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cinema

Form of art and entertainment consisting of moving pictures, in either black and white or colour, projected on a screen. Cinema draws on other arts, such as literature, drama, and music. Its development, beginning in the 1890s, has been closely linked to technological advances, including action and colour photography, sound reproduction, and film processing and printing. The first sound feature film was released in 1927.

The silent era

In the 1890s the French film pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière developed the cinematograph, a device to project pictures onto a screen to give the illusion of movement. The Lumières' films and those of many other early film-makers were short documentary recordings of everyday events such as workers leaving a factory, the arrival of a train at a station, or the feeding of a baby. The early years of the 20th century saw the emergence of narrative film and the evolution of a more sophisticated film language (editing patterns, camera movements, optical effects). Significant films of the period range from Georges Méliès's fantasy narrative Le Voyage dans la lune/A Trip to the Moon (1902) to Edwin S Porter's western The Great Train Robbery (1903) and D W Griffith's epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916).

While the USA consolidated its position as the commercial leader of the world market during the 1920s, European cinema went through a period of modernist artistic experimentation. German expressionism was particularly influential, exemplified in such films as Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and the work of Fritz Lang, F W Murnau, and G W Pabst. In the USSR the technique of montage was developed by Sergei Eisenstein, most famously in Bronenosets Potyomkin/Battleship Potemkin (1925). This period also saw the emergence of important film industries in India and Japan.

Hollywood before 1960

During the first two decades of the 20th century, US film-making developed artistically and commercially, led by the likes of D W Griffith, Cecil B De Mille, and Charlie Chaplin. By the 1920s the industry was centred on a group of studios based near Los Angeles, California. These Hollywood studios adopted a mass-production system modelled on other American industries. All Hollywood films conformed to a standard pattern and by the mid-1930s their content and idiom were limited by the stringent Production Code (see censorship, film and Hays Code). The appeal and marketability of the Hollywood product, however, was founded upon the production of films according to different genres and the exploitation of star popularity, nurtured by high-profile advertising, press releases, and media features.

The early years of American cinema were dominated by historical epics, melodramas, slapstick comedies, and westerns. Documentaries were pioneered by Robert Flaherty. After the introduction of sound in the late 1920s, popular genres included the musical, the gangster picture, the screwball comedy, the horror film, the period drama, and the crime thriller. The development of animation began at this time. Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, for example, first appeared in the cartoon Steamboat Willie (1928), and the first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was released in 1937.

The development of a star system dates from 1909, when players such as Mary Pickford and Ben Turpin began to win acclaim. New stars such as Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Gloria Swanson, and Rudolph Valentino soon emerged. The introduction of sound brought an end to the careers of many silent stars, whose voices or acting style were unsuited to the new medium; instead more naturalistic performers and established stage personalities found work in the cinema. Stars of Hollywood's ‘golden era’ of the 1930s and 1940s include Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Henry Fonda, Clark Gable, Judy Garland, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, the Marx Brothers, William Powell, Barbara Stanwyck, James Stewart, and Spencer Tracy.

Despite earlier experiments, colour film-making really began with Technicolor. In the USA, colour was initially reserved for epic productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) and lavish musicals like The Wizard of Oz (1939), but by the mid-1950s it had become the industrial norm in Hollywood. At that time various wide-screen processes were introduced, of which CinemaScope was the most successful.

World cinema before 1960

In France in the 1930s, Jean Renoir made a number of classic films, including La Nuit du carrefour/Night at the Crossroads (1932) and Le Crime de M. Lange/ The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936). A series of poetic realist films, such as Julien Duvivier's Pépé le Moko (1936) and Marcel Carné's Quai des brumes/Port of Shadows (1938) were to influence the US film noir genre and the French crime thrillers known as policiers. Jean Cocteau's main work in the cinema dates from the 1940s–50s. Louis Malle began his career in the 1950s.

In Britain the 1930s–50s were a sustained period of creativity, with such film-makers as Alexander Korda, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and Carol Reed. The Ealing Studios came into their own, and J Arthur Rank established a film empire.

In Italy immediately after World War II, the neo-realist movement, pioneered by Luchino Visconti, produced such classic films as Roberto Rossellini's Roma, città aperta/Rome, Open City (1945) and Vittorio De Sica's Ladri di biciclette/Bicycle Thieves (1948). In the 1950s Michelangelo Antonioni and the surrealist Federico Fellini began their careers.

Luis Buñuel began as a surrealist, in the 1920s, and worked mainly in exile from his native Spain. Ingmar Bergman in Sweden and Andrzej Wajda in Poland won international audiences in the 1950s, as did the Indian director Satyajit Ray. The greatest Japanese directors of the period are Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu, and Akira Kurosawa.

World cinema after 1960

One of the most significant movements of the 1960s was the French New Wave, which began with such films as Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle/Breathless (1959) and François Truffaut's Jules et Jim (1962). They self-consciously played with film form, subverting the American conventions; they juxtaposed high art and popular culture; and they presented an often left-wing critique of modern life.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the development of significant national film movements in, for example, Britain (Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger), Czechoslovakia (Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel), Germany (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders), and Spain (Carlos Saura, José Luis Borau, Victor Erice). In the next two decades in Europe, new directors such as Krzysztof Kieślowski, Pedro Almodóvar, Aki Kaurismaki, Jean-Jacques Beneix, Patrice Leconte, and Derek Jarman rose to prominence. The cinemas of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America also began to be shown in the West. Antipodean film-makers like Jane Campion, Peter Weir, George Miller, and Lee Tamahori, and Canadian film-makers like Denys Arcand and Atom Egoyan won international acclaim. The national cinemas of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan produced some of the most intriguing films of the late 1980s and 1990s, establishing the reputations of Chen Kaige, Zhang Yimou, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Tian Zhuangzhuang, Juzo Itami, Takeshi ‘Beat’ Takeshi, John Woo, Wong Kar-Wai, and others. By the end of the 20th century the prolific Indian film industry, known as Bollywood, served an audience of around one billion people.

The 1990s also saw a revival in the fortunes of British cinema. The work of Mike Leigh was well-received, while films such as the romantic comedy Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and the crime film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1997) enjoyed critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic.

US cinema after 1960

In the USA, film-makers like Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Arthur Penn, and Martin Scorsese adapted New Wave stylistic techniques for the American mainstream. Woody Allen developed a more verbose, comic style of film-making that would prove to be hugely influential on the next generation of film-makers.

The Hollywood studios began to divide their attentions between the traditional family audience and the emergent youth market. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw restructuring of the US film industry and innovation among the new generation of film-makers. But there followed a gradual return to the more conservative values traditionally associated with Hollywood cinema.

The success of big-budget commercial films such as Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), and ET the Extraterrestrial (1982) ushered in an era of US film-making dominated by the blockbuster mentality and special effects, enhanced in the 1990s by the development of computer-generated images. One of the most commercially-successful directors during this time was Steven Spielberg. A conservatism in US film, however, encouraged a return to genre and the star system. The western, romantic comedy, and war film, for example, were all revived in the 1990s, as exemplified by Unforgiven (1992), Sleepless in Seattle (1993), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). The Hollywood star became major player in the US film industry, with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Carrey, Tom Hanks, Demi Moore, and Bruce Willis commanding salaries of millions of dollars per film.

On the other hand, in the 1980s and 1990s a number of young independent film-makers and small production companies emerged, operating outside the Hollywood studios. Working with smaller budgets but a greater degree of artistic freedom, many of these film-makers innovatively revived the traditions of both the B film and the New Wave. Landmark films include the Coen brothers' Blood Simple (1984), Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It (1986), Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape (1989), and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). Soderbergh's film, in particular, triggered a revival of the independent sector that escalated throughout the 1990s. Independent US films of this decade, written and directed by young film-makers such as Hal Hartley, Richard Linklater, Whit Stillman, and Kevin Smith, have tended to give priority to the spoken word and leave out the visual pyrotechnics associated with mainstream cinema, epitomized by blockbusters like Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997).

Technological developments

With satellite and cable television dramatically expanding the audience for film, and motion pictures annually setting and breaking new box-office records, the 1990s further blurred the lines between television and the cinema. A revolution in computer imaging, the arrival of the DVD, and the impact of the Internet affected the way in which films were viewed and received.

Technological background The projection of images dates back to the 17th-century magic lantern. Throughout the 19th century efforts were made to capture the illusion of movement in pictures. Optical toys such as the zoetrope exploited aspects of human perception whereby images cast onto the retina are retained by the brain for a fraction of a second, allowing for a rapid succession of still images to be interpreted as one uninterrupted moving image. The development of still photography by Joseph Niépce, Louis Daguerre, and William Talbot during the first half of the century paved the way for the experimental ‘series photography’ of Eadweard Muybridge in which the movement of animals and humans was captured in a series of still images.

In the USA, a number of developments during the last two decades of the 19th century made cinematography more feasible. Celluloid roll film was first used in 1887. In 1891, working on behalf of the US inventor Thomas Edison, W K L Dickson introduced the kinetograph. Driven by batteries, and using perforated celluloid roll film, this was the first motion-picture camera. Dickson was subsequently commissioned by Edison to develop the kinetoscope, a machine in which the pictures were viewed through a peephole, to showcase the kinetograph films. Following the pioneering work of Dickson, the birth of cinema as we know it today took place in 1895 when the Lumière brothers first demonstrated their cinematograph, a portable machine that could photograph, project, and print moving images.

Sound Silent films were never completely silent. Edison, for example, had developed the phonograph before the kinetograph and attempted to combine sound and image. Screenings of films between 1895 and 1927 were invariably accompanied by music, whether played by a solo pianist in a suburban cinema or by a 100-piece orchestra in a big city theatre. In Japan, moreover, there was always a narrator, a legacy of the kabuki theatrical tradition.

‘Talking pictures’ were introduced by Warner Bros, first in the short Don Juan (1926) and then in the feature film The Jazz Singer (1927), starring Al Jolson. Although the industry's adaptation to sound initially set back the artistic gains of the previous decade as film-makers got used to the bulky equipment and more complex working conditions (silent sets and the use of microphones, for example), the artistic possibilities of the new medium were soon realized.

Colour Early film-makers such as Méliès had laboriously hand-tinted their films, and subsequently many efforts had been made to introduce colour. But it was not until the development of the Technicolor three-strip process that colour became more than a gimmick. Initially used by Disney for a series of animated shorts, the Technicolor process was first used for the feature film Becky Sharp (1935). The introduction of colour film stock opened up further artistic possibilities. In Britain, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, together with their cameraman Jack Cardiff, were among the first to exploit the expressive potential of colour. Over the next 20 years, colour film lost its connotations of fantasy and extravagance, and usurped black and white as the signifier of realism.

Widescreen During Hollywood's ‘golden era’ the ratio of width to height (aspect ratio) was established at 1.33:1 as the standard image for American films. By the 1950s, however, the perceived threat from television led the film industry to attempt to create images that TV could not reproduce. The prohibitively expensive Cinerama, which combined a wide-screen image with multidirectional sound, and the short-lived 3-D fad were both introduced in 1952. More importantly for the future of film history, CinemaScope was also developed in 1952 by Twentieth Century Fox and first shown in 1953 in a feature film called The Robe. This system anamorphically compressed a wide-screen image on 35-mm film stock, offered stereophonic sound, and required minimal investment by exhibitors (the purchase of a wider screen and a new lens to be fitted to existing projectors). When projected the image had an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Subsequently, a wide-screen aspect ratio of 1.85:1 became the norm.

Early European cinema Early European cinema was dominated by French films (the productions of Pathé and Gaumont, for example), though film production also flourished in Scandinavia. Italian film-makers specialized in spectacular historical epics such as the blockbuster Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959). Most European film industries faltered during World War I. However, the 1920s in Europe produced landmark films such as the Carl Theodor Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc/The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), F W Murnau's Der letzte Mann/The Last Laugh (1924), Abel Gance's Napoléon (1926), and Alfred Hitchcock's sound film debut Blackmail (1929). Besides Eisenstein, other early Soviet directors were Vsevolod Pudovkin and Dziga Vertov.

Cine-literacy Audiences after World War II had grown up with film, and were attuned to its idioms and alert to its artistic possibilities. Young French enthusiasts working on the film journal Cahiers du Cinéma developed the auteur theory, the idea that the director is (or should be) the ‘author’ of the film, and a cornerstone of the New Wave. Outside the commercial mainstream, film-makers were developing distinctive personal styles.

The availability of home video and the development of film courses at many American universities helped to create a buoyant independent film scene in the USA by the end of the 1980s, where previously there had been only a few independent film-makers such as John Cassavetes, John Sayles, and Jim Jarmusch.

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