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The History of film or cinema has brought this mass media from its early stages as an obscure novelty to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment in the modern world. Film has existed since the late 19th century, and in the time since has had a broad impact on the arts, technology, and even politics.

The birth of film

Technological ancestors

See also: Precursors of film

For centuries, humans had experimented with what would become the two key elements of cinema: the projection of images using light (such as with the camera obscura and the Magic lantern); and the illusion of motion created by exploiting the optical phenomenon called "persistence of vision" (such as with the zoetrope, introduced in the 1830s). The invention and spread of photography in the mid-19th century provided the key missing element.

Even from here, the "birth" of the movies was actually a gradual process of evolution with many blind alleys and crisscrossing paths. It involved a number of individuals in Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who, from the 1860s on, worked on often similar inventions with varying degrees of success. Eadward Muybridge, Louis Le Prince and Ottomar Anschütz were among those who designed pioneering machines for projection of rapidly moving images. George Eastman, the American founder of Eastman Kodak, Hannibal Goodwin and William Friese Greene all worked on early prototypes of motion picture film.

Ready For An Audience

W.K. Laurie Dickson, a researcher at the Edison Laboratories, is credited with the invention of a practicable form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. In 1894, Thomas Edison introduced to the public the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope. The latter was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of film (powered by an electric motor) was projected by a lamp and lense onto a glass. The spectator viewed the image through an eye piece. Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets shot by Dickson, in their "Black Maria" studio. These films were usually short sequences by acrobats, music hall performers, and also included boxing demonstrations. Kinetescope Parlours soon spread to Europe, and aroused a great deal of interest.

Edison believed that he had a monopoly position on moving pictures, as he was the only one with a camera. Two Greek entrepreneurs called upon Robert Paul, a British electrician and scientific instrument maker of Hatton garden, London.They asked him to build a number of replicas of a kinetoscope that they had acquired. To his amazement, he found that Edison had not patented this invention in Britain, and he went on to produce a number on his own account. One of these was supplied to Georges Melies, and aroused his interest in the possibilities of film. As films for these machines were in short supply, Paul, with the assistance of Birt Acres invented a camera. One of their first films was of the Derby, won by the Prince of Wales's horse.

Edison had not initiated the idea of projection nor transmission of films; but had merely intended to display them in individual viewers. However, Paul hit upon the idea, and invented a film projector, giving his first public showing in 1895. about the same time, Auguste and Louis Lumière, also inspired by the kinetoscope, invented the cinematograph, a portable, three-in-one camera, developer/printer, and projector. In France in late 1895, the Lumière brothers began exhibitions of projected films before the paying public. They sparked the move from single-viewer units to projection (Cook, 1990), and quickly became Europe's leading producers of the new medium. Even Edison joined the burgeoning projection trend with the Vitascope within less than six months. Nikola Tesla, who worked with Edison at one time, invented the radio (credited to him post-humously by the US Patent Office) along with the Tesla coil used in Marconi's radio telegraph, and he claimed that one of its benefits of radio would be the democratisation of information including projecting duplicated moving images in every house in the world, king or pauper, thus successfully predicting television before the first movies were even made.

The movies of the time were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and travelling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique: no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, stagey compositions. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to mushroom before the end of the century, in countries around the world.

The silent era

Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles.

Early developments in technique, form and business

Paris stage magician Georges Méliès began shooting and exhibiting films in 1896. His stock-in-trade became films of fantasy and the bizarre, including A Trip to the Moon(aka Le Voyage dans la Lune) (1902), possibly the first movie to portray space travel. He pioneered many of the fundamental special effects techniques used in movies for most of the twentieth century, demonstrating the revolutionary point that film had unprecedented power to bend visible reality rather than just faithfully recording it (Cook, 1990). He also led the way in making multi-scene narratives as long as fifteen minutes the industry standard.

Edwin S. Porter, Edison's leading director in these years, pushed forward the sophistication of film editing in works like Life of an American Fireman and the first movie Western, The Great Train Robbery (both 1903). Porter arguably discovered that the basic unit of structure in a film is the shot, rather than the scene (the basic unit of structure in a play).

These developments helped establish the medium as more than a passing fad and encouraged the boom in nickelodeons, the first permanent movie theaters. There were 10,000 in the U.S. alone by 1908 (Cook, 1990). The previously anarchic industry increasingly became big business, which encouraged consolidation. The French Pathé Frères company achieved a dominant position worldwide through methods like control of key patents and ownership of theaters. In the U.S., Edison led the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which achieved a brief, virtual monopoly there, using not just aggressive business tactics but sometimes violent intimidation against independent competitors (Parkinson, 1995).

Rise of the feature film and film as art

The standard length of a film remained one reel, or about ten to fifteen minutes, through the first decade of the century, partly based on producers' assumptions about the attention spans of their still largely working class audiences.

'The Story of the Kelly Gang' (also screened as 'Ned Kelly and His Gang') is widely regarded as the world's first feature length film. Its 70 minute length was unprecedented when it was released in 1906. The movie traces the life of the legendary Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly (1855-1880). It was written and directed by Charles Tait. The film's actual reel length is 1219.2 metres. It was released in Australia on the 26th December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.

The film cost an estimated $2,250 and was filmed in the following locations, St Kilda (indoor scenes), Eltham, Greensborough, Heidelberg, Melbourne, Mitcham and Rosanna which are all located in Victoria, Australia. Only about 9 minutes have survived the almost 100 years since its filming. However, a copy of the programme booklet has also survived, containing both extracts from contemporary newspaper reports of the capture of the gang, and a synopsis of the film, in six 'scenes'. The latter provided audiences with the sort of information later provided by intertitles, and can help historians imagine what the film may have been like.

soon Europe created multiple-reel period extravaganzas that began to push the envelope of a films length further. With international box office successes like Queen Elizabeth (France, 1912), Quo Vadis? (Italy, 1913) and Cabiria (Italy, 1914), the multi-reel, or "feature", film began to replace the short as the cinema's central form.

Leading this trend in America was director D.W. Griffith with his historical epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Unprecedented in scale, they also did much to fix the developing codes of editing and visual storytelling that remain the foundation of mainstream film grammar. The former film was also notable as perhaps the first to inspire widespread racial controversy.

Along with a boom in high-toned literary adaptations, these trends began to make the movies a respectable diversion for the middle class and gain them recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century.

Hollywood triumphant

Until this point, the cinemas of France and Italy had been the most globally popular and powerful. But the United States was already gaining quickly when World War I (1914-1918) caused a devastating interruption in the European film industries. 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: movie factory for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and controlling the market in many of them.

By the 1920s, the U.S. reached what still stands as its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually [1], 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 iconic on every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical continuity editing was solidified and exported everywhere - although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan.

This explosion was vitally intertwined with the growth of the studio system and its greatest publicity tool, the star system, the engines of American film for decades to come and the models for many other movie 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 ‘20s.

World film at the peak of the silents

But even now, the dominance of mainstream Hollywood entertainment wasn’t as strong as it would be, and alternatives were still widely seen and influential.

Germany was America’s strongest competitor. Its most distinctive contribution was the dark, hallucinatory worlds of German Expressionism, which advanced the power of anti-realistic presentation to put internal states of mind onscreen, as well as strongly influenced the emerging horror genre.

The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called dialectical or intellectual montage, which strove to make non-linear, often violently clashing, images express ideas and provoke emotional and intellectual reactions in the viewer.

The cultural avant gardes of a number of countries worked with experimental films, mostly shorts, that completely abandoned linear narrative and embraced abstraction, pure aestheticism and the irrational subconscious, most famously in the work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel. In some ways, in fact, this decade marked the first serious split between mainstream, "popular" film and "art" film.

Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent film was made in India by Dadasaheb Phalke, considered to be the Father of Indian Cinema. The film was the period piece Raja Harishchandra (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period films. By the next decade the output of Indian Cinema was an average of 27 films per year.

But even within the mainstream, refinement was rapid, bringing silent film to what would turn out to be its aesthetic summit. The possibilities of cinematography kept expanding as cameras became more mobile (thanks to new booms and dollies) and film stocks more sensitive and versatile. Screen acting came into its own as a craft, leaving behind its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism. As visual eloquence increased, reliance on intertitles decreased; the occasional film, such as F.W. Murnau’s The Last Laugh (Germany, 1926) even eschewed them altogether. Paradoxically, at about this point, the silent cinema came abruptly to an end.

The Sound Era

Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. The real turning point came in late 1927, when Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. It was a gargantuan success, as were follow-ups like Warners' The Lights of New York (1928), the first all-synchronized-sound feature. 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 reluctant industry that "talking pictures", or "talkies," were the future.

Industry impact of sound

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 Yasujiro 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 days were numbered.

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 advent 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 movie stars, such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and the number one box office draw of the '30s, child performer Shirley Temple.

Creative impact of sound

Creatively, however, the lightning-paced 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. Stage performers, directors and writers flooded the 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 suddenly over.

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).

Sound films emphasized and benefited different genres 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). 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 movies (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.)

The rhythms of street-smart slang energized American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman's The Public Enemy (both 1931). 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). 1939, a major year for cinema, brought us timeless classics like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind.

The 1940s: the war and post-war years

The onset of US involvement in WWII brought a proliferation of movies as both patriotism and propaganda. American propaganda movies included Desperate Journey, Mrs Miniver, Forever and a Day and Objective Burma. 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 movies now considered a classic film noir.

The need for wartime propaganda also saw a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and Noel 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 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 low 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 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 WWII would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One. The Actor's 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 the Italian neorealist movement. Major films to come out of the movement in the forties included Bicycle Thieves, Rome: Open City, and La Terra Trema. In 1952 Umberto D was released, usually considered the last film of the movement.

In the late forties, 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 reach the peak of their creative partnership with films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

The 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 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).

In the post-war years Hollywood also faced another threat. Living rooms were beginning to be invaded by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some movie theatres would go 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-garde movement, 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 announced the death of cinema and showed their new hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film is Guy Debord's Bombs in Favor of DeSade from 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 literally 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, boasted a "bigger is better" approach to marketing movies to a shrinking US audience. This lead to the re-emergence of the epic film 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).

Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The magic of 3-D film would last for only two years, 1952-1954, and helped sell The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Producer William Castle would tout films featuring "Emergo" "Percepto", the first of a long line of gimmicks that would remain popular marketing tools for Castle and others throughout the 1960s.

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) set the stage for The Blackboard Jungle (1955), and some notable early TV productions like Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's Twelve Angry Men would be turned into critically acclaimed films.

Disney's Sleeping Beauty was released on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution after nearly a decade in production.

Across the globe, the 1950s marked the golden era of Indian Cinema with more than 200 films being made. Indian films also gained world recognition through films like Pather Panchali (1955), from critically acclaimed Academy Award winning director Satyajit Ray. Television began competing seriously with films projected in theatres, but surprisingly it promoted moviegoing all the more instead of curtailing it.

The 'New Hollywood' or Post-classical cinema

'The New Hollywood' and 'post-classical cinema' are terms used to describe the period following the decline of the studio system in the 50s and 60s and the end of the production code. It is defined by a greater tendency to dramatize such things as sexuality and violence, and by the rising importance of blockbuster movies.

'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired in the classical/Golden Age period: chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature "twist endings", and lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering Psycho.

The 1960s

The 1960s saw the increasing decline of the studio system in Hollywood. Many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in England and Cinecittà in Rome. Hollywood movies were still largely aimed at big 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, but American films were losing the creative impetus to British and European film makers. The growth in independent producers and production companies, and the increase in the power of individual actors also contributed to the decline in traditional Hollywood studio production.

There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema in this period. The late 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of the French New Wave with films like Les quatre cents coups and Jules et Jim from directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Italian films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, and the stark dramas of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman were also making an impact outside their home countries.

In Britain, the "Free Cinema" of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and others lead to a group of realistic and ground-breaking 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 break taboos around sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the James Bond films, beginning with Dr. No in 1962 would turn the series into a worldwide phenomenon.

Africans had been denied the right to make movies for decades. In the sixties, however Ousmane Sembène produced several French- and Wolof-language films 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 Gettino called for a politically engaged Third Cinema in contrast to Hollywood and the european auteur cinema.

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 The year of the pig about the Vietnam War by Emile de Antonio.

By the late 1960s however, Hollywood was beginning to claw back some of the creative impetus with films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969). Bonnie and Clyde is often seen as the beginning of the New Hollywood.

The 1970s

The 1970s saw the emergence of a new generation of film school-trained American film makers, like Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Brian de Palma. This coincided with the increasing popularity of the auteur theory in film literature and the media, a development which gave these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some enormous critical and commercial successes, like Coppola's The Godfather films, Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas's Star Wars. It also, however, led to some inevitable failures, including Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. The latter almost single-handledly brought down backer United Artists following its release in 1980.

The phenomenal success of Jaws and Star Wars in particular, lead to the rise of the modern blockbuster, with the Hollywood studios increasingly intent on producing a smaller number of very high budget films with massive marketing and promotional backing. This development has continued to the present day.

The mid-1970s had also seen a big increase in adult cinemas and the legal production of hardcore pornographic films in the U.S. Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace became something of a phenomenon and lead to a spate of similar sex films throughout the decade. These would finally die out with the introduction of VCR technology in the 1980s.

The early '70s also alerted English language audiences to the new West German cinema, with Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders among its leading exponents.

The end of the decade saw the first major international interest in Australian cinema. Peter Weir's films Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith gained critical acclaim, while George Miller's violent futuristic actioner Mad Max was a substantial hit in 1979 and marked the beginning of Australian attempts to target the international market.

The '80s: sequels, blockbusters and videotape

The shift that occurred in the 1980s from seeing movies in a theater to watching videos on a VCR, is a move close to the original concepts of Thomas Edison. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. That proved most fortunate, however, as the sale and rental of their movies on home video became a significant source of revenue for the movie companies. THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm launched in 1982. [2] Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980); After Hours (1985); The King of Comedy (1983).

The Digital Age

After the decade of the 1970s helped define the blockbuster motion picture, the way Hollywood released its films changed. Now films, for the most part, would premiere in an even wider number of theatres, although, to this day, some movies still premiere using the route of the limited/roadshow release system. Until this new "Digital Age", the primary way for audiences to see their favorite films again and again was to re-release films. But the medium of home video would change all of this.

Among the terms most associated with this new era include:

George Lucas: The Star Wars films Industrial Light and Magic Steven Spielberg: Jaws

The 1990s: technical advances

The history of film and video distributed online began in the year 1994 with the first public showing of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Influence of Comics. Smoke, 1995. In the 1990s, cinema began the process of making another transition, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Pixar, The Matrix. Meanwhile, in the home video realm, the DVD would become the new standard for watching movies after their standard theatrical releases. Just look forward to the future.

The new millennium

Peter Greenaway's The Tulse Luper Suitcases takes advantage of new media and high definition technology. Interactivity of PlayStation, &, Grand Theft Auto relationship w/cinema: actors, soundtrack, narrative structure. The Superhero film also began to fully emerge in prominence and more consistent artistic sophistication, notably with the huge success of X-Men starting the trend. The documentary film also rises as a potently commercial genre. Faster edits. home theatre. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is released and innovates many techniques in visual effects, while giving the word "Epic" a whole new meaning. Future: Problems of digital distribution to be overcome -- higher compression, cheaper technology. Content security. Expiration of copyrights, enforcing copyright.

Machinima and The Long Tail

One major new development in the early 21st century is the development of systems that make it much easier for regular people to write, shoot, edit and distribute their own movies without the large aparatus of the film industry. This phenomenon and its repercussions are outlined in Chris Anderson's theory, The Long Tail. One of the new systems for this kind of filmmaking is a new process called machinima, which is best exemplified by the comedy series Red vs Blue and the action/drama series The Codex.

The underground

Alongside the Hollywood tradition, there has also been an underground film tradition of low budget, often self-produced works created outside of the studio system and without the involvement of labor unions.

Addendum

"Independent film" may be defined as any motion picture financed and produced without the aid of a movie studio. These works have contributed to the history of cinema from the early days, and will continue to do so. Notable independent filmmakers include a plethora of diverse auteurs such as D. W. Griffith, John Cassavetes, Woody Allen, Maya Deren, Orson Welles, Russ Meyer, John Sayles, Jim Jarmusch, John Waters, and Roger Corman.

References

Print

Acker, Ally . Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. London: B.T. Batsford, 1991.
Basten, Fred E. Glorious Technicolor: The Movies' Magic Rainbow. AS Barnes & Company, 1980.
Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 2nd edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. ISBN 0-393-95553-2
Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.
Eyman, Scott. The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution, 1926-1930. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0-684-81162-6
King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Merritt, Greg. Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001.
Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press, 1999.
Parkinson, David. History of Film. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995. ISBN 0-500-20277-X
Rocchio, Vincent F. Reel Racism. Confronting Hollywood's Construction of Afro-American Culture. Westview Press, 2000.
Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Comment, 1984.
Thackway, Melissa. Africa shoots back: Alternative perspectives in sub-saharan francophone african film. Indiana University Press, 2003.
Unterburger, Amy L. The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia: Women on the Other Side of the Camera. Visible Ink Press, 1999.

Digital video

Glorious Technicolor; directed by Peter Jones. Based on the book (above); written by Basten & Jones. Documentary, (1998).

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 The cultural [[avant garde]]s of a number of countries worked with [[experimental film]]s, mostly shorts, that completely abandoned linear narrative and embraced abstraction, pure aestheticism and the irrational subconscious, most famously in the work of Spanish [[surrealism|surrealist]] [[Luis Buñuel]].  In some ways, in fact, this decade marked the first serious split between mainstream, "popular" film and [[art film|"art" film]].
-Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent film was made in India by Dadasaheb Phalke, considered to be the Father of Indian Cinema. The film was the [[Period piece|period piece]] ''Raja Harishchandra'' (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period films. By the next decade the output of [[Indian Cinema]] was an average of 27 films per year.
+Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent film was made in [[India]] by [[Dadasaheb Phalke]], considered to be the Father of [[Cinema of India|Indian Cinema]]. The film was the [[Period piece|period piece]] ''Raja Harishchandra'' (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period films. By the next decade the output of Indian Cinema was an average of 27 films per year.
 But even within the mainstream, refinement was rapid, bringing silent film to what would turn out to be its aesthetic summit. The possibilities of [[cinematography]] kept expanding as cameras became more mobile (thanks to new booms and [[Camera Dolly|dollies]]) and [[film stock]]s more sensitive and versatile.  Screen [[acting]] came into its own as a craft, leaving behind its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism.  As visual eloquence increased, reliance on intertitles decreased; the occasional film, such as [[F.W. Murnau]]’s ''[[The Last Laugh]]'' (Germany, 1926) even eschewed them altogether.  Paradoxically, at about this point, the silent cinema came abruptly to an end.