Motion Picture History

MOTION PICTURES HISTORY








ORIGINS

Motion pictures were developed scientifically long before their artistic or commercial possibilities were realized and explored. One of the earliest scientific advances leading directly to the development of motion pictures was the publication of a paper by the English scholar Peter Mark Roget in 1824, enunciating the principle of “The Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects.” It established that the human eye retains an image for a fraction of a second longer than the image is actually present. Roget's paper inspired scientists to invent various ways to demonstrate the principle.

Early Experiments

In both the U.S. and Europe, pictures drawn by hand were animated as amusements, using devices that became popular in the parlors of the middle class. Specifically, it was found that if 16 pictures are made of a movement that occurs in one second and are shown successively within one second, persistence of vision puts them together and they are seen as moving.A band of such drawings mounted on the inside of a revolving drum was called a Zoetrope. When viewed through slits in the side of the spinning drum, the drawings appeared to move. A more elaborate device was the Praxinoscope of the French inventor Charles Émile Reynaud (1844–1918). It consisted of a revolving drum with a ring of mirrors placed at the center and pictures inside the wall of the drum. As the drum revolved, the pictures seemed to come to life.At about the same time, William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in France were working on the first practical photographic process, perfected by 1839. As early as 1852, photographs began to replace drawings in viewing machines; by 1861 the American inventor Coleman Sellers (1827–1907) had patented the Kinematoscope, which brought to life a series of posed photographs mounted on a turning paddlewheel. In picture parlors, the Kinematoscope crudely projected the photographs for the audience by flashing them rapidly on a screen. As the speed of photographic emulsions increased, it became possible to photograph actual movement instead of posed phases of movement. In 1877 the English-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge used a battery of 24 cameras to record the cycle of motion of a running horse.A significant step toward the development of the first motion picture camera was taken by the French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey (1830–1904), whose portable chronophotographe moved a single band of images past an aperture at a steady speed. His filmstrip consisted of oiled paper, however, which easily buckled and tore. By 1889, the American inventors Hannibal Goodwin (1822–1900) and George Eastman had developed strips of high-speed emulsion mounted on strong celluloid; their innovation removed a major obstacle to more efficient experimentation with moving pictures.

Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson.

Until the 1890s, scientists were interested chiefly in the development of photography rather than cinematography. This changed when the American inventor Thomas Alva Edison set up the Black Maria, a tarpaper shack near his West Orange, N.J., laboratories that became the site of Edison's moving picture experiments and the world's first movie studio. Edison is generally credited with devising the original movie machine, the Kinetoscope, but his assistant, the inventor William K. L. Dickson (1860–1937), did most of the actual work. Dickson devised the sprocket system by which the film is moved through the camera; he even succeeded, as early as 1889, in producing a rudimentary talking picture. The Kinetoscope, patented by Edison in 1891, ran about 15 m (about 50 ft) of film in an endless loop past a magnifying screen for the viewer. The coin-operated machines were introduced in public parlors in New York City in 1894 and appeared in London, Berlin, and Paris before the end of the year.

The Lumière Brothers

Experiments in projecting motion pictures for more than one person proceeded simultaneously in the U.S. and Europe, combining Edison's Kinetoscope with magic-lantern techniques. In France, the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, introduced their Cinématographe, a combination printer, camera, and projector, in 1895. The Lumières produced a highly successful series of short films depicting motion for its own sake, including workers streaming from a factory, waves crashing against the shore, and a gardener watering a lawn. One of their most effective films featured a mail train rushing at the viewer, causing audiences to recoil in fear. More elaborate and distinctively theatrical films were produced in the U.S. at the Edison studio, where circus performers, dancers, and dramatic actors performed for the cameras. By this time, equipment had been standardized, and such films were immediately marketed on an international scale.

ONE-REELERS

In 1896 the French magician Georges Méliès (1861–1938) proved that film could interpret life as well as record it. He made a series of films that explored the narrative potential of the new medium, and the one-reeler was born. In a studio on the outskirts of Paris, Méliès reconstructed a ten-part version of the Dreyfus trial (1899) and filmed Cinderella (1900) in 20 scenes. He is chiefly remembered, however, for his clever fantasies, such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), in which he exploited the trick possibilities of the movie camera. Méliès discovered that by stopping the camera in midshot and then rearranging the scene before continuing, he could make things disappear on film. Also, by cranking back the film a few feet and starting the next shot, he was able to achieve superimposition, double exposure, and dissolves. His short films were an instant hit with the public and were shown internationally. Although considered little more than curiosities today, they are significant precursors of techniques and styles for an art form then in its infancy.The documentary style of the Lumière brothers and the theatrical fantasies of Méliès merged in the realistic fiction of the American inventor Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941), who is often called the father of the story film. Working at the Edison studio, Porter produced the first major American film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903. The eight-minute film greatly influenced the development of motion pictures because of such innovations as the intercutting of scenes shot at different times and in different places to form a unified narrative, culminating in a chase to achieve primitive suspense. In doing this, Porter developed editing, one of the fundamental techniques of film creation. In film editing, pieces of selected celluloid are put together to achieve a forced perspective capable of manipulating the minds and emotions of an audience.The Great Train Robbery was hugely successful and is credited with turning movies into a mass art. Small theaters called nickelodeons sprang up all over the U.S., and motion pictures began to emerge as an industry. Most one-reelers of the time were short comedies, adventure stories, or filmed records of performances by leading actors of the day.

SILENT MOVIES

Between 1909 and 1912 all aspects of the fledgling industry were controlled by the Motion Picture Patents Co., a trust consisting of leading producers. They limited the length of films to one or two reels and refused to grant screen credit to players. The trust was successfully challenged in 1912, however, when independent producers in Europe and the U.S. formed their own production and exhibition companies. They exhibited full-length feature films such as Quo Vadis? (1912) from Italy and Queen Elizabeth (1912) from France, the latter starring the French actor Sarah Bernhardt.

American Silent Movies

The example of Italy in particular, which, with 717 films in production, had the most advanced national cinema in the world in 1912, spurred American producers to action. They pushed for longer films, more artistic freedom for directors, and screen credit for players, some of whom were obviously becoming public favorites. As a result, there followed a period of major economic and artistic expansion in American film.

D. W. Griffith

The most influential filmmaker of the early silent period was the American producer and director D. W. Griffith, who developed the aesthetics of the motion picture. In 1908, at the Biograph Film Co. in New York City, Griffith began to refine the elements of moviemaking as they had evolved up to that time. He used the camera functionally, starting his shots only on significant action and stopping as soon as the action was completed. He also moved the camera closer to his players in order to heighten emotion; he was the first director to use the close-up as a means of emphasis, flying in the face of the popular belief that audiences would not understand two eyes or a hand filling the screen. Griffith trained and developed his own company of actors, which came to include such future stars as Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish. He experimented freely with lighting, camera angles, and the use of filters over the lenses to achieve unique effects. Griffith also broke his scenes into a number of different shots, timing their lengths to create increasing excitement as well as a rhythmic momentum never before achieved on film. He proved that the basis of film expression is editing and that the unit of editing is the shot, not the scene.In 1913 Griffith completed the first of his epics, Judith of Bethulia, in four reels; Biograph executives were outraged at its length and failed to release it until 1914, by which time longer films had become more common. In the meantime, Griffith left Biograph to join the Mutual studio in Hollywood, Calif., and had begun work on his 12-reel American Civil War film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), the screen's first true masterwork, which marked the emergence of motion pictures as a full-fledged art form. Expertly mixing the spectacle of battle with the pathos of human drama, The Birth of a Nation possesses a cumulative power that took many white audiences by storm; many blacks and others, however, have long complained that the film fosters negative stereotypes of African-Americans and glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. Even more impressive is Griffith's later film Intolerance (1916), made in part as an answer to critics of The Birth of a Nation and often cited as the greatest motion picture ever made. An immense historical pageant, it tells four stories from separate epochs simultaneously, cutting from one to another with a visual and emotional force that has seldom been equaled on the screen.

The move to Hollywood

Between 1915 and 1920 grandiose movie palaces proliferated throughout the U.S. The film industry moved gradually but firmly out of the East to Hollywood, where such independent producers as Thomas Harper Ince (1882–1924), Cecil B. de Mille, and Mack Sennett set up their own studios. Ince introduced the unit system, by which movie production was decentralized, enabling several films to be made simultaneously by unit managers, answerable to a studio head. Hundreds of films a year poured from the studios to fill an increasing demand from theaters. The vast majority of them were Westerns, slapstick comedies, and such elegant romantic melodramas as de Mille's Male and Female (1919) starring Gloria Swanson (1897–1983). Ince specialized in hard-hitting, unsentimental Westerns, notably those starring the popular cowboy actor William S. Hart (1870–1946).

Silent comedies

Mack Sennett became known as the king of comedy; he introduced slapstick to the screen in a series of wildly imaginative films starring his enormously popular Keystone Kops. Sennett's style of comedy was altogether new, combining elements of vaudeville, the circus, comic strips, and pantomime. He was a master of timing who kept his films moving at a dizzying pace. Sennett once said that a gag could be planted, developed, and completed in less than 100 feet of film, or one minute on the screen. He had a talent for creating an atmosphere in which artistic temperament could flourish. His corps of players included Marie Dressler (1869–1934), Mabel Normand (1894–1930), Fatty Arbuckle (1887–1933), and an English comic named Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin was a comic genius whose work lit up the screen. His presence in a film virtually assured its success. Chaplin was the first truly international movie star and a legend well within his own lifetime. Chaplin's “little tramp” character, which enjoyed an almost idolatrous popularity, displayed a superb range of comedy, satire, pathos, and common humanity. The “Little Fellow,” as he was called, was continuously developed and expanded by Chaplin in such films as The Tramp (1915), Easy Street (1917), The Kid (1921), and The Gold Rush (1925). Chaplin continued to produce, direct, and star in his own films well into the sound era and was especially memorable in The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947), and Limelight (1952). In 1919, Chaplin, along with Griffith and popular stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, formed the original United Artists Corp. and ushered in the star system as well as a golden age of silent film in the U.S.

European Silent Movies

Motion picture production in England, Italy, and Scandinavia declined drastically at the end of World War I due to rising costs and an inability to compete in a growing world market. In Germany, the Soviet Union, and France, however, the movies achieved new artistic significance, marking an influential period in the development of the medium.

Germany

The striking and innovative German silent cinema drew much from expressionist art and classical theater techniques of the period (see Expressionism). The most celebrated example of expressionist filmmaking of the time is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) by Robert Wiene (1881–1938), in which highly stylized costumes and settings were used to tell the story from a madman's point of view. A similar concern with the supernatural is evident in such films as The Golem (1920), by Paul Wegener (1874–1948); the vampire film Nosferatu (1922), by F. W. Murnau (1889–1931); and the Austrian director Fritz Lang's science fiction spectacle Metropolis (1927), which deals with a robotlike society controlled by an evil superindustrialist.

By the mid-1920s, the technical proficiency of the German cinema surpassed that of any other in the world. Artists and directors were given almost limitless support from the state, which financed the largest and best-equipped studios in the world, the huge Universum-Film-Aktiengesellschaft—popularly known as UFA—near Berlin. Introspective, expressionist studies of lower-class life known as “street” films were marked by dignity, beauty, and length, displaying great strides in the effective use of lighting, sets, and photography. German directors freed the camera from the tripod and put it on wheels, achieving a mobility and grace never seen before. Films such as Murnau's The Last Laugh (1924), starring Emil Jannings (1884–1950), and The Joyless Street (1925), by G. W. Pabst (1885–1967), starring the Swedish-American actor Greta Garbo, were internationally acclaimed for their depth of feeling and technical innovation. Because of the immigration of the best German film talent to America, including the directors Murnau and Lang and the actor Jannings, German films declined quickly after 1925, becoming imitations of Hollywood productions.

USSR

A cycle of great Soviet films appeared between 1925 and 1930, revolutionary in both theme and content and of extraordinary visual impact. The Soviet film industry was nationalized in 1919 under the People's Commissariat of Propaganda and Education. Films of the period played out recent Soviet history with a power, realism, and scope that was the antithesis of the introspective German cinema. The Soviet Union's two greatest directors, Sergey Mikhaylovich Eisenstein and Vsevolod Ilarionovich Pudovkin, were directly influenced by Griffith's Intolerance and used the dynamics of editing to dazzling effect. The summary of their credo was the concept of montage, a method of shooting and rapidly interspersing separate shots to force a given impression on the mind of the viewer.

The most spectacular use of this technique can be seen in Eisenstein's Potemkin (1925), which concerns the mutiny of a battleship crew over spoiled food and the warm reception given the rebels by the people of Odessa. In the famous “Odessa steps” sequence of the film, Eisenstein climaxed an assault on the townspeople by soldiers with a rapid series of scenes showing the precarious progress of an unattended baby carriage down a monumental outdoor staircase, a grandmotherly woman being shot, a student recoiling in horror, and troops moving the crowd along with poised bayonets. The end result created a unified emotion in response to a series of simultaneous events.

Pudovkin's The End of St. Petersburg (1927) and Eisenstein's October (1928), also known as Ten Days That Shook the World, commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik rise to power with different approaches. Pudovkin narrated the story of the individual as hero, a personification of the masses. For Eisenstein, whose films are more purely cinematic, the masses themselves are the hero. Both filmmakers were excellent writers and film theorists, who analyzed their own work and that of others to the enrichment of a growing body of film criticism being published all over the world.

France

Only in France was there sufficient vigor on the part of filmmakers to survive the post–World War I period without government assistance. Working out of small studios, rented for one film at a time, a diverse group of artists realized both avant-garde and traditional forms of cinema with a minimum of executive interference. Author and editor Louis Delluc (1890–1942) was an ardent champion of the French cinema who surrounded himself with such filmmakers as Abel Gance (1889–1981), René Clair, Jean Epstein (1897–1953), and Germaine Dulac (1882–1942), a group largely responsible for reviving French cinema. Delluc's Fièvre (Fever, 1922) is an impressionist portrait of lower-class life. René Clair's The Italian Straw Hat (1927) is a delightfully imaginative comedy based on a popular 19th-century farce. Gance's Napoléon (1927) was an epic forerunner of widescreen technique that involves, in part, three screens separated into as many as 32 images.

One of the most eloquent French productions of the 1920s is The Passion of Joan of Arc (1929) by the Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer (1889–1967). Working with an international cast and crew, Dreyer merged the best of the Scandinavian, German, and Soviet schools of filmmaking into a gracefully fluid style of his own, expertly fusing form and content to achieve an operatic reverence for his material. The performance of Maria Falconetti (1901–46) as Joan is considered one of the finest examples of silent-screen acting. The Passion of Joan of Arc, the last of the great silent films along with Murnau's American production of Sunrise (1927), all but spoke, bringing the medium to the threshold of sound.

The Mature Silent Film

After World War I, motion picture production became a major American industry, generating millions of dollars in assets for successful producers. American films became international in character and dominated the world market. Artists responsible for the most successful European films were imported by studios, and their techniques were adapted and assimilated by Hollywood. The star system flourished, and films featured such top attractions as Rudolph Valentino, John Barrymore, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow (1905–65), and Norma Shearer (1900–83). The period was also characterized by an attempt to regulate the moral values of motion pictures through a Hollywood Production Code instituted (1930) by the industry and headed by the politician Will H. Hays (1879–1954). Official film censorship bodies of one type or another existed until 1968.

In the 1920s American films began to have a sophistication and smoothness of style that synthesized all that had previously been learned about making movies. Stately, romantic Westerns, such as John Ford's The Iron Horse (1924), showed the economy and craftsmanship that would mark the careers of such outstanding American directors as Frank Capra, William Wyler, and George Stevens (1904–75). Cecil B. de Mille, while seeming to mask the lubricity of his early sex comedies, such as The Affairs of Anatol (1921), behind the biblical facade of such spectacles as The Ten Commandments (1923) and The King of Kings (1927), in fact inserted orgies and bathing scenes at every opportunity.

Two of the most popular directors of the time, Ernst Lubitsch and Erich von Stroheim, revealed sophisticated and distinctively different temperaments on the screen. Lubitsch abandoned the spectacles he had directed in Germany for light, romantic comedies noted for their simple decor, elegant technique, and the charm with which Lubitsch managed to imbue them. His films were said to have the “Lubitsch touch.” In films such as The Marriage Circle (1924) and So This Is Paris (1926), Lubitsch so adroitly handled sexual subject matter as to render it both pointed and censor-proof. Von Stroheim's work, harsh and more European in tone than Lubitsch's, is richly extravagant and sometimes brooding, as in Foolish Wives (1921), which contrasts American innocence with European decadence. His masterwork on avarice in American society, Greed (1924), was reduced by studio executives from ten to two hours. Most of the cut footage has been lost, but even in its abbreviated state it is considered one of the high points of realism on the screen.

Screen comedy enjoyed a golden age in the 1920s. Two major American comedians, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, joined Chaplin in the forefront of the genre, their work springing directly from the slapstick traditions of the one-reelers. During this period, each of these comedians was given the time and the financial backing to develop and elaborate on his distinctive character. Keaton never smiled, and in films such as Sherlock Jr. (1924) he contrasted his immobile face with sight gags based on his incredible physical dexterity. Harold Lloyd was a daredevil comedian who played the naive, all-American boy in films such as The Freshman (1925), often acting the part of the bespectacled bumbling optimist.

The Silent Documentary

The earliest films were documentaries in the sense that they simply recorded what was happening. The San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the flight of the Wright brothers in France in 1908, and the eruption of Mount Etna in Sicily in 1910 were all recorded by movie cameras and incorporated into some of the Pathé newsreels, which continued production through the early 1950s. Once the story film became popular, however, the fact film was almost totally neglected until the emergence of the American director Robert Flaherty in the early 1920s.

Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), a study of Inuit (Eskimo) life, possesses the intimacy and warm personal contact that seemed missing from previous exercises in recording real life. Although Flaherty's subsequent work, especially Moana (1926) and Man of Aran (1934), came under attack as being somewhat fictionalized, he succeeded in reviving interest in the documentary film, later to reach its zenith in England.

SOUND FILMS

In 1926 the Warner Brothers studio introduced the first practicable sound films, using a process known as Vitaphone, the recording of musical and spoken passages on large disks that were then synchronized with the action on the screen. In 1927, Warner Brothers released The Jazz Singer, their first talking picture, starring the entertainer Al Jolson, and sound films were an immediate success with the public. Jolson's line “You ain't heard nothing yet!” from The Jazz Singer signaled the end of the silent era. The following year, the producer Walt Disney pioneered the use of sound in an animated short film, Steamboat Willie, which helped turn a cartoon character named Mickey Mouse into a national celebrity. By 1931, Vitaphone was obsolete, replaced by the less clumsy, easily adaptable Movietone system, a method of recording sound directly on film in a strip alongside the picture. This standard process, developed by the American inventor Lee De Forest, enabled sound films to become an international phenomenon almost overnight.

Early Talkies

The transition from silent to sound films was so rapid that many films released in 1928 and 1929 had begun production as silents, with sound added hastily to meet the growing demand. Theater owners rushed to convert their facilities to accommodate sound. The earliest talkies simply exploited raw sound for novelty. Elaborate literary productions were filmed, and extraneous sound effects were introduced at every opportunity. Audiences soon grew weary of monotonous dialogue and the static situations resulting from the grouping of actors around a stationary microphone.

Such problems were defeated at the outset of the 1930s by directors in several countries who had the imagination to use sound creatively. They liberated the microphone to reestablish a fluid sense of cinema and discovered the benefits of postsynchronization, which permitted subtler manipulation of both music and dialogue. In the U.S., Lubitsch and the director King Vidor explored the possibilities of shooting long sequences without sound, adding it later to highlight the action. Lubitsch did this charmingly, with music, in The Love Parade (1929), and Vidor used sound atmospherically to create a natural mood in Hallelujah! (1929), a drama with music set in the South. Directors learned how to create effects by using sound from an unseen source, realizing that if the viewer hears a clock ticking, showing the clock isn't necessary.

Screenwriters Ben Hecht, Dudley Nichols (1895–1960), and Robert Riskin (1897–1955) began to invent dialogue that was particularly suited to films, stripped of nonessentials and serving the action rather than stifling it. The rapid-fire newspaper language written by Hecht for The Front Page (1931), directed by Lewis Milestone (1895–1980), contrasts with the witty repartee he wrote for Lubitsch's Design for Living (1933). Nichols excelled in clear, unambiguous dialogue for films such as John Ford's Mary of Scotland (1936). Riskin won acclaim for creating familiar characters in the films of Frank Capra, notably in It Happened One Night (1934), starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable.

Popular Films of the 1930s

Gangster films and musicals dominated the screen in the early 1930s. The highly successful Little Caesar (1930) made a star of Edward G. Robinson and spawned a series of violent reflections on America during the Great Depression and the era of Prohibition. Films such as Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) brought speed, vigor, and realism to the screen, as did the musicals and zany comedies that seemed to have a nonconformist attitude toward life. Warner Brothers' highly successful musical 42nd Street (1933) began a trend in elaborate dance films, uniquely choreographed by Busby Berkeley (1895–1976). They eventually gave way to the more intimate song-and-dance films of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (1911–95), who enchanted audiences in Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936). Popular comics such as W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Mae West, and Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and Oliver Hardy (1892–1957) created elaborate and distinct comic worlds with which their public came to identify. The public also developed a nearly insatiable appetite for such animated figures as Betty Boop, Popeye, and Krazy Kat, along with a new Disney character, Donald Duck; Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and other well-known members of the Warner Brothers cartoon menagerie made their first appearances in animated shorts between the mid-1930s and early '40s.

Sex in the cinema

From the 1890s onward, directors had been testing the boundaries of sexual propriety, and a trade in pornographic movies had developed; in mainstream films, however, sexuality was suggested rather than depicted. An exception, scandalous for its day, was Ecstasy (1933), a Czech film starring the young Viennese actor Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, later known as Hedy Lamarr (1913–2000); for years, customs officials sought to bar the film from entering the U.S. Much of the violence and sexual innuendo in Hollywood's early gangster and musical-comedy films was toned down by the emergence of the Catholic Legion of Decency and the strengthening of U.S. censorship laws in 1934.

The star vehicles

Most film directors of the 1930s concentrated on providing popular vehicles for such well-known stars as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, and Clark Gable, whose personalities were often portrayed to the public as extensions of the roles they were playing. The vogue of making films based on popular novels, never really absent from the screen, reached a zenith in the late 1930s with expensively mounted productions of A Tale of Two Cities (1935), The Good Earth (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939), and one of the most popular films in motion picture history, Gone with the Wind (1939).

Escapist films

The trend toward escapism and fantasy was strong throughout the 1930s. A cycle of classic horror films, including Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932), emerged from Universal studios, spawning a series of sequels and spin-offs lasting through the decade. One of the most enduring films of the time is the musical-fantasy The Wizard of Oz (1939), based on the book by L. Frank Baum; it starred young Judy Garland, who became the premier musical performer of the 1940s. The enormous critical and popular success of Disney's first feature-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), established the animated musical as an art form in its own right.

The Art Film

The escapism of Hollywood films was partly offset in the 1930s by art-house presentations of more serious, realistic films from Europe, such as the Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930) from Germany—which introduced Marlene Dietrich to filmgoers—and the French director Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion (1937) from France, considered one of the great antiwar statements in film history. One American filmmaker who came to Hollywood from radio in 1940 was the writer-director-actor Orson Welles, whose urge to experiment with new camera angles and sound effects greatly extended the vocabulary of sound film. Although he found difficulty adapting himself to conventional Hollywood discipline and was often unable to obtain financial support for his projects, his Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) have influenced the subsequent work of virtually every major filmmaker in the world.

Developments in Europe

Film production in Europe was sporadic as World War II approached. In Germany during the Nazi regime, film production was given over to such propagandistic documentaries as Triumph of the Will (1935), a celebration of the National Socialist party by Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). Soviet cinema re-created operas and ballets in films that were often static and overly elaborate. Exceptions are two well-edited, visually challenging films by Sergey Eisenstein, Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the two-part Ivan the Terrible (1944–46).

In France, the cinema remained more flexible and cosmopolitan. The films of Renoir continued to enjoy an international reputation, and the film poet Jean Vigo (1905–34) contributed a strong sense of imagery in Zéro de Conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and L'Atalante (1934). Highly individual filmmakers continued to emerge in spite of the chaotic disorganization of the French film industry during and after the war. Even during the height of the German occupation, Marcel Carné (1903–96) contributed a masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis (The Children of Paradise, 1945), employing hundreds of extras in a stylized, theatrical allegory of love and death lasting more than three hours on the screen.

The Documentary Movement

Apart from the early work of the British-born American director Alfred Hitchcock, who began making features in the U.S. in 1939, and the postwar work of the director Carol Reed (1906–76), such as Odd Man Out (1946), the most important cinema in England in the 1930s and '40s was the documentary movement led by John Grierson (1898–1972). Grierson coined the word documentary, which he defined as the “creative treatment of actuality,” setting it apart from travelogues and newsreels. As a result of his government-supported films—Song of Ceylon (1934), Housing Problems (1935), and Night Mail (1936)—the documentary film matured, establishing a deeper relationship between people and their society. Such films included interviews and dramatic re-creations of events, foreshadowing the docudrama.

Grierson's films substantially influenced documentary work in the U.S., notably that of the filmmaker Pare Lorentz (1905–92), whose The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) are poetic, powerful reflections on the relationship between people and their land. Both films, along with The City (1939), a technically fascinating film on city planning by Willard Van Dyke (1906–86), were presented to popular acclaim at the 1939 New York World's Fair. During the war, American filmmakers mixed documentary styles with forms of fiction to produce reenactments of true stories in such thrillers as The House on 92nd Street (1945) by Henry Hathaway (1898–1985), an anti-Nazi spy film based on FBI records. The documentary movement also pushed the Hollywood motion picture industry to match the movement's photorealism with combat films such as The Story of G.I. Joe (1945), a tough look at the war correspondent Ernie Pyle and his interaction with soldiers on the front lines.

Development of the cinema AFTER WORLD WAR II

After World War II, the popularity of motion pictures began to be challenged by the advent of television. As audiences started to dwindle, Hollywood responded with size and spectacle. Meanwhile, the art of the cinema was reborn in Italy and other European countries, and Asian nations emerged as major centers of film production.

Advent of Color

Experiments with color films had begun as early as 1906, and color was used occasionally as a novelty, but most of the processes developed, including early two-color Technicolor, were disappointing and failed to generate any enthusiasm on the part of the public. By 1933, the Technicolor process had been perfected as a commercially viable three-color system, which was first used in the 1935 film Becky Sharp, an adaptation of Vanity Fair, by the English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. The popularity of color grew, and it was used increasingly throughout the 1940s, notably in a series of classic Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) musicals including Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and Easter Parade (1948).

In the 1950s, the use of color increased so sharply as to all but eclipse the black-and-white film. So-called small films striving for a quiet realism—such as Marty (1955) by Delbert Mann (1920– ), about the aspirations of a Bronx butcher, and Otto Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), dealing with drug addiction—were made in black and white. It was considered a major departure, however, when Hitchcock filmed Psycho (1960) in black and white and when director Peter Bogdanovich (1939– ) did the same with The Last Picture Show (1971). In subsequent decades, films such as Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), Woody Allen's Zelig (1983), and Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) also used black-and-white photography to powerful effect, but these were rare and conspicuous exceptions to the overwhelming trend.

Other Technological Changes

In 1953, the Twentieth Century Fox studio premiered its biblical epic The Robe in a new process called CinemaScope, which created a wide-screen revolution in the film industry. In rapid succession studios introduced a series of wide-screen processes such as VistaVision, Todd-AO, Panavision, Superscope, and Technirama. Only Todd-AO and Panavision ultimately survived. Involving one camera, one projector, and standard-size film, they were the most easily adaptable of the various systems; their success permanently changed the shape of the motion picture screen. Colorful, star-studded wide-screen musicals such as A Star Is Born (1954) and Oklahoma! (1955), massive biblical epics such as Ben-Hur (1959), adventures such as Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and historical panoramas such as Doctor Zhivago (1965) became the mainstay of the American screen.

For a brief period in the early 1950s, a novelty known as 3-D (for three-dimensional) appeared. Two cameras were used to take pictures of the same scene from slightly different angles. Through the use of polarized eyeglasses, viewers were given the opportunity to see only one picture with each eye, producing a three-dimensional effect. The glasses were not popular with the public, the images on the screen not very sharp, and the films themselves not very good. After enjoying a brief vogue in films such as House of Wax (1953), the novelty wore off, and 3-D films were rereleased in their conventional two-dimensional form.

Decline of the Studio System

Despite the success of wide-screen spectaculars, the popularity and influence of Hollywood declined steadily throughout the 1950s and '60s. A series of antitrust suits forced major studios to divest themselves of their affiliate theaters and other holdings, and films began to be sold competitively in an open market. The star system, in which studios spent millions of dollars grooming their stables of personalities, was at an end. Performers, free to operate independently of studios, commanded huge salaries as well as a percentage of the gross of their films. By 1959, production in the U.S. had dropped to 250 films a year, half of what it had been during the war years. European and Asian films, once confined to art houses, became a staple of American viewing. In 1946, less than a dozen art theaters were found in the U.S.; in 1960, more than a thousand were in operation. Film festivals began to be held throughout the world, displaying the work of directors whose films had never been shown outside their own countries before the 1950s.

Rebirth of Italian Cinema

In the late 1940s the Italian cinema experienced a rebirth with the rise of neorealism, a cinematic movement that captured worldwide attention and introduced several major Italian filmmakers. The movement was characterized by films with an intense, almost overbearing realism, set against natural backgrounds and using nonprofessional actors. It was begun by the director Roberto Rossellini in Open City (1945), which achieved an intimacy and depth of emotion new to the screen in its depiction of the Nazi occupation of Rome and the resistance of the city's people. The films of the actor-director Vittorio De Sica (1901–74), especially The Bicycle Thief (1949), shot entirely on the streets of Milan, captured the grim social realities of postwar Italy and became internationally known.

Other filmmakers trained in neorealism went on to build strong worldwide reputations in their own individual styles. Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75) filmed The Gospel According to Saint Matthew (1966) in a stark, neorealist tradition. Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954), a realistic study of circus performers and misfits, led him to an acclaimed portrait of decadent Italian society in La Dolce Vita (1960) and, later, to the personal and fantastic imagery in 8 1/2 (1963) and Juliet of the Spirits (1965).

One of the most widely discussed filmmakers of the 1960s was Michelangelo Antonioni, who also emerged from the neorealist movement. Antonioni's L'Avventura (1959) and Red Desert (1964) are moody, barren studies of lost characters in a modern, complex world. Both Red Desert and Juliet of the Spirits show a remarkable use of color by directors who had formerly worked in black and white. Other Italian films of this period that demonstrate a strong social and political consciousness include The Conformist (1970) and 1900 (1977) by Bernardo Bertolucci, and Swept Away (1975) and Seven Beauties (1976), by Lina Wertmuller (1928– ).

Italian directors also established themselves in more popular genres. Sergio Leone (1929–89), an assistant to De Sica on The Bicycle Thief, launched the American actor Clint Eastwood to international stardom in a series of low-budget, high-energy “spaghetti Westerns” in the 1960s. Three decades later, the Italian comic Roberto Benigni (1952– ), who directed and starred in Life is Beautiful (1998), a comedy set during the Holocaust period, became the first non-English-speaking actor ever to win an Academy Award (see Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Academy of) as best actor.

English Films

With Room at the Top in 1959, directed by Jack Clayton (1921–95), a series of realistic films about English working-class life began to be produced. Films such as A Taste of Honey (1962), by Tony Richardson (1928–91), and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), by Karel Reisz (1926– ), coincided with an intense American interest in English fashion and culture. The popular rock group the Beatles appeared in A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), which were especially popular in the U.S., as were such English stars as Dirk Bogarde (1921–99), Julie Christie (1940– ), Albert Finney (1936– ), Glenda Jackson (1937– ), and Vanessa Redgrave; the Irish-born Peter O'Toole; and the Scottish-born Sean Connery (1930– ). In 1966, the Italian director Antonioni produced, in England, his most commercial film, Blow-Up, about a photographer who accidentally captures a crime on film. The English director John Schlesinger (1926–2003) shot Midnight Cowboy in New York City in 1969, displaying a keen sense of the decaying American dream; a young English filmmaker, Sam Mendes (1965– ), scored a similar critical and popular success with American Beauty (1999), a comical but disturbing portrait of dysfunctional family life in the American suburbs.

One of the few directors in the late 20th century to preserve a distinctly English identity while gaining international celebrity was Mike Leigh (1943– ), an acute and sometimes satirical observer of British society, politics, and culture. His filmmaking method, based on lengthy improvisation, yielded such critically acclaimed films as High Hopes (1988), Life Is Sweet (1990), Secrets and Lies (1996), and Topsy-Turvy (1999). The English documentary tradition was represented by Michael Apted (1941– ), who, beginning with Seven Up (1964), studied a group of 14 Britons at seven-year intervals.

Ingmar Bergman

One of the most distinctive and original directors to emerge in the post–World War II international climate was Sweden's Ingmar Bergman, who brought an intense philosophical and intellectual depth to his films. In treating problems of human isolation, sexual conflicts, and religious obsession, he became the dominant influence in the Swedish cinema and a key writer-director in the history of world cinema. In his film The Seventh Seal (1956), he probed the mysteries of life and morality through the trials of a medieval knight playing a game of chess with Death. In Wild Strawberries (1957), he created a series of poetic flashbacks reviewing the life of an elderly professor, played with dignity by the Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöstrom (1879–1960). Bergman skillfully and vividly dissected the human experience in a series of films examining the search for both love and the meaning of life by a group of complex, articulate characters. Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), Scenes from a Marriage (1973), and Autumn Sonata (1978) portray love/hate relationships imbued with a consciousness of the religious themes running through the lives of the characters. Bergman's career as a director for television as well as the cinema has flourished for more than three decades with an almost unbroken stream of significant, creative works, displaying remarkable visual style and composition coupled with a unique energy and intelligence.

Spanish Cinema

The Spanish director Luis Buñuel was a leading figure in the early European avant-garde, notable for his collaboration with the Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'Age d'Or (1930), extended metaphors in surrealism that caused shock and outrage because of their audacious imagery and strong anti-Roman Catholicism. Buñuel came to worldwide attention as a master filmmaker in the 1960s, creating a series of films in which he explored the inability of characters to come to terms with their own human nature. His film Viridiana (1961), banned in Spain by the government of Francisco Franco, tells the tale of a young novitiate who is raped and corrupted by thieves and blasphemers before taking her vows, drawing a parallel between sexual fetishism and religion. Such themes are also raised in his films Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Belle de Jour (1967), and Tristana (1970). Buñuel's films, sometimes starkly realistic in style, are also charming and witty on occasion in their commentary on the nature of the civilized world. In The Exterminating Angel (1962), a group of people at a dinner party find that they are unable to leave the table. During a formal supper in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), a curtain rises and the guests find that they are onstage before an audience. Buñuel's idea that people seek to deny their animal nature through the creation of civilized codes and manners is humorously tested in his work through the breaking down of order, leaving his characters in absurd situations. Because of his anti-Fascist attitudes and strong anti-Roman Catholic politics, Buñuel fled Spain in the early 1960s to work in France and Mexico.

Pedro Almodóvar (1951– ), another provocative, irreverent Spanish filmmaker with a strong sense of the absurd, became an important international presence in the 1980s and '90s. Highlights of his work include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) and All About My Mother (1999), the latter an Academy Award winner for best foreign-language film.

French Films and the New Wave

France dominated the world art-film market throughout the 1950s and '60s, producing fiercely independent filmmakers who experimented in many diverse styles of expression. The light-headed, highly personal comedies of Jacques Tati (1908–82), such as M. Hulot's Holiday (1953) and Mon Oncle (1958), revived pantomime humor and became widely successful. Equally impressive to art-film critics, although not popular commercially, were the films of Robert Bresson (1907–99), notably Diary of a Country Priest (1950), A Man Escaped (1956), and The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962). Bresson's films are introspective and austere, simply photographed on a small budget. He took a sharp, detached view of the world, often working almost totally in medium shots, which give his films a literary or theatrical quality.

In the late 1950s, a group of highly creative young filmmakers emerged to form a movement known as the nouvelle vague (“new wave”). Influenced strongly by the American films of Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and John Ford, they began to express their views on the state of the art in the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma, in which they proposed the auteur theory of filmmaking: According to this theory, the director is the sole author of a film, and, despite studio pressure or outside influences from other aspects of the industry itself, a film bears the individual stamp of the director's personality.

The first proponents of the nouvelle vague made films about modern French life in individual styles, each from a unique perspective. François Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais (1922– ) all made their first important features in 1958–59. Truffaut, a former film critic particularly enamored of the films of Hitchcock, became known for his gentle, realistic, autobiographical portraits of a character named Antoine Doinel, portrayed by Jean-Pierre Léaud (1944– ), whose life he charted in 400 Blows (1959), Love at Twenty (1962), Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970), and Love on the Run (1979). Truffaut explored the theme of freedom versus involvement in a restrictive society in these films and in others, such as his enormously popular Jules and Jim (1961) and Shoot the Piano Player (1960). Truffaut continued to make films of rare beauty and charm, such as his deliberately old-fashioned and simply told The Wild Child (1970), about the civilizing of a young boy who had been raised by wolves. The films of Resnais, especially Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), are paradigms of intimacy, portraying life as a struggle between emotional distance and involvement with others, with distance almost always winning out in the end. Using stylistic and intellectual abstractions and intentionally distorted editing techniques, Resnais raised questions about the quality and effect of time and memory and their relationship to human emotion.

The most radically experimental of the nouvelle vague directors was Jean Luc Godard, whose first feature, Breathless (1959), starring Jean Paul Belmondo (1933– ), is a highly successful homage to the American gangster film. Godard's subject matter shows great diversity, ranging from a series of autobiographical portraits of his then wife, the actor Anna Karina (1940– ), notably Vivre Sa Vie (1962), to the sexual and political comedy of Masculin-Féminin (1966). Godard played with time and space, moving his camera freely and allowing his actors to improvise at will. His film Weekend (1968) is a bitter study of modern life, in which the victims of an automobile accident wander the highways, discussing the nature of their lives with literary and cinematic figures who appear mysteriously to connect the past, present, and future. After Weekend, Godard's films became significantly less accessible to commercial audiences, moving toward political tracts such as the pedagogic Tout Va Bien (1972), which stars an American, Jane Fonda.

Another French director associated with the nouvelle vague was Louis Malle (1932–95), who had served as an assistant to Bresson and as an underwater camera operator for the oceanographer and documentary filmmaker Jacques Cousteau. Malle stretched the boundaries of onscreen eroticism in The Lovers (1959), starring Jeanne Moreau (1928– ), and applied his editing wizardry to slapstick comedy in Zazie dans le Métro (1960); the English-language Atlantic City (1980), made in the U.S. and featuring the American actor Susan Sarandon (1946– ), is a moving example of his mature style. Eric Rohmer (1920– ), a former editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, devoted much of his long career to crafting elegant, intelligent, exquisitely photographed fables about the search for love; his best-known works include My Night at Maud's (1969) and Claire's Knee (1970), two of a series called “Six Moral Tales.” Rohmer remained active through the 1990s, releasing a quartet of films under the general title “Tales of the Four Seasons.”

Eastern European Films

Influenced by developments in both Italy and France, talented filmmakers in Communist Eastern Europe navigated shifting ideological currents to create a cinema of lasting value. Of the Czech directors who emerged in the 1960s, the most illustrious was Miloš Forman (1932– ), who directed Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Firemen's Ball (1967) while still in Czechoslovakia; two of his later Hollywood films, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), starring the American actor Jack Nicholson and adapted from a novel by the American writer Ken Kesey (1935– ), and Amadeus (1984), from the British playwright Peter Shaffer's play about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Italian composer Antonio Salieri, both won Academy Awards for best picture and best director. The Polish cinematic tradition produced Andrzej Wajda (1926– ), director of Kanal (1956), Ashes and Diamonds (1958), and Man of Iron (1981), among many other distinguished films; and Krzysztof Kieslowski (1941–96), internationally famed for Dekalog (1988), a series of ten short films on the Ten Commandments, and his “Three Colors” trilogy Blue (1993), White (1994), and Red (1994). Another prominent filmmaker, both in Poland and in the West, was Roman Polanski (1933– ); highlights of his career include Knife in the Water (1962) and the English-language films Chinatown (1974), an evocative detective drama, and Tess (1979), a sumptuous adaptation of the English novelist Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles.

New German Cinema

A diverse group of West German filmmakers emerged in the mid-1970s, sharing a critical stance on the quality of life in modern Germany and a flat rejection of complacent bourgeois materialism. The films of Werner Herzog (1942– ) were characterized by extreme landscapes and characters, and were often made under dangerous or difficult conditions. His best-known film, Aguirre, Wrath of God (1973), tells of a 16th-century Spanish expedition to the Peruvian jungle during which a power-hungry lunatic plans to steal an entire continent; for the equally remarkable Fitzcarraldo (1982), the story of a European man obsessed with building an opera house in the Amazon, Herzog insisted on having a real riverboat hauled over a treacherous incline. Wim Wenders (1945– ) dealt with themes of alienation and self-realization, as in his Kings of the Road (1976), Paris, Texas (1984), and the eloquent Wings of Desire (1988) and its sequel, Faraway, So Close! (1993); many of his films also showed a fascination with American culture. A highly praised Wenders documentary, Buena Vista Social Club (1999), portrayed a group of veteran Cuban musicians.

The most prolific and unpredictable of the filmmakers, credited with restoring the German cinema to parity with France and Italy, was Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1946–82); he made 41 feature films in 12 years. A young graduate of radical theater groups, Fassbinder worked at bridging the gap between film as a personal and a popular art in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), Fox and His Friends (1978), and The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979). All of these are built around themes of alienation, consumerism, economic inequality, and political oppression.

Filmmaking in Asia

In 1951, the Japanese director Kurosawa Akira's Rashomon won the grand prize at the Venice Film Festival, introducing the strong national cinema of Japan to Western audiences. Kurosawa's films Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957) were known as “eastern Westerns” and served as models for several American films, notably The Magnificent Seven (1960), which was patterned on Seven Samurai. Less well known in the West are the films of Mizoguchi Kenji (1898–1956) and Kinugasa Teinosuke (1896–1982), which are handsomely produced, beautifully photographed dramas marked by a unique use of color. Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) is a costume legend of 16th-century Japan, and Kinugasa's Gate of Hell (1954) is a lavish 12th-century tale of family honor; both films are mature, philosophical works of great intellectual and visual power. The acclaimed cinematographer for Rashomon, Ugetsu, and other celebrated films was Miyagawa Kazuo (1908–99). One of the few Japanese filmmakers to have an international impact in the 1980s was Itami Juzo (1933–97), the director of such satires as The Funeral (1984), Tampopo (1986), and A Taxing Woman (1987). Within Japan, and to some extent overseas, a long-lived series of “Godzilla” monster movies, begun in 1954 and produced by Tanaka Tomoyuki (1910–97), proved extraordinarily popular. Japanese animated films, known as anime, also attracted huge audiences, accounting for about half of all movie ticket sales in Japan in the late 1990s.

The film industry of India, vigorous and productive for many years, achieved worldwide attention in 1955 through the work of the director Satyajit Ray, whose Pather Panchali (Song of the Road, 1955), Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1956), and Apur Sansar (The World of Apu, 1959) form the Apu trilogy, tracing the growth of a young boy to manhood. Beginning in the 1960s, the Indian producer Ismail Merchant (1936–2005), the American-born director James Ivory (1928– ), and the German-born writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1927– ) collaborated on more than 20 films, most of outstanding literary quality, including Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970), and adaptations of the English novelist E. M. Forster's works A Room with a View (1986) and Howards End (1992). Merchant was born in Bombay, long the center of the Indian film industry. By the end of the century, the Bombay studios, collectively known as “Bollywood,” were churning out up to 800 films a year, mostly Hindi-language fantasies set in exotic locales and filled with music and dance.

Another Asian film capital known more for the quantity than the quality of its productions was Hong Kong; in the early 1990s, before the city reverted from British to Chinese control, more than 200 films a year were produced, chiefly low-budget thrillers featuring martial-arts stars. Some leading lights of the Hong Kong cinema, notably Jackie Chan (1954– ), Chow Yun-Fat (1955– ), Malaysian-born Michelle Yeoh (1963– ), and the American-born Bruce Lee (1940–73), became internationally known, and the Chinese-born John Woo (1946– ) went on to pursue a career directing big-budget Hollywood action films. China did not develop a world-class cinema until the loosening of ideological constraints in the 1980s. Two important Chinese films of the '90s, both starring Gong Li (1965– ), were Raise the Red Lantern (1991), directed by Zhang Yimou (1951– ), and Farewell My Concubine (1993), by Chen Kaige (1952– ). The Taiwanese-born filmmaker Ang Lee (1954– ) directed the Chinese-language The Wedding Banquet (1993), Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), along with several highly regarded English-language films, including Sense and Sensibility (1995) based on Jane Austen's novel.

The Australian Cinema

After decades of dormancy, a strong national cinema emerged in Australia at the beginning of the 1970s. Previously, films by non-Australians were shot on Australian locations with foreign financing and U.S. distribution; noteworthy examples include Outback (1971), by Ted Kotcheff (1931– ), and Walkabout (1971), by Nicolas Roeg (1928– ). Indigenous Australian films began to attract international interest with Peter Weir's (1944– ) chillers Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Last Wave (1978). The former re-creates an incident in 1900 in which a group of schoolgirls unaccountably disappeared from a picnic in the outback; the latter focuses on the contrast between Western rationalism and the spiritual outlook of Australia's aborigines. Weir's subsequent Hollywood career featured such popular American actors as Harrison Ford (1942– ) in Witness (1985) and Robin Williams (1952– ) in Dead Poets Society (1989), and the Canadian-born Jim Carrey (1962– ) in The Truman Show (1998).

Like Weir's early films, the works of Bruce Beresford (1940– ) and Gillian Armstrong (1950– ) show a strong sense of national pride. Beresford's The Getting of Wisdom (1977) focuses on life in a Victorian girls' school, and his Breaker Morant (1980) is the true story of three Australian soldiers in the Boer War tried for the murder of Boer prisoners and condemned to death by the British. Armstrong's My Brilliant Career (1979) recounts the early life of a feminist writer at the turn of the century. Another Australian, George Miller (1945– ), helped turn a little-known actor, Mel Gibson (1956– ), into an international sensation in the futuristic Mad Max action-adventure trilogy (1979–85). Gibson, who was born in Peekskill, N.Y., but educated in Australia, also starred in Weir's political thriller The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) and went on to win multiple Academy Awards for producing and directing Braveheart (1995), a Scottish war epic. The Piano (1993), an intensely erotic film by the New Zealand-born Jane Campion (1954– ), became the first work by a woman director to win the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival.

AMERICAN films FROM the 1960s TO THE 1990s

The impact of European developments on American filmmakers and the further decline of the studio system conspired to change the character of the American cinema during the 1960s and '70s. By the end of the 1960s, only the names of the studios remained, their original function taken over by investors from outside the industry. Many studios were bought by large conglomerates. The early studios were primarily in the business of making movies, with an eye toward showing a healthy profit. The new conglomerates, often in businesses unrelated to movies, were interested only in films as a sound business investment.

Recent Filmmakers

Hollywood censorship policies were relaxed in the late 1960s in favor of a rating system that allowed any type of subject matter to be filmed, but imposed age restrictions on the audiences that would be allowed to see it. This change permitted the writers and directors of films intended for mature audiences to exercise much greater latitude in their choice of language and in their depiction of sexuality and graphic violence. At the same time, a new generation of gifted young filmmakers emerged on the American scene, influenced by trends in Europe and willing to work with different distributors on a film-by-film basis. Many of these directors produced significant work of lasting quality, both on the fringes of the newly decentralized industry and within its boundaries. Some of them, such as Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Arthur Penn (1922– ), and Francis Ford Coppola, consistently managed to work with company financing, securing release and distribution from a different studio for each project or developing relatively stable relationships with only one. Other directors, such as Robert Altman, John Cassavetes (1929–89), and John Sayles (1950– ), often circumvented establishment channels but occasionally achieved wider commercial success that financed their future work.

Kubrick produced a steady stream of interesting work, from the scathing political satire of Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) to the technical wizardry of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the meticulous 18th-century period detail of his adaptation of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon (1975), and the Gothic horror of The Shining (1980). Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) drew art-house audiences together with fans of violence and adventure, serving as the starting point for the so-called youth generation films, along with The Graduate (1967), by Mike Nichols, and Easy Rider (1969), by Dennis Hopper (1935– ). Penn continued to make films that spoke to the counterculture of the 1960s, including Alice's Restaurant (1969) and Four Friends (1981). After achieving early success as a comedy writer and standup comic, Allen directed a series of riotously funny films that zero in on a peculiarly New York City sensibility, such as Take the Money and Run (1969), Bananas (1971), and Sleeper (1973). His later works, including Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987), and Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), blend comedy with serious musings on love, death, and personal responsibility.

Coppola made You're a Big Boy Now (1966) as part of his master's thesis at the film school of the University of California in Los Angeles. He went on to direct The Conversation (1974), a Watergate-era drama about wiretapping; Apocalypse Now (1979), which adapts the English writer Joseph Conrad's short story “Heart of Darkness” to paint a disturbing portrait of the Vietnam war; and the three-part Godfather saga (1972; 1974; 1990), based on a novel by Mario Puzo (1920–99) and widely acclaimed as an epic vision of an Italian-American family involved in organized crime. Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and GoodFellas (1990) also deal with crime and the Italian-American experience; his other films include Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—based on the controversial novel by the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis—and The Age of Innocence (1993), adapted from a novel by the American writer Edith Wharton.

Two accomplished but less flamboyant Hollywood directors during this period were Alan J. Pakula (1928–98) and Sydney Pollack (1934– ). Pakula left a thoughtful and penetrating body of work, including Klute (1971); All the President's Men (1976), focusing on the Watergate scandal; and Sophie's Choice (1982), based on a novel by the American writer William Styron, for which Meryl Streep won an Academy Award in the title role. Highlights of Pollack's extremely varied output are The Way We Were (1973), a romantic drama with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford; the gender-bending comedy Tootsie (1982), featuring a bravura performance by Dustin Hoffman in the dual role of Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels; and the epic romance Out of Africa (1985), a multiple Academy Award-winner based on the life and writings of the Danish author Isak Dinesen.

Altman had a huge commercial success with his film M*A*S*H (1970), which was the basis for a popular, long-running television series. He subsequently directed a series of films that often seem beyond the mass audience, notable exceptions being his kaleidoscopic Nashville (1975), which features 26 leading roles and weaves an American tapestry of music, drama, politics, and religion; and The Player (1992), a black comedy/mystery about the Hollywood film industry. Cassavetes, an actor-director whose first feature was the experimental Shadows (1959), moved into the mainstream for a time after his commercial success with Faces (1968) and again with A Woman Under the Influence (1974), starring his wife, Gena Rowlands (1934– ). The independent actor-writer-director John Sayles won critical acclaim for such films as Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980), Matewan (1987), Passion Fish (1992), and Lone Star (1996). Spike Lee, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in such critically and commercially successful films as Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991), blazed a trail for a new generation of black filmmakers. Another politically committed director, Oliver Stone, won a wide popular audience for his films Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989), both dealing with the Vietnam War, and his highly controversial JFK (1991), about the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy.

Big-Budget Fantasies

Among the most popular films from the 1970s through the '90s were escapist epics featuring dazzling stunts and special effects. These included disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974); comic-strip fantasies such as Superman (1978) and Batman (1989), and their sequels, as well as Men in Black (1997) and the visually stunning The Matrix (1999); the James Bond spy series, spanning more than three decades and based on a character created by the British novelist Ian Fleming (1908–64); and the Star Trek films (the first in 1979), based on the 1960s television series. Star Wars (1977), a space adventure directed by George Lucas, grossed more than $200 million and became the envy of the industry; also extraordinarily profitable were two Star Wars sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), and three “prequels,” Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002), and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005).

Director Steven Spielberg proved a master at captivating the popular imagination. His Jaws (1975), about a killer shark that terrorizes a small beach community, became the model for a number of films in which scary creatures threatened helpless victims. His Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) capitalized on a widespread fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Spielberg's other multimillion-dollar blockbusters (movies which achieved widespread success) included Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), all based on the serial cliffhangers of the 1930s. The magic of the Spielberg name helped attract large audiences to two of his more serious projects in the 1990s, Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan (1998).

The blockbuster mentality reached its zenith in the works of James Cameron (1954– ). Associated throughout much of his career with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947– ), he directed the Austrian-born star in the low-budget science-fiction film The Terminator (1984) and the spectacular sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Cameron, a director with enormous technical gifts, wrote, produced, and directed the romantic epic Titanic (1997); the winner of 11 Academy Awards, including best picture, Titanic was both the most expensive and the most lucrative motion picture of the century, reportedly costing more than $200 million to make and earning worldwide revenues in excess of $1.5 billion.

The skyrocketing costs of big-budget epics drove several studios into bankruptcy and forced others to produce only two or three pictures per year. More intimate films such as Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989) continued to be made, but these were often considered gambles by their distributors; more often than not, producers sought to reduce their risk by casting bankable stars such as Tom Cruise (1962– ), Tom Hanks, or Julia Roberts. To maximize their own profits and creative control, several top-bracket Hollywood performers, including Streisand, Warren Beatty (1937– ), and Jodie Foster, became producers and directors of films in which they also starred. At the opposite extreme, a few crude-looking, cheaply made films, notably Clerks (1994) and The Blair Witch Project (1999), cleverly exploited their anti-Hollywood stance and lack of star power to connect with older teen and college-age moviegoers. Ingenious marketing also turned a tidy profit for innumerable low-budget horror movies and lowbrow comedies churned out by the major studios.

Recycled Genres

Many outstanding films of the 1990s breathed new life into familiar genres. Clint Eastwood received Academy Awards for best picture and best director for his revisionist Western Unforgiven (1992), and, like Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan, Terrence Malick (1943– ) offered a wrenching view of World War II in The Thin Red Line (1998), based on a novel by the American writer James Jones. The crime drama, and its dark subgenre film noir, fared especially well. With its lurid colors, sharp dialogue, and extreme violence, Pulp Fiction (1994), directed by Quentin Tarantino (1963– ), was considered by many critics to be the decade's most influential film. Other filmmakers struck a noirish note in The Grifters (1990), The Usual Suspects (1995), and L.A. Confidential (1997), while Fargo (1996) turned a grisly crime tale into black comedy.

Upholding the American documentary tradition were such films as The War Room (1993), a chronicle of Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign; Hoop Dreams (1994), which follows the lives of two black student-athletes; Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997), which investigates the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex.; and works by Frederick Wiseman (1930– ), Barbara Kopple (1946– ), and Errol Morris (1948– ). The documentarian Ken Burns (1953– ) became widely known for “The Civil War” (1990) and “Baseball” (1994), two ambitious series on U.S. public television.

No film genre experienced a more vigorous revival than the animated feature. Disney infused Broadway pizzazz into its trademark animation style to create such blockbuster musicals as The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and The Lion King (1994). Computerized animation, which made an awkward debut in Tron (1982), reached a new level of depth and sophistication in Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999), produced by Pixar Animation Studios.

RECENT TRENDS

As a new century dawned, Hollywood was still assimilating the home-video revolution of the 1980s, which made major releases available for home viewing almost immediately after they left the theaters. This, combined with the advent of cable television, featuring relatively current films on special channels, seemed to seriously threaten the very nature of the filmgoing experience. A climate similar to that in the early 1950s was created, in which film companies moved firmly toward large spectacles with fantastic special effects in order to lure the public away from their video recorders and back to the big screen. A new generation of multiplex cinemas emerged, often with a dozen or more screens, offering comfortable stadium-style seating, digital sound, and the convenience of telephone and Internet reservations. Films such as Disney's Fantasia 2000 (1999), made especially for the large-format IMAX system, sought to offer filmgoers an entertainment experience that no home video setup could rival.

At the same time, filmmakers faced with rising production and distribution costs welcomed the revenue stream that video sales and rentals generated. By the end of the 1990s, studios and suppliers earned more than $9 billion annually from U.S. sales and rentals of videotapes and digital video discs (DVDs), with DVDs representing a rapidly growing share of the market. U.S. filmgoers paid more than $7 billion a year at the box office, with the top ten films accounting for more than one-fourth of the total. Licensing of film-related merchandise, especially toys and video games, also represented an important source of revenue.

By the end of the 1990s, the computer revolution had penetrated nearly every aspect of moviemaking. Virtually every commercial film had its own Internet site, from which fans could download trailers and video clips in digitized formats. Editing of both video and audio on digital computers was increasingly commonplace, and a new generation of filmmakers was experimenting with digital video cameras. Digital animation techniques provided a powerful new tool for the creation of dazzling special effects in such live-action spectacles as Lucas's second Star Wars trilogy; two Spielberg dinosaur films, Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997); The Matrix (1999), a genre-bending adventure that fused science fiction, mysticism, and martial arts; an otherwise old-fashioned “toga epic,” Gladiator (2000), directed by a Briton, Ridley Scott (1937– ), and starring a New Zealand-born Australian actor, Russell Crowe (1964– ); and the masterful Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–03), produced and directed by another New Zealander, Peter Jackson (1961– ). Technology already existed that would allow the replacement of heavy, expensive, and perishable film reels with systems that could download satellite transmissions of entire motion pictures and project them digitally on the big screen.

Digital technology has also assisted in the restoration of classic films that might otherwise have been lost. The National Center for Film and Video Preservation of the American Film Institute has estimated that of 21,000 feature-length movies produced in the U.S. prior to 1951, half have already been lost or destroyed or have irreparably deteriorated. Cellulose nitrate, the basis of film stock until the mid-20th century, was especially flammable and vulnerable to decay, and studios took little care to store the film reels under properly controlled conditions. In 1988, Congress passed the National Film Preservation Act and created the National Film Registry, which required the Librarian of Congress annually to designate 25 films of cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance for restoration and preservation. Movie companies and television networks have discovered a significant profit potential in restorations of films such as Gone with the Wind and Snow White, since even the multimillion-dollar costs of restoring and distributing a classic film are normally much lower than those of making and marketing a new one. The largest public film repositories in the U.S. are the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City; the International Museum of Photography and Film at George Eastman House, in Rochester, N.Y.; the Film and Television Archive of the University of California at Los Angeles; and the Library of Congress and the National Archives, both in Washington, D.C.

Silent Film

Silent film fans are fond of saying that silent films were never really silent. They were created to be shown with specific music, for one thing. And the creators of these films never really thought anything was missing. In fact, when "talkies" debuted, many intelligent people felt they would never catch on!

In any case, silent film is an art form all its own, and there are numerous sites on the Web devoted to the movies, their directors, and their stars. Even if you never saw a silent film shown the way it was supposed to be shown, at the correct speed and with the right music, you'll enjoy visiting these sites.

And so we present our collection of the best and most useful silent film links (but not all of them, by any means). All of these sites and more are included in the permanent Silent Movies Subjects list.