial success of disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
During the mid-1970s, more pornographic theatres, euphemistically
called "adult cinemas", were established, and the legal production of hardcore pornographic films began. Porn films such as Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace
became something of a popular culture phenomenon and resulted in a
spate of similar sex films. The porn cinemas finally died out during the
1980s, when the popularization of the home VCR
and pornography videotapes allowed audiences to watch sex films at
home. In the early 1970s, English-language audiences became more aware
of the new West German cinema, with Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders among its leading exponents.
In world cinema, the 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the popularity of martial arts films, largely due to its reinvention by Bruce Lee, who departed from the artistic style of traditional Chinese martial arts films and added a much greater sense of realism to them with his Jeet Kune Do style. This began with The Big Boss (1971), which was a major success across Asia. However, he didn't gain fame in the Western world until shortly after his death in 1973, when Enter the Dragon
was released. The film went on to become the most successful martial
arts film in cinematic history, popularized the martial arts film genre
across the world, and cemented Bruce Lee's status as a cultural icon. Hong Kong action cinema, however, was in decline due to a wave of "Bruceploitation" films. This trend eventually came to an end in 1978 with the martial arts comedy films, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Woo-ping and starring Jackie Chan, laying the foundations for the rise of Hong Kong action cinema in the 1980s.
While the musical film genre had declined in Hollywood by this time, musical films were quickly gaining popularity in the cinema of India, where the term "Bollywood" was coined for the growing Hindi film industry in Bombay (now Mumbai) that ended up dominating South Asian cinema, overtaking the more critically acclaimed Bengali film industry in popularity. Hindi filmmakers combined the Hollywood musical formula with the conventions of ancient Indian theatre to create a new film genre called "Masala", which dominated Indian cinema throughout the late 20th century. These "Masala" films portrayed action, comedy, drama, romance and melodrama all at once, with "filmi" song and dance routines thrown in. This trend began with films directed by Manmohan Desai and starring Amitabh Bachchan, who remains one of the most popular film stars in South Asia. The most popular Indian film of all time was Sholay (1975), a "Masala" film inspired by a real-life dacoit as well as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and the Spaghetti Westerns.
The end of the decade saw the first major international marketing of Australian cinema, as Peter Weir's films Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith gained critical acclaim. In 1979, Australian filmmaker George Miller also garnered international attention for his violent, low-budget action film Mad Max.
1980s
During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video became a significant "second venue" for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries. Direct-to-video
(niche) markets usually offered lower quality, cheap productions that
were not deemed very suitable for the general audiences of television
and theatrical releases.
The Lucas–Spielberg combine would dominate "Hollywood" cinema for much of the 1980s, and lead to much imitation. Two follow-ups to Star Wars, three to Jaws, and three Indiana Jones films helped to make sequels of successful films more of an expectation than ever before. Lucas also launched THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm in 1982, while Spielberg enjoyed one of the decade's greatest successes in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the same year. 1982 also saw the release of Disney's Tron which was one of the first films from a major studio to use computer graphics extensively. American independent cinema struggled more during the decade, although Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985), and The King of Comedy (1983) helped to establish him as one of the most critically acclaimed American film makers of the era. Also during 1983 Scarface was released, which was very profitable and resulted in even greater fame for its leading actor Al Pacino. Probably the most successful film commercially was Tim Burton's 1989 version of Bob Kane's creation, Batman, which broke box-office records. Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the demented Joker earned him a total of $60,000,000 after figuring in his percentage of the gross.
British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of David Puttnam's company Goldcrest Films. The films Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields and A Room with a View
appealed to a "middlebrow" audience which was increasingly being
ignored by the major Hollywood studios. While the films of the 1970s had
helped to define modern blockbuster
motion pictures, the way "Hollywood" released its films would now
change. Films, for the most part, would premiere in a wider number of
theatres, although, to this day, some films still premiere using the
route of the limited/roadshow release system.
Against some expectations, the rise of the multiplex cinema did not
allow less mainstream films to be shown, but simply allowed the major
blockbusters to be given an even greater number of screenings. However,
films that had been overlooked in cinemas were increasingly being given a
second chance on home video.
During the 1980s, Japanese cinema experienced a revival, largely due to the success of anime films. At the beginning of the 1980s, Space Battleship Yamato (1973) and Mobile Suit Gundam
(1979), both of which were unsuccessful as television series, were
remade as films and became hugely successful in Japan. In particular, Mobile Suit Gundam sparked the Gundam franchise of Real Robot mecha anime. The success of Macross: Do You Remember Love? also sparked a Macross franchise of mecha anime. This was also the decade when Studio Ghibli was founded. The studio produced Hayao Miyazaki's first fantasy films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky (1986), as well as Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988), all of which were very successful in Japan and received worldwide critical acclaim. Original video animation (OVA) films also began during this decade; the most influential of these early OVA films was Noboru Ishiguro's cyberpunk film Megazone 23 (1985). The most famous anime film of this decade was Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk film Akira (1988), which although initially unsuccessful at Japanese theaters, went on to become an international success.
Hong Kong action cinema, which was in a state of decline due to endless Bruceploitation films after the death of Bruce Lee, also experienced a revival in the 1980s, largely due to the reinvention of the action film genre by Jackie Chan. He had previously combined the comedy film and martial arts film genres successfully in the 1978 films Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. The next step he took was in combining this comedy martial arts genre with a new emphasis on elaborate and highly dangerous stunts, reminiscent of the silent film era. The first film in this new style of action cinema was Project A (1983), which saw the formation of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team as well as the "Three Brothers" (Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao). The film added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and slapstick humor, and became a huge success throughout the Far East.
As a result, Chan continued this trend with martial arts action films
containing even more elaborate and dangerous stunts, including Wheels on Meals (1984), Police Story (1985), Armour of God (1986), Project A Part II (1987), Police Story 2 (1988), and Dragons Forever (1988). Other new trends which began in the 1980s were the "girls with guns" subgenre, for which Michelle Yeoh gained fame; and especially the "heroic bloodshed" genre, revolving around Triads, largely pioneered by John Woo and for which Chow Yun-fat became famous. These Hong Kong action trends were later adopted by many Hollywood action films in the 1990s and 2000s.
In Indian cinema, another star actor, considered by many to be the most natural actor in Indian cinema, Mohanlal
acted in his first movie. During the 80's he rose to become a super
star in Indian cinema. Indian cinema as a whole was changing in a new
wave of movies and directors.
1990s
The early 1990s saw the development of a commercially successful
independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was
increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), the latter of which became the highest-grossing film of all time at the time up until Avatar (2009), also directed by James Cameron, independent films like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video.
Filmmakers associated with the Danish film movement Dogme 95
introduced a manifesto aimed to purify filmmaking. Its first few films
gained worldwide critical acclaim, after which the movement slowly faded
out.
Scorsese's Goodfellas
was released in 1990. It is considered by many as one of the greatest
movies to be made, particularly in the gangster genre. It is said to be
the highest point of Scorsese's career.
Cinema admissions in 1995
Major American studios began to create their own "independent" production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino's runaway hit Pulp Fiction
in 1994. The same year marked the beginning of film and video
distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also
regained their popularity, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). During 1995, the first feature-length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios
and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer
animation would grow to become the dominant technique for feature-length
animation, which would allow competing film companies such as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox
to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own.
During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical
film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile, DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.
2000s
Since the late 2000s streaming media platforms like YouTube provided means for anyone with access to internet and cameras (a standard feature of smartphones) to publish videos to the world. Also competing with the increasing popularity of video games and other forms of home entertainment,
the industry once again started to make theatrical releases more
attractive, with new 3D technologies and epic (fantasy and superhero)
films becoming a mainstay in cinemas.
The documentary film also rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. A new genre was created with Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq,
when 150 inexpensive DV cameras were distributed across Iraq,
transforming ordinary people into collaborative filmmakers. The success
of Gladiator led to a revival of interest in epic cinema, and Moulin Rouge! renewed interest in musical cinema. Home theatre systems became increasingly sophisticated, as did some of the special edition DVDs designed to be shown on them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released on DVD in both the theatrical version and in a special extended version intended only for home cinema audiences.
In 2001, the Harry Potter film series
began, and by its end in 2011, it had become the highest-grossing film
franchise of all time until the Marvel Cinematic Universe passed it in
2015.
More films were also being released simultaneously to IMAX cinema, the first was in 2002's Disney animation Treasure Planet; and the first live action was in 2003's The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of The Matrix Reloaded. Later in the decade, The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.
There has been an increasing globalization of cinema during this
decade, with foreign-language films gaining popularity in
English-speaking markets. Examples of such films include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin), Amélie (French), Lagaan (Hindi), Spirited Away (Japanese), City of God (Brazilian Portuguese), The Passion of the Christ (Aramaic), Apocalypto (Mayan) and Inglourious Basterds (multiple European languages). Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 awards won, 3 Special Awards and 31 nominations.
In 2003, there was a revival in 3D film popularity the first being James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss which was released as the first full-length 3-D IMAX feature filmed with the Reality Camera System.
This camera system used the latest HD video cameras, not film, and was
built for Cameron by Emmy nominated Director of Photography Vince Pace,
to his specifications. The same camera system was used to film Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003), Aliens of the Deep IMAX (2005), and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005).
After James Cameron's 3D film Avatar
became the highest-grossing film of all time, 3D films gained brief
popularity with many other films being released in 3D, with the best
critical and financial successes being in the field of feature film
animation such as Universal Pictures/Illumination Entertainment's Despicable Me and DreamWorks Animation's How To Train Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After and Megamind. Avatar
is also note-worthy for pioneering highly sophisticated use of motion
capture technology and influencing several other films such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
2010s
As of 2011, the largest film industries by number of feature films
produced were those of India, the United States, China, Nigeria and
Japan.
In Hollywood, superhero films have greatly increased in popularity and financial success, with films based on Marvel and DC comics regularly being released every year up to the present. As of 2019, the superhero genre has been the most dominant genre as far as American box office receipts are concerned. The 2019 superhero film Avengers: Endgame, was the most successful movie of all-time at the box office.
2020s
COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic
resulted in closures of film theatres around the world in response to
regional and national lockdowns. Many films slated to release in the
early 2020s faced delays in development, production, and distribution,
with others being released on streaming services with little or no
theatrical window.
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