History of film 1

History of film
This article is about the history of film as an artistic medium. For the history of motion-picture technology, see
History of film technology.
The history of film began in the 1890s, with the invention of the first motion-picture cameras and the establishment
of the first film production companies and cinemas.

Years
in film

1870s

• v
• t
• e [1]

Early period
The films of the 1890's were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in
vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or
staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique,
usually no camera movement, and flat compositions reminiscent of the Stage.
But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to mushroom before
the end of the century, in countries around the world. "The Cinema was to offer a cheaper, simpler way of providing
entertainment to the masses. Filmmakers could record actors' performances, which then could be shown to audiences
around the world. Travelogues would bring the sights of far-flung places, with movement, directly to spectators'
hometowns. Movies would become the most popular visual art form of the late late Victorian age"[2]
History of film 2

Until 1927, motion pictures for films were produced without sound.
This era is referred to as the silent era of film. To enhance the viewers'
experience, silent films were commonly accompanied by live
musicians and sometimes sound effects and even commentary spoken
by the showman or projectionist. In most countries, intertitles came to
be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, thus dispensing
with narrators, but in Japanese cinema human narration remained
popular throughout the silent era. The technical problems were
resolved by 1923.

Illustrated songs were a notable exception to this trend that began in

1894 in vaudeville houses and persisted as late as the late 1930s in film
A scene from "A trip to the moon" (1902) by theaters. Live performance or sound recordings were paired with
Georges Méliès. hand-colored glass slides projected through stereopticons and similar
devices. In this way, song narrative was illustrated through a series of
slides whose changes were simultaneous with the narrative development. The main purpose of illustrated songs was
to encourage sheet music sales, and they were highly successful with sales reaching into the millions for a single
song. Later, with the birth of film, illustrated songs were used as filler material preceding films and during reel
changes.

There was a non-commercial attempt to combine the motion picture with a combination of slides and synchronize
the resulting moving picture with audio. The film included hand-painted slides as well as other previously used
techniques. Simultaneously playing the audio while the film was being played with a projector was required. This
monumental production, released in 1915, was entitled "The Photo-Drama of Creation" and lasted eight hours.

Birth of movies
The first eleven years of motion pictures show the cinema moving from a novelty to an established large-scale
entertainment industry. The films represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, completely made by one
person with a few assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by
large companies in something like industrial conditions.
The year 1900 conveniently marks the emergence of the first motion pictures that can be considered as 'films' - at
this point, film-makers begin to introduce basic editing techniques and film narrative.

The invention and advancement of the camera

Early movie cameras were fastened to the head of their tripod with
only simple levelling devices provided. These cameras were thus
effectively fixed during the course of the shot, and hence the first
camera movements were the result of mounting a camera on a
moving vehicle. The Lumière brothers shot a scene from the back
of a train in 1896.
The first rotating camera for taking panning shots was built by
Robert W. Paul in 1897, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's
Diamond Jubilee. He used his camera to shoot the procession in
Georges Méliès (left) painting a backdrop in his studio
one shot. His device had the camera mounted on a vertical axis
that could be rotated by a worm gear driven by turning a crank
handle, and Paul put it on general sale the next year. Shots taken using such a "panning" head were also referred to as
‘panoramas’ in the film catalogues of the first decade of the cinema.
History of film 3

Georges Méliès built one of the first film studios in May 1897. It had a glass roof and three glass walls constructed
after the model of large studios for still photography, and it was fitted with thin cotton cloths that could be stretched
below the roof to diffuse the direct rays of the sun on sunny days.[3]
The Execution of Mary Stuart, produced by the Edison Company for viewing with the Kinetoscope, showed Mary
Queen of Scots being executed in full view of the camera. The effect was achieved by replacing the actor with a
dummy for the final shot. Georges Méliès also utilized this technique in the making of Escamotage d’un dame chez
Robert-Houdin (The Vanishing Lady). The woman is seen to vanish through the use of stop motion techniques.
The other basic technique for trick cinematography was the double
exposure of the film in the camera. This was pioneered by George
Albert Smith in July 1898 in England. The set was draped in
black, and after the main shot, the negative was re-exposed to the
overlaid scene. His The Corsican Brothers was described in the
catalogue of the Warwick Trading Company in 1900: “By
extremely careful photography the ghost appears *quite
transparent*. After indicating that he has been killed by a
sword-thrust, and appealing for vengeance, he disappears. A
‘vision’ then appears showing the fatal duel in the snow.”
A scene inset inside a circular vignette showing a
“dream vision” in Santa Claus (1899) G.A. Smith also initiated the special effects technique of reverse
motion. He did this by repeating the action a second time, while
filming it with an inverted camera, and then joining the tail of the second negative to that of the first. The first films
made using this device were Tipsy, Topsy, Turvy and The Awkward Sign Painter. The earliest surviving example of
this technique is Smith's The House That Jack Built, made before September 1900.
Cecil Hepworth took this technique further, by printing the negative of the forwards motion backwards frame by
frame, so producing a print in which the original action was exactly reversed. To do this he built a special printer in
which the negative running through a projector was projected into the gate of a camera through a special lens giving
a same-size image. This arrangement came to be called a “projection printer”, and eventually an “optical printer”.
The use of different camera speeds also appeared around 1900 in the films of Robert W. Paul and Hepworth. Paul
shot scenes from On a Runaway Motor Car through Piccadilly Circus (1899) with the camera turning very slowly.
When the film was projected at the usual 16 frames per second, the scenery appeared to be passing at great speed.
Hepworth used the opposite effect in The Indian Chief and the Seidlitz Powder (1901). The Chief's movements are
sped up by cranking the camera much faster than 16 frames per second. This gives what we would call a “slow
motion” effect.

Film editing and continuous narrative

The first films to consist of more than one shot appeared toward the end of the 19th century, a notable example was
the French film of the life of Jesus Christ. These weren't represented as a continuous film, the separate scenes were
interspersed with lantern slides, a lecture, and live choral numbers, to increase the running time of the spectacle to
about 90 minutes. Another example of this is the reproductions of scenes from the Greco-Turkish war, made by
Georges Méliès in 1897. Although each scene was sold separately, they were shown one after the other by the
exhibitors. Even Méliès' Cendrillon (Cinderella) of 1898 contained no action moving from one shot to the next one.
To understand what was going on in the film the audience had to know their stories beforehand, or be told them by a
presenter.
History of film 4

The two scenes making up Come Along, Do!

Real film continuity, involving action moving from one sequence into another, is attributed to British film pioneer
Robert W. Paul's Come Along, Do!, made in 1898 and one of the first films to feature more than one shot. In the first
shot, an elderly couple is outside an art exhibition having lunch and then follow other people inside through the door.
The second shot shows what they do inside. Paul's 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' of 1896 was the first camera to
feature reverse-cranking, which allowed the same film footage to be exposed several times and thereby to create
super-positions and multiple exposures. This technique was first used in his 1901 film Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost.
The further development of action continuity in multi-shot films continued in 1899 at the Brighton School in
England. In the latter part of that year, George Albert Smith made The Kiss in the Tunnel. This started with a shot
from a "phantom ride" at the point at which the train goes into a tunnel, and continued with the action on a set
representing the interior of a railway carriage, where a man steals a kiss from a woman, and then cuts back to the
phantom ride shot when the train comes out of the tunnel. A month later, the Bamforth company in Yorkshire made
a restaged version of this film under the same title, and in this case they filmed shots of a train entering and leaving a
tunnel from beside the tracks, which they joined before and after their version of the kiss inside the train
compartment.

The first two shots of Seen Through the Telescope (1900), with the telescope POV simulated by the circular mask.

In 1900, continuity of action across successive shots was definitively established by George Albert Smith and James
Williamson, who also worked in Brighton. In that year Smith made Seen Through the Telescope, in which the main
shot shows street scene with a young man tying the shoelace and then caressing the foot of his girlfriend, while an
History of film 5

old man observes this through a telescope. There is then a cut to close shot of the hands on the girl's foot shown
inside a black circular mask, and then a cut back to the continuation of the original scene. Even more remarkable is
James Williamson's Attack on a China Mission Station (1900). The first shot shows Chinese Boxer rebels at the gate;
it then cuts to the missionary family in the garden, where a fight ensues. The wife signals to British sailors from the
balcony, who come and rescue them. The film also used the first "reverse angle" cut in film history.
G.A Smith pioneered the use of the close-up shot in his 1900 films As Seen Through a Telescope and Grandma's
Reading Glass. He further developed the ideas of breaking a scene shot in one place into a series of shots taken from
different camera positions over the next couple of years, starting with The Little Doctors of 1901. In a series of films
he produced at this time, he also introduced the use of subjective and objective point-of-view shots, the creation of
dream-time and the use of reversing. He summed up his work in Mary Jane's Mishap of 1903, with repeated cuts in
to a close shot of a housemaid fooling around, along with superimpositions and other devices, before abandoning
film-making to invent the Kinemacolor system of colour cinematography. His films were the first to establish the
basics of coherent narrative and what became known as film language, or "film grammar".
James Williamson concentrated on making films taking action from one place shown in one shot to the next shown
in another shot in films like Stop Thief!, made in 1901, and many others. He also experimented with the close-up,
and made perhaps the most extreme one of all in The Big Swallow, when his character approaches the camera and
appears to swallow it. These two film makers of the Brighton School also pioneered the editing of the film; they
tinted their work with color and used trick photography to enhance the narrative. By 1900, their films were extended
scenes of up to 5 minutes long.
Most films of this period were what came to be called "chase films". These were inspired by James Williamson's
Stop Thief! of 1901, which showed a tramp stealing a leg of mutton from a butcher's boy in the first shot, then being
chased through the second shot by the butcher's boy and assorted dogs, and finally being caught by the dogs in the
third shot. Several British films made in the first half of 1903 extended the chase method of film construction. These
included An Elopement à la Mode and The Pickpocket: A Chase Through London, made by Alf Collins for the
British branch of the French Gaumont company, Daring Daylight Burglary, made by Frank Mottershaw at the
Sheffield Photographic Company, and Desperate Poaching Affray, made by William Haggar. Haggar in particular
innovated the first extant panning shots; the poachers are chased by gamekeepers and police officers and the camera
pans along, creating a sense of urgency and speed. His films were also recognised for their intelligent use of depth of
staging and screen edges, while film academic Noël Burch praised Haggar's effective use of off-screen space.[4] He
was also one of the first film makers to purposefully introduce violence for entertainment; in Desperate Poaching
Affray the villains are seen firing guns at their pursuers.
Other filmmakers took up all these ideas including the American
Edwin S. Porter, who started making films for the Edison Company in
1901. When he began making longer films in 1902, he put a dissolve
between every shot, just as Georges Méliès was already doing, and he
frequently had the same action repeated across the dissolves. His film,
The Great Train Robbery (1903), had a running time of twelve
minutes, with twenty separate shots and ten different indoor and
outdoor locations. He used cross-cutting editing method to show
simultaneous action in different places. The time continuity in The
Still from The Great Train Robbery, produced by Great Train Robbery was actually more confusing than that in the
Edwin S. Porter. films it was modeled on, but nevertheless it was a greater success than
them due to its Wild West violence.

The Pathé company in France also made imitations and variations of Smith and Williamson's films from 1902
onwards using cuts between the shots, which helped to standardize the basics of film construction. An influential
French film of the period was Méliès's 14 minute long A Trip to the Moon. It was extremely popular at the time of its
History of film 6

release, and is the best-known of the hundreds of films made by Méliès. It was one of the first known science fiction
films, and used innovative animation and special effects, including the well-known image of the spaceship landing in
the Moon's eye. The sheer volume of Pathé's production led to their filmmakers giving a further precision and polish
to the details of film continuity.

Animation
The first use of animation in movies was in 1899, with the production of the short film Matches: An Appeal by
British film pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper- a thirty-second long stop-motion animated piece intended to
encourage the audience to send matches to British troops fighting the Boer War. The film contains an appeal to send
money to Bryant and May who would then send matches to the British troops which were fighting in the Boer War
in South Africa. It was shown in December 1899 at The Empire Theatre in London. This film is the earliest known
example of stop-motion animation. Little puppets, constructed of matchsticks, are writing the appeal on a black wall.
Their movements are filmed frame by frame, movement by movement.
The relative sophistication of this piece was not followed up for some
time, with subsequent works in animation being limited to short, two or
three frame effects, such as appeared in Edwin Stanton Porter's 1902
short "Fun in a Bakery Shop", where a lump of dough was made to
smile over the course of a three-frame sequence. Works rivaling the
British short in length did not appear until 1905, when Edwin Porter
made How Jones Lost His Roll, and The Whole Dam Family and the
Dam Dog. Both of these films had intertitles which were formed by the
letters moving into place from a random scattering to form the words
A single frame from the Humorous Phases of
of the titles. This was done by exposing the film one frame at a time,
Funny Faces animation, showing the use of
cut-out technique
and moving the letters a little bit towards their final position between
each exposure. This is what has come to be called "single frame
animation" or "object animation", and it needs a slightly adapted camera that exposes only one frame for each turn of
the crank handle, rather than the usual eight frames per turn.

In 1906, Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton at Vitagraph took the next step, and in their Humorous
Phases of Funny Faces, what appear to be cartoon drawings of people move from one pose to another. This is done
for most of the length of this film by moving jointed cut-outs of the figures frame by frame between the exposures,
just as Porter moved his letters. However, there is a very short section of the film where things are made to appear to
move by altering the drawings themselves from frame to frame, which is how standard animated cartoons have since
been made up to today.

The technique of single frame animation was further developed in 1907 by Edwin S. Porter in The Teddy Bears and
by J. Stuart Blackton with Work Made Easy. In the first of these the toy bears were made to move, apparently on
their own, and in the latter film building tools were made to perform construction tasks without human intervention,
by using frame-by-frame animation. The technique got to Europe almost immediately, and Segundo de Chomon and
others at Pathé took it further, adding clay animation, in which sculptures were deformed from one thing into another
thing frame by frame in Sculpture moderne (1908), and then Pathé made the next step to the animation of silhouette
shapes. Also in France, Émile Cohl fully developed drawn animation in a series of films starting with Fantasmagorie
(1908), in which humans and objects drawn as outline figures went though a series of remarkable interactions and
transformations. In the United States the response was from the famous strip cartoon artist Winsor McCay, who drew
much more realistic animated figures going through smoother, more naturalistic motion in a series of films starting
with the film Little Nemo, made for Vitagraph in 1911. In the next few years various others took part in this
development of animated cartoons in the United States and elsewhere.
History of film 7

The feature film

Films at the time were no longer than one reel, although some
multi-reel films had been made on the life of Christ in the first few
years of cinema. The first feature length multi-reel film in the world
was the 1906 Australian production called The Story of the Kelly Gang.
It traced the life of the legendary infamous outlaw and bushranger Ned
Kelly (1855–1880) and ran for more than an hour with a reel length of
approximately 4,000 feet (1,200 m).[5] It was first shown at the
Athenaeum Hall in Collins Street, Melbourne, Australia on 26
December 1906 and in the UK in January 1908.[6][7]

Maturation

The film business

The first successful permanent theatre showing only films was "The
Nickelodeon", which was opened in Pittsburgh in 1905. By then there
were enough films several minutes long available to fill a programme Poster for a Biograph Studios release from 1913.
running for at least half an hour, and which could be changed weekly
when the local audience became bored with it. Other exhibitors in the United States quickly followed suit, and within
a couple of years there were thousands of these nickelodeons in operation. The American experience led to a
worldwide boom in the production and exhibition of films from 1906 onwards.

By 1907 purpose-built cinemas for motion pictures were being opened across the United States, Britain and France.
The films were often shown with the accompaniment of music provided by a pianist, though there could be more
musicians. There were also a very few larger cinemas in some of the biggest cities. Initially, the majority of films in
the programmes were Pathé films, but this changed fairly quickly as the American companies cranked up production.
The programme was made up of just a few films, and the show lasted around 30 minutes. The reel of film, of
maximum length 1,000 feet (300 m), which usually contained one individual film, became the standard unit of film
production and exhibition in this period. The programme was changed twice or more a week, but went up to five
changes of programme a week after a couple of years. In general, cinemas were set up in the established
entertainment districts of the cities. In 1907, Pathé began renting their films to cinemas through film exchanges
rather than selling the films outright.
By about 1910, actors began to receive screen credit for their roles, and
the way to the creation of film stars was opened. Films were
increasingly longer, and began to feature proper plots and
development.
The litigation over patents between all the major American
film-making companies led to the formation of a trust to control the
American film business, with each company in the trust being allocated
production quotas (two reels a week for the biggest ones, one reel a
week for the smaller). However, although 6,000 exhibitors signed up to
An early film, depicting a re-enactment of the
Battle of Chemulpo Bay (Film produced in 1904 the trust, about 2,000 others did not and began to fund new film
by Edison Studios) producing companies. By 1912 the independents had nearly half of the
market and the government defeated the trust by initiating anti-trust
action at the same time.
History of film 8

Up to 1913, most American film production was still carried out around New York, but due to the monopoly of the
Edison Company's film patents and its litigous attempts to preserve it, many filmmakers moved to Southern
California, starting with Selig in 1909. The sunshine and scenery was important for the production of Westerns,
which came to form a major American film genre with the first cowboy stars, G.M. Anderson ("Broncho Billy") and
Tom Mix. Selig pioneered the use of (fairly) wild animals from a zoo for a series of exotic adventures, with the
actors being menaced or saved by the animals. Kalem Company sent film crews to places in America and abroad to
film stories in the actual places they were supposed to have happened. Kalem also pioneered the female action
heroine from 1912, with Ruth Roland playing starring roles in their Westerns.
In France, Pathé retained its dominant position, followed still by Gaumont, and then other new companies that
appeared to cater to the film boom. A film company with a different approach was Film d'Art. This was set up at the
beginning of 1908 to make films of a serious artistic nature. Their declared programme was to make films using only
the best dramatists, artists and actors. The first of these was L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (The Assassination of the
Duc de Guise), a historical subject set in the court of Henri III. This film used leading actors from the
Comédie-Française, and had a special accompanying score written by Camille Saint-Saëns. The other French majors
followed suit, and this wave gave rise to the English-language description of films with artistic pretensions aimed at
a sophisticated audience as "art films". By 1910, the French film companies were starting to make films as long as
two, or even three reels, though most were still one reel long. This trend was followed in Italy, Denmark, and
Sweden.
In Britain, the Cinematograph Act 1909 was the first primary legislation to specifically regulate the film industry.
Film exhibitions often took place in temporary venues and the use of highly flammable cellulose nitrate for film,
combined with limelight illumination, created a significant fire hazard. The Act specified a strict building code
which required, amongst other things, that the projector be enclosed within a fire resisting enclosure.
Regular newsreels were exhibited from 1910 and soon became a popular way for finding out the news - the British
Antarctic Expedition to the South Pole was filmed for the newsreels as were the suffragette demonstrations that were
happening at the same time. F. Percy Smith was an early nature documentary pioneer working for Charles Urban and
he pioneered the use of time lapse and micro cinematography in his 1910 documentary on the growth of flowers.

New film producing countries

With the worldwide film boom, yet more countries now joined Britain, France, Germany and the United States in
serious film production. In Italy, production was spread over several centres, with Turin being the first and biggest.
There, Ambrosio was the first company in the field in 1905, and remained the largest in the country through this
period. Its most substantial rival was Cines in Rome, which started producing in 1906. The great strength of the
Italian industry was historical epics, with large casts and massive scenery. As early as 1911, Giovanni Pastrone's
two-reel la Caduta di Troia (The Fall of Troy) made a big impression worldwide, and it was followed by even bigger
spectacles like Quo Vadis? (1912), which ran for 90 minutes, and Pastrone's Cabiria of 1914, which ran for two and
a half hours.
History of film 9

Italian companies also had a strong line in

slapstick comedy, with actors like André
Deed, known locally as "Cretinetti", and
elsewhere as "Foolshead" and "Gribouille",
achieving worldwide fame with his almost
surrealistic gags.
The most important film-producing country
in Northern Europe up until the First World
War was Denmark. The Nordisk company
was set up there in 1906 by Ole Olsen, a
fairground showman, and after a brief
period imitating the successes of French and
British filmmakers, in 1907 he produced 67
films, most directed by Viggo Larsen, with
La Caduta di Troia (The Siege of Troy) (1911)
sensational subjects like Den hvide Slavinde
(The White Slave), Isbjørnenjagt (Polar
Bear Hunt) and Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt). By 1910, new smaller Danish companies began joining the business,
and besides making more films about the white slave trade, they contributed other new subjects. The most important
of these finds was Asta Nielsen in Afgrunden (The Abyss), directed by Urban Gad for Kosmorama, This combined
the circus, sex, jealousy and murder, all put over with great conviction, and pushed the other Danish filmmakers
further in this direction. By 1912, the Danish film companies were multiplying rapidly.

The Swedish film industry was smaller and slower to get started than the Danish industry. Here, the important man
was Charles Magnusson, a newsreel cameraman for the Svenskabiografteatern cinema chain. He started fiction film
production for them in 1909, directing a number of the films himself. Production increased in 1912, when the
company engaged Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller as directors. They started out by imitating the subjects
favoured by the Danish film industry, but by 1913 they were producing their own strikingly original work, which
sold very well.
Russia began its film industry in 1908 with Pathé shooting some fiction subjects there, and then the creation of real
Russian film companies by Aleksandr Drankov and Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. The Khanzhonkov company quickly
became much the largest Russian film company, and remained so until 1918.
In Germany, Oskar Messter had been involved in film-making from 1896, but did not make a significant number of
films per year till 1910. When the worldwide film boom started, he, and the few other people in the German film
business, continued to sell prints of their own films outright, which put them at a disadvantage. It was only when
Paul Davidson, the owner of a chain of cinemas, brought Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad to Germany from Denmark in
1911, and set up a production company, Projektions-AG "Union" (PAGU), for them, that a change-over to renting
prints began. Messter replied with a series of longer films starring Henny Porten, but although these did well in the
German-speaking world, they were not particularly successful internationally, unlike the Asta Nielsen films. Another
of the growing German film producers just before World War I was the German branch of the French Éclair
company, Deutsche Éclair. This was expropriated by the German government, and turned into DECLA when the war
started. But altogether, German producers only had a minor part of the German market in 1914.
Overall, from about 1910, American films had the largest share of the market in all European countries except
France, and even in France, the American films had just pushed the local production out of first place on the eve of
World War I. So even if the war had not happened, American films may have become dominant worldwide.
Although the war made things much worse for European producers, the technical qualities of American films made
them increasingly attractive to audiences everywhere.
History of film 10

Film technique
A.E. Smith filming The Bargain Fiend in the
Vitagraph Studios in 1907. Arc floodlights hang
overhead.
New film techniques that were introduced in this period include the use
of artificial lighting, fire effects and Low-key lighting (i.e. lighting in
which most of the frame is dark) for enhanced atmosphere during
sinister scenes.
Continuity of action from shot to shot was also refined, such as in
Pathé's le Cheval emballé (The Runaway Horse) (1907) where
cross-cutting between parallel actions is used. D. W. Griffith also
began using cross-cutting in the film The Fatal Hour, made in July
1908. Another development was the use of the Point of View shot, first
used in 1910 in Vitagraph's Back to Nature. Insert shots were also used
for artistic purposes; the Italian film La mala planta (The Evil Plant),
directed by Mario Caserini had an insert shot of a snake slithering over
the ‘Evil Plant’.

As films grew longer, specialist writers were employed to simplify more complex stories derived from novels or
plays into a form that could be contained on one reel. Genres began to be used as categories; the main division was
into comedy and drama, but these categories were further subdivided.
Intertitles containing lines of dialogue began to be used consistently from 1908 onwards, such as in Vitagraph's An
Auto Heroine; or, The Race for the Vitagraph Cup and How It Was Won. The dialogue was eventually inserted into
the middle of the scene and became commonplace by 1912. The introduction of dialogue titles transformed the
nature of film narrative. When dialogue titles came to be always cut into a scene just after a character starts speaking,
and then left with a cut to the character just before they finish speaking, then one had something that was effectively
the equivalent of a present-day sound film.

During WW1

The film business

The years of the First World War were a complex transitional period for the film industry. The exhibition of films
changed from short one-reel programmes to feature films. Exhibition venues became larger and began charging
higher prices.
In the United States, these changes brought destruction to many film companies, the Vitagraph company being an
exception. Film production began to shift to Los Angeles during World War I. The Universal Film Manufacturing
Company was formed in 1912 as an umbrella company. New entrants included the Jesse Lasky Feature Play
Company, and Famous Players, both formed in 1913, and later amalgamated into Famous Players-Lasky. The
biggest success of these years was David Wark Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith followed this up with
the even bigger Intolerance (1916).
In France, film production shut down due to the general military mobilization of the country at the start of the war.
Although film production began again in 1915, it was on a reduced scale, and the biggest companies gradually
retired from production. Italian film production held up better, although so called "diva films", starring anguished
female leads were a commercial failure. In Denmark, the Nordisk company increased its production so much in 1915
and 1916 that it could not sell all its films, which led to a very sharp decline in Danish production, and the end of
Denmark's importance on the world film scene.
The German film industry was seriously weakened by the war. The most important of the new film producers at the
time was Joe May, who made a series of thrillers and adventure films through the war years, but Ernst Lubitsch also
came into prominence with a series of very successful comedies and dramas.
History of film 11

Because of the large local market for films in Russia, the industry there was not harmed by the war at first, although
the isolation of the country led many Russian films to develop peculiarly distinctive features. In 1919, after the
Bolshevik Revolution, an exodus of talent from the country took place and film production was drastically curtailed.

New techniques
At this time, studios were blacked out to
allow shooting to be unaffected by changing
sunlight. This was replaced with floodlights
and spotlights. The widespread adoption of
irising-in and out to begin and end scenes
caught on in this period. This is the
revelation of a film shot in a circular mask,
which gradually gets larger till it expands
beyond the frame. Other shaped slits were
used, including vertical and diagonal
apertures.
A new idea taken over from still
photography was "soft focus". This began in
1915, with some shots being intentionally
Complex vignette shot in die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster Princess).
thrown out of focus for expressive effect, as
in Mary Pickford's Fanchon the Cricket.
It was during this period that camera effects intended to convey the subjective feelings of characters in a film really
began to be established. These could now be done as Point of View (POV) shots, as in Sidney Drew's The Story of
the Glove (1915), where a wobbly hand-held shot of a door and its keyhole represents the POV of a drunken man.
The use of anamorphic (in the general sense of distorted shape) images first appears in these years with Abel Gance's
la Folie du Docteur Tube (The Madness of Dr. Tube). In this film the effect of a drug administered to a group of
people was suggested by shooting the scenes reflected in a distorting mirror of the fair-ground type.

Symbolic effects taken over from conventional literary and artistic tradition continued to make some appearances in
films during these years. In D. W. Griffith's The Avenging Conscience (1914), the title "The birth of the evil thought"
precedes a series of three shots of the protagonist looking at a spider, and ants eating an insect. Symbolist art and
literature from the turn of the century also had a more general effect on a small number of films made in Italy and
Russia. The supine acceptance of death resulting from passion and forbidden longings was a major feature of this art,
and states of delirium dwelt on at length were important as well.
History of film 12

The use of insert shots, i.e. close-ups of

objects other than faces, had already
been established by the Brighton
school, but were infrequently used
before 1914. It is really only with
Griffith's The Avenging Conscience
that a new phase in the use of the Insert
Shot starts. As well as the symbolic
inserts already mentioned, The
Avenging Conscience also made
extensive use of large numbers of Big
Close Up shots of clutching hands and
tapping feet as a means of emphasizing
those parts of the body as indicators of
psychological tension.

Atmospheric inserts were developed in Insert shot in Old Wives for New (Cecil B. DeMille, 1918)
Europe in the late 1910s. This kind of
shot is one in a scene which neither contains any of the characters in the story, nor is a Point of View shot seen by
one of them. An early example is in Maurice Tourneur's The Pride of the Clan (1917), in which there is a series of
shots of waves beating on a rocky shore to demonstrate the harsh lives of the fishing folk. Maurice Elvey's Nelson –
England's Immortal Naval Hero (1919) has a symbolic sequence dissolving from a picture of Kaiser Wilhelm II to a
peacock, and then to a battleship.

By 1914, continuity cinema was the established mode of commercial cinema. One of the advanced continuity
techniques involved an accurate and smooth transition from one shot to another. Cutting to different angles within a
scene also became well-established as a technique for dissecting a scene into shots in American films. If the direction
of the shot changes by more than ninety degrees, it is called a reverse-angle cutting. The leading figure in the full
development of reverse-angle cutting was Ralph Ince in his films, such as The Right Girl and His Phantom
Sweetheart
The use of flash-back structures continued to develop in this period, with the usual way of entering and leaving a
flash-back being through a dissolve. The Vitagraph company's The Man That Might Have Been (William Humphrey,
1914), is even more complex, with a series of reveries and flash-backs that contrast the protagonist's real passage
through life with what might have been, if his son had not died.
After 1914, cross cutting between parallel actions came to be used - more so in American films than in European
ones. Cross-cutting was often used to get new effects of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B.
DeMille's The Whispering Chorus, in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a Chinese prostitute
in an opium den, while simultaneously his unknowing wife is being remarried in church.

Film art
The general trend in the development of cinema, led from the United States, was towards using the newly developed
specifically filmic devices for expression of the narrative content of film stories, and combining this with the
standard dramatic structures already in use in commercial theatre. D. W. Griffith had the highest standing amongst
American directors in the industry, because of the dramatic excitement he conveyed to the audience through his
films. Cecil B. DeMille's The Cheat (1915), brought out the moral dilemmas facing their characters in a more subtle
way than Griffith. DeMille was also in closer touch with the reality of contemporary American life. Maurice
Tourneur was also highly ranked for the pictorial beauties of his films, together with the subtlety of his handling of
History of film 13

fantasy, while at the same time he was capable of getting greater naturalism from his actors at appropriate moments,
as in A Girl's Folly (1917).
Sidney Drew was the leader in developing "polite comedy", while slapstick was refined by Fatty Arbuckle and
Charles Chaplin, who both started with Mack Sennett's Keystone company. They reduced the usual frenetic pace of
Sennett's films to give the audience a chance to appreciate the subtlety and finesse of their movement, and the
cleverness of their gags. By 1917 Chaplin was also introducing more dramatic plot into his films, and mixing the
comedy with sentiment.
In Russia, Yevgeni Bauer put a slow intensity of acting combined with Symbolist overtones onto film in a unique
way.
In Sweden, Victor Sjöström made a series of films that combined the realities of people's lives with their
surroundings in a striking manner, while Mauritz Stiller developed sophisticated comedy to a new level.
In Germany, Ernst Lubitsch got his inspiration from the stage work of Max Reinhardt, both in bourgeois comedy and
in spectacle, and applied this to his films, culminating in his die Puppe (The Doll), die Austernprinzessin (The Oyster
Princess) and Madame Dubarry.

Hollywood triumphant
At the start of the First World War, French and Italian cinema had been the most globally popular. The war came as
a devastating interruption to European film industries. The American industry, or "Hollywood", as it was becoming
known after its new geographical center in California, gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: film
factory for the world and exporting its product to most countries on earth.
By the 1920s, the United States reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800
feature films annually,[8] or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster
Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow, to cite just a few
examples, made these performers’ faces well-known on every continent. The Western visual norm that would
become classical continuity editing was developed and exported – although its adoption was slower in some
non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan.
This development was contemporary with the growth of the studio system and its greatest publicity method, the star
system, which characterized American film for decades to come and provided models for other film industries. The
studios’ efficient, top-down control over all stages of their product enabled a new and ever-growing level of lavish
production and technical sophistication. At the same time, the system's commercial regimentation and focus on
glamorous escapism discouraged daring and ambition beyond a certain degree, a prime example being the brief but
still legendary directing career of the iconoclastic Erich von Stroheim in the late teens and the ‘20s.

The sound era

Main article: Sound film
During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained what is generally
regarded as the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film; but this process was actually
accomplished first by Charles Taze Russell in 1914 with the lengthy film The Photo-Drama of Creation. This drama
consisted of picture slides and moving pictures synchronized with phonograph records of talks and music. The early
sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone,
DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking
pictures", or "talkies", were the future. A lot of attempts were made before the success of The Jazz Singer, that can
be seen in the List of film sound systems.
The change was remarkably swift. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was almost all-talkie, with several competing
sound systems (soon to be standardized). Total changeover was slightly slower in the rest of the world, principally
History of film 14

for economic reasons. Cultural reasons were also a factor in countries like China and Japan, where silents co-existed
successfully with sound well into the 1930s, indeed producing what would be some of the most revered classics in
those countries, like Wu Yonggang's The Goddess (China, 1934) and Yasujirō Ozu's I Was Born, But... (Japan,
1932). But even in Japan, a figure such as the benshi, the live narrator who was a major part of Japanese silent
cinema, found his acting career was ending.
Sound further tightened the grip of major studios in numerous countries: the vast expense of the transition
overwhelmed smaller competitors, while the novelty of sound lured vastly larger audiences for those producers that
remained. In the case of the U.S., some historians credit sound with saving the Hollywood studio system in the face
of the Great Depression (Parkinson, 1995). Thus began what is now often called "The Golden Age of Hollywood",
which refers roughly to the period beginning with the introduction of sound until the late 1940s. The American
cinema reached its peak of efficiently manufactured glamour and global appeal during this period. The top actors of
the era are now thought of as the classic film stars, such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart,
Greta Garbo, and the greatest box office draw of the 1930s, child performer Shirley Temple.

Creative impact of sound

Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in some ways, film briefly reverted to the
conditions of its earliest days. The late '20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in front of and behind the
camera struggled with the stringent limitations of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to
utilize the new medium. Many stage performers, directors and writers were introduced to cinema as producers
sought personnel experienced in dialogue-based storytelling. Many major silent filmmakers and actors were unable
to adjust and found their careers severely curtailed or even ended.
This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with Chinatown Nights
and The Man I Love, Rouben Mamoulian with Applause, Alfred Hitchcock with Blackmail (Britain's first sound
feature), were among the directors to bring greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of sound
(Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed further, technical advances in microphones and
cameras, and capabilities for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all sound directly at the
time of filming).
Sound films emphasized on black history and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the
musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was The Broadway Melody (1929) and the form
would find its first major creator in choreographer/director Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, 1933, Dames, 1934). In
France, avant-garde director René Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like Under the Roofs of
Paris (1930) and Le Million (1931). Universal Pictures begin releasing gothic horror films like Dracula and
Frankenstein (both 1931). In 1933, RKO released Merian C. Cooper's classic "giant monster" film King Kong. The
trend thrived best in India, where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama made the musical
the basic form of most sound films (Cook, 1990); virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian
popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. (See also Bollywood.)
At this time, American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman's The Public Enemy (both 1931) became
popular. Dialogue now took precedence over "slapstick" in Hollywood comedies: the fast-paced, witty banter of The
Front Page (1931) or It Happened One Night (1934), the sexual double entrendres of Mae West (She Done Him
Wrong, 1933) or the often subversively anarchic nonsense talk of the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, 1933). Walt
Disney, who had previously been in the short cartoon business, stepped into feature films with the first
English-speaking animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; released by RKO Pictures in 1937. 1939, a
major year for American cinema, brought such films as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with The Wind.
History of film 15

WW2 and its aftermath

The desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas
like 49th Parallel (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and Noël Coward and David Lean's
celebrated naval film In Which We Serve in 1942, which won a special Academy Award. These existed alongside
more flamboyant films like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A
Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), as well as Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V,
based on the Shakespearean history Henry V. The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to
make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942).
The onset of US involvement in World War II also brought a proliferation of films as both patriotism and
propaganda. American propaganda films included Desperate Journey, Mrs. Miniver, Forever and a Day and
Objective Burma. Notable American films from the war years include the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine (1943),
scripted by Dashiell Hammett; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's direction of a script by Thornton Wilder; the
George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney, and the immensely popular
Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and 1942 including John Huston's
The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the first films now considered a classic film noir. In 1941, RKO Pictures released
Citizen Kane made by Orson Welles. It is often considered the greatest film of all time. It would set the stage for the
modern motion picture, as it revolutionized film story telling.
The strictures of wartime also brought an interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's Gainsborough
melodramas (including The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady), and films like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven
Can Wait, I Married a Witch and Blithe Spirit. Val Lewton also produced a series of atmospheric and influential
small-budget horror films, some of the more famous examples being Cat People, Isle of the Dead and The Body
Snatcher. The decade probably also saw the so-called "women's pictures", such as Now, Voyager, Random Harvest
and Mildred Pierce at the peak of their popularity.
1946 saw RKO Radio releasing It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra. Soldiers returning from the war would
provide the inspiration for films like The Best Years of Our Lives, and many of those in the film industry had served
in some capacity during the war. Samuel Fuller's experiences in World War II would influence his largely
autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One. The Actor's Studio was founded in October 1947
by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, and the same year Oskar Fischinger filmed Motion Painting No.
1.
In 1943, Ossessione was screened in Italy, marking the beginning of Italian neorealism. Major films of this type
during the 1940s included Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City, and La Terra Trema. In 1952 Umberto D was released,
usually considered the last film of this type.
In the late 1940s, in Britain, Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including Whisky
Galore!, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit, and Carol Reed directed his
influential thrillers Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. David Lean was also rapidly becoming a
force in world cinema with Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like Black
Narcissus and The Red Shoes.
History of film 16

The 1950s
The House Un-American Activities
Committee investigated Hollywood in the
early 1950s. Protested by the Hollywood
Ten before the committee, the hearings
resulted in the blacklisting of many actors,
writers and directors, including Chayefsky,
Charlie Chaplin, and Dalton Trumbo, and
many of these fled to Europe, especially the
United Kingdom.

The Cold War era zeitgeist translated into a

type of near-paranoia manifested in themes
such as invading armies of evil aliens,
(Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The War of
the Worlds); and communist fifth A production scene from the 1950 Hollywood film Julius Caesar starring Charlton
Heston.
columnists, (The Manchurian Candidate).

During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was also threatened by television, and the increasing
popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close. The demise of the "studio
system" spurred the self-commentary of films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
In 1950, the Lettrists avante-gardists caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Treatise on Slime
and Eternity was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin and split with the movement, the Ultra-Lettrists
continued to cause disruptions when they showed their new hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film is
Guy Debord's Howls for Sade of 1952.
Distressed by the increasing number of closed theatres, studios and companies would find new and innovative ways
to bring audiences back. These included attempts to literally widen their appeal with new screen formats.
Cinemascope, which would remain a 20th Century Fox distinction until 1967, was announced with 1953's The Robe.
VistaVision, Cinerama, and Todd-AO boasted a "bigger is better" approach to marketing films to a dwindling US
audience. This resulted in the revival of epic films to take advantage of the new big screen formats. Some of the most
successful examples of these Biblical and historical spectaculars include The Ten Commandments (1956), The
Vikings (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and El Cid (1961). Also during this period a number of other
significant films were produced in Todd-AO, developed by Mike Todd shortly before his death, including
Oklahoma! (1955), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), South Pacific (1958) and Cleopatra (1963) plus many
more.
Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The fad for 3-D film would last for only two years, 1952–1954, and
helped sell House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Producer William Castle would tout films featuring
"Emergo" "Percepto", the first of a series of gimmicks that would remain popular marketing tools for Castle and
others throughout the 1960s.
In the U.S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early activism of
the Civil Rights Movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), On the Waterfront
(1954), Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men (1957). Disney continued making animated
films, notably; Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). He
began, however, getting more involved in live action films, producing classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(1954), and Old Yeller (1957). Television began competing seriously with films projected in theatres, but
surprisingly it promoted more filmgoing rather than curtailing it.
History of film 17

Limelight is probably a unique film in at least one interesting respect. Its two leads, Charlie Chaplin and Claire
Bloom, were in the industry in no less than three different centuries. In the 19th Century, Chaplin made his theatrical
debut at the age of eight, in 1897, in a clog dancing troupe, The Eight Lancaster Lads. In the 21st Century, Bloom is
still enjoying a full and productive career, having appeared in dozens of films and television series produced up to
and including 2013. She received particular acclaim for her role in The King's Speech (2010).

Golden Age of Asian cinema

Main article: Asian cinema
Following the end of World War II in the 1940s, the
following decade, the 1950s, marked a 'Golden Age' for
non-English world cinema, especially for Asian
cinema. Many of the most critically acclaimed Asian
films of all time were produced during this decade,
including Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953), Satyajit
Ray's The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959) and The Music
Room (1958), Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1954) and
Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Raj Kapoor's Awaara (1951),
Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds (1955), Guru Dutt's
Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959), and the
Akira Kurosawa films Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952),
Seven Samurai (1954) and Throne of Blood (1957).

During Japanese cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s,

successful films included Rashomon (1950), Seven
Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) by
Akira Kurosawa, as well as Yasujirō Ozu's Tokyo Story
(1953) and Ishirō Honda's Godzilla (1954).[9] These
films have had a profound influence on world cinema.
In particular, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai has been
Satyajit Ray, Indian Bengali film director.
remade several times as Western films, such as The
Magnificent Seven (1960) and Battle Beyond the Stars
(1980), and has also inspired several Bollywood films, such as Sholay (1975) and China Gate (1998). Rashomon was
also remade as The Outrage (1964), and inspired films with "Rashomon effect" storytelling methods, such as Andha
Naal (1954), The Usual Suspects (1995) and Hero (2002). The Hidden Fortress was also the inspiration behind
George Lucas' Star Wars (1977). Other famous Japanese filmmakers from this period include Kenji Mizoguchi,
Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Inagaki and Nagisa Oshima. Japanese cinema later became one of the main inspirations
behind the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s to 1980s.

During Indian cinema's 'Golden Age' of the 1950s, it was producing 200 films annually, while Indian independent
films gained greater recognition through international film festivals. One of the most famous was The Apu Trilogy
(1955–1959) from critically acclaimed Bengali film director Satyajit Ray, whose films had a profound influence on
world cinema, with directors such as Akira Kurosawa, Martin Scorsese, James Ivory, Abbas Kiarostami, Elia Kazan,
François Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, Carlos Saura, Jean-Luc Godard, Isao Takahata, Gregory Nava, Ira Sachs, Wes
Anderson and Danny Boyle being influenced by his cinematic style. According to Michael Sragow of The Atlantic
Monthly, the "youthful coming-of-age dramas that have flooded art houses since the mid-fifties owe a tremendous
debt to the Apu trilogy". Subrata Mitra's cinematographic technique of bounce lighting also originates from The Apu
Trilogy. Other famous Indian filmmakers from this period include Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Raj
Kapoor, Bimal Roy, K. Asif and Mehboob Khan.
History of film 18

The cinema of South Korea also experienced a 'Golden Age' in the 1950s, beginning with director Lee Kyu-hwan's
tremendously successful remake of Chunhyang-jon (1955). That year also saw the release of Yangsan Province by
the renowned director, Kim Ki-young, marking the beginning of his productive career. Both the quality and quantity
of filmmaking had increased rapidly by the end of the 1950s. South Korean films, such as Lee Byeong-il's 1956
comedy Sijibganeun nal (The Wedding Day), had begun winning international awards. In contrast to the beginning
of the 1950s, when only 5 films were made per year, 111 films were produced in South Korea in 1959.
The 1950s was also a 'Golden Age' for Philippine cinema, with the emergence of more artistic and mature films, and
significant improvement in cinematic techniques among filmmakers. The studio system produced frenetic activity in
the local film industry as many films were made annually and several local talents started to earn recognition abroad.
The premiere Philippine directors of the era included Gerardo de Leon, Gregorio Fernández, Eddie Romero,
Lamberto Avellana, and Cirio Santiago.[10][11]

1960s
During the 1960s, the studio system in Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location
in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.
"Hollywood" films were still largely aimed at family audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that
produced the studios' biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound
of Music (1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade. The growth in independent producers and
production companies, and the increase in the power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of traditional
Hollywood studio production.
There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema in America during this period. During the late
1950s and 1960s, the French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard produced films
such as Les quatre cents coups, Breathless and Jules et Jim which broke the rules of Hollywood cinema's narrative
structure. As well, audiences were becoming aware of Italian films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the stark
dramas of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman.
In Britain, the "Free Cinema" of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and others lead to a group of realistic and
innovative dramas including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and This Sporting Life. Other
British films such as Repulsion, Darling, Alfie, Blowup and Georgy Girl (all in 1965-1966) helped to reduce
prohibitions sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the James Bond films, beginning with Dr.
No in 1962 would render the series popular worldwide.
During the 1960s, Ousmane Sembène produced several French- and Wolof-language films and became the 'father' of
African Cinema. In Latin America, the dominance of the "Hollywood" model was challenged by many film makers.
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino called for a politically engaged Third Cinema in contrast to Hollywood and
the European auteur cinema.
Further, the nuclear paranoia of the age, and the threat of an apocalyptic nuclear exchange (like the 1962 close-call
with the USSR during the Cuban missile crisis) prompted a reaction within the film community as well. Films like
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe with Henry Fonda were produced in a Hollywood that was once
known for its overt patriotism and wartime propaganda.
In documentary film the sixties saw the blossoming of Direct Cinema, an observational style of film making as well
as the advent of more overtly partisan films like In the Year of the Pig about the Vietnam War by Emile de Antonio.
By the late 1960s however, Hollywood filmmakers were beginning to create more innovative and groundbreaking
films that reflected the social revolution taken over much of the western world such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The
Graduate (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rosemary's Baby (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider
(1969) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Bonnie and Clyde is often considered the beginning of the so-called New
Hollywood.
History of film 19

In Japanese cinema, Academy Award winning director Akira Kurosawa produced Yojimbo (1961), which like his
previous films also had a profound influence around the world. The influence of this film is most apparent in Sergio
Leone's A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Walter Hill's Last Man Standing (1996). Yojimbo was also the origin of the
"Man with No Name" trend.
Meanwhile in India, the Academy Award winning Bengali director Satyajit Ray wrote a script for The Alien in 1967,
based on a Bengali science fiction story he himself had written in 1962. The film was intended to be his debut in
Hollywood but the production was eventually cancelled. Nevertheless, the script went on to influence later films
such as Steven Spielberg's E.T. (1982) and Rakesh Roshan's Koi... Mil Gaya (2003).

1970s: The 'New Hollywood' or post-classical cinema

The New Hollywood was the period following the decline of the studio system during the 1950s and 1960s and the
end of the production code, (which was replaced in 1968 by the MPAA film rating system). During the 1970s,
filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic
images of bloody deaths - a good example of this is Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972).
Post-classical cinema is the changing methods of storytelling of the New Hollywood producers. The new methods of
drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during the classical/Golden Age period:
story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling "twist endings", main characters may behave
in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The
beginnings of post-classical storytelling may be seen in 1940s and 1950s film noir films, in films such as Rebel
Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's Psycho. 1971 marked the release of controversial films like Straw Dogs,
A Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and Dirty Harry. This sparked heated controversy over the perceived
escalation of violence in cinema.
During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola,
George Lucas, Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, and Robert Altman. This coincided with the increasing popularity of
the auteur theory in film literature and the media, which posited that a film director's films express their personal
vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far
greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and
commercial successes, like Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Coppola's The Godfather films, Altman’s Nashville, Allen's Annie
Hall and Manhattan, Malick's Badlands and Days of Heaven, and Polish immigrant Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It
also, however, resulted in some failures, including Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino's
hugely expensive Western epic Heaven's Gate, which helped to bring about the demise of its backer, United Artists.
The financial disaster of Heaven's Gate marked the end of the visionary "auteur" directors of the "New Hollywood",
who had unrestrained creative and financial freedom to develop films. The phenomenal success in the 1970s of
Spielberg’s Jaws and Lucas’s Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern "blockbuster". Hollywood studios
increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and
promotional campaigns. This trend had already been foreshadowed by the commercial success of disaster films such
as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
During the mid-1970s, more pornographic theatres, euphemistically called "adult cinemas", were established, and the
legal production of hardcore pornographic films began. Porn films such as Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace
became something of a popular culture phenomenon and resulted in a spate of similar sex films. The porn cinemas
finally died out during the 1980s, when the popularization of the home VCR and pornography videotapes allowed
audiences to watch sex films at home. In the early 1970s, English-language audiences became more aware of the
new West German cinema, with Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders among its leading
exponents.
In world cinema, the 1970s saw a dramatic increase in the popularity of martial arts films, largely due to its
reinvention by Bruce Lee, who departed from the artistic style of traditional Chinese martial arts films and added a
History of film 20

much greater sense of realism to them with his Jeet Kune Do style. This began with The Big Boss (1971), which was
a major success across Asia. However, he didn't gain fame in the Western world until shortly after his death in 1973,
when Enter the Dragon was released. The film went on to become the most successful martial arts film in cinematic
history, popularized the martial arts film genre across the world, and cemented Bruce Lee's status as a cultural icon.
Hong Kong action cinema, however, was in decline due to a wave of "Bruceploitation" films. This trend eventually
came to an end in 1978 with the martial arts comedy films, Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master,
directed by Yuen Woo-ping and starring Jackie Chan, laying the foundations for the rise of Hong Kong action
cinema in the 1980s.
While the musical film genre had declined in Hollywood by this time, musical films were quickly gaining popularity
in the cinema of India, where the term "Bollywood" was coined for the growing Hindi film industry in Bombay (now
Mumbai) that ended up dominating South Asian cinema, overtaking the more critically acclaimed Bengali film
industry in popularity. Hindi filmmakers combined the Hollywood musical formula with the conventions of ancient
Indian theatre to create a new film genre called "Masala", which dominated Indian cinema throughout the late 20th
century. These "Masala" films portrayed action, comedy, drama, romance and melodrama all at once, with "filmi"
song and dance routines thrown in. This trend began with films directed by Manmohan Desai and starring Amitabh
Bachchan, who remains one of the most popular film stars in South Asia. The most popular Indian film of all time
was Sholay (1975), a "Masala" film inspired by a real-life dacoit as well as Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and the
Spaghetti Westerns.
The end of the decade saw the first major international marketing of Australian cinema, as Peter Weir's films Picnic
at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith gained critical acclaim. In
1979, Australian filmmaker George Miller also garnered international attention for his violent, low-budget action
film Mad Max.

1980s: Sequels, blockbusters and videotape

During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade,
the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved
unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of films on home video became a significant "second venue" for
exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries.
The Lucas–Spielberg combine would dominate "Hollywood" cinema for much of the 1980s, and lead to much
imitation. Two follow-ups to Star Wars, three to Jaws, and three Indiana Jones films helped to make sequels of
successful films more of an expectation than ever before. Lucas also launched THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm in
1982, while Spielberg enjoyed one of the decade's greatest successes in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the same year.
1982 also saw the release of Disney's Tron which was one of the first films from a major studio to use computer
graphics extensively. American independent cinema struggled more during the decade, although Martin Scorsese's
Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985), and The King of Comedy (1983) helped to establish him as one of the most
critically acclaimed American film makers of the era. Also during 1983 Scarface was released, was very profitable
and resulted in even greater fame for its leading actor Al Pacino. Probably the most successful film commercially
was vended during 1989: Tim Burton's version of Bob Kane's creation, Batman, exceeded box-office records. Jack
Nicholson's portrayal of the demented Joker earned him a total of $60,000,000 after figuring in his percentage of the
gross.
British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of David Puttnam's company Goldcrest Films.
The films Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields and A Room with a View appealed to a "middlebrow"
audience which was increasingly being ignored by the major Hollywood studios. While the films of the 1970s had
helped to define modern blockbuster motion pictures, the way "Hollywood" released its films would now change.
Films, for the most part, would premiere in a wider number of theatres, although, to this day, some films still
premiere using the route of the limited/roadshow release system. Against some expectations, the rise of the multiplex
History of film 21

cinema did not allow less mainstream films to be shown, but simply allowed the major blockbusters to be given an
even greater number of screenings. However, films that had been overlooked in cinemas were increasingly being
given a second chance on home video.
During the 1980s, Japanese cinema experienced a revival, largely due to the success of anime films. At the beginning
of the 1980s, Space Battleship Yamato (1973) and Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), both of which were unsuccessful as
television series, were remade as films and became hugely successful in Japan. In particular, Mobile Suit Gundam
sparked the Gundam franchise of Real Robot mecha anime. The success of Macross: Do You Remember Love? also
sparked a Macross franchise of mecha anime. This was also the decade when Studio Ghibli was founded. The studio
produced Hayao Miyazaki's first fantasy films, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Castle in the Sky
(1986), as well as Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies (1988), all of which were very successful in Japan and
received worldwide critical acclaim. Original video animation (OVA) films also began during this decade; the most
influential of these early OVA films was Noboru Ishiguro's cyberpunk film Megazone 23 (1985). The most famous
anime film of this decade was Katsuhiro Otomo's cyberpunk film Akira (1988), which although initially unsuccessful
at Japanese theaters, went on to become an international success.
Hong Kong action cinema, which was in a state of decline due to endless Bruceploitation films after the death of
Bruce Lee, also experienced a revival in the 1980s, largely due to the reinvention of the action film genre by Jackie
Chan. He had previously combined the comedy film and martial arts film genres successfully in the 1978 films
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow and Drunken Master. The next step he took was in combining this comedy martial arts
genre with a new emphasis on elaborate and highly dangerous stunts, reminiscent of the silent film era. The first film
in this new style of action cinema was Project A (1983), which saw the formation of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team as
well as the "Three Brothers" (Chan, Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao). The film added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the
fights and slapstick humor, and became a huge success throughout the Far East. As a result, Chan continued this
trend with martial arts action films containing even more elaborate and dangerous stunts, including Wheels on Meals
(1984), Police Story (1985), Armour of God (1986), Project A Part II (1987), Police Story 2 (1988), and Dragons
Forever (1988). Other new trends which began in the 1980s were the "girls with guns" sub-genre, for which
Michelle Yeoh gained fame; and especially the "heroic bloodshed" genre, revolving around Triads, largely pioneered
by John Woo and for which Chow Yun-fat became famous. These Hong Kong action trends were later adopted by
many Hollywood action films in the 1990s and 2000s.

1990s: New special effects, independent films, and DVDs

The early 1990s saw the development of a
commercially successful independent
cinema in the United States. Although
cinema was increasingly dominated by
special-effects films such as Terminator 2:
Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993)
and Titanic (1997), the latter of which
became the highest-grossing film of all time
at the time up until "Avatar", also directed
Cinema admissions in 1995
by James Cameron, independent films like
Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and
Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the
cinema and on home video. Filmmakers associated with the Danish filmmovement Dogme 95 introduced a
manifesto aimed to purify filmmaking. Its first few films gained worldwide critical acclaim, after which the
movement slowly faded out.
History of film 22

Major American studios began to create their own "independent" production companies to finance and produce
non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney
the year before the release of Tarantino's runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994. The same year marked the beginning of
film and video distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with
Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). During 1995, the first feature
length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney.
After the success of Toy Story, computer animation would grow to become the dominant technique for feature
length animation, which would allow competing film companies such as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century
Fox to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own. During the late 1990s, another cinematic
transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard
for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

Recent years
The documentary film also rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time, with the success of films such as
March of the Penguins and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. A new genre was created
with Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, when 150 inexpensive DV cameras were distributed across Iraq,
transforming ordinary people into collaborative filmmakers. The success of Gladiator lead to a revival of interest in
epic cinema, and Moulin Rouge! renewed interest in musical cinema. Home theatre systems became increasingly
sophisticated, as did some of the special edition DVDs designed to be shown on them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy
was released on DVD in both the theatrical version and in a special extended version intended only for home cinema
audiences.
In 2001, the Harry Potter film series began, and by its end in 2011, it had become the highest-grossing film franchise
of all time.
More films were also being released simultaneously to IMAX cinema, the first was in 2002's Disney animation
Treasure Planet; and the first live action was in 2003's The Matrix Revolutions and a re-release of The Matrix
Reloaded. Later in the decade, The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in
IMAX technology.
There has been an increasing globalization of cinema during this decade, with foreign-language films gaining
popularity in English-speaking markets. Examples of such films include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
(Mandarin), Amelie (French), Lagaan (Hindi-Urdu), Spirited Away (Japanese), City of God (Portuguese), The
Passion of the Christ (Aramaic), Apocalypto (Mayan), Slumdog Millionaire (parts in Hindi-Urdu), and Inglourious
Basterds (multiple European languages).
Recently there has been a revival in 3D film popularity the first being James Cameron's Ghosts of the Abyss which
was released as the first full-length 3-D IMAX feature filmed with the Reality Camera System. This camera system
used the latest HD video cameras, not film, and was built for Cameron by Emmy nominated Director of Photography
Vince Pace, to his specifications. The same camera system was used to film Spy Kids 3D: Game Over (2003), Aliens
of the Deep IMAX (2005), and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D (2005).
After James Cameron's 3D film Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time, 3D films have gained
increasing popularity with many other films being released in 3D, with the best critical and financial successes being
in the field of feature film animation such as DreamWorks Animation's How To Train Your Dragon and Walt Disney
Pictures/Pixar's Toy Story 3. Avatar is also note-worthy for pioneering highly sophisticated use of motion capture
technology and influencing several other films such as Rise of the Planet of the Apes.
As of 2010, the largest film industries by number of feature films produced are those of India, the United States and
China.
History of film 23

References
[1] http:/ / en. wikipedia. org/ w/ index. php?title=Template:Years_in_film& action=edit
[2] Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristen. (2003) "Film History An Introduction". New York: McGraw-Hill Company Inc.p.13
[3] Wakeman, John. World Film Directors, Volume 1. The H. W. Wilson Company. 1987. pp. 747-765.
[4] Hayes, Christian. Phantom Rides (http:/ / www. screenonline. org. uk/ film/ id/ 1193042/ ), BFI Screen Online. Accessed 30 August 2011.
[5] Ray Edmondson and Andrew Pike (1982) Australia's Lost Films. P.13. National Library of Australia, Canberra. ISBN 0-642-99251-7
[6] The Argus, 27 December 1906 (http:/ / trove. nla. gov. au/ ndp/ del/ article/ 9663171)
[7] Ina Bertrand and Ken Robb (1982) "The continuing saga of...The Story of the Kelly Gang." Cinema Papers, No. 36, February 1982, p.18-22
[8] Film History of the 1920s (http:/ / www. filmsite. org/ 20sintro. html)
[9] Dave Kehr, Anime, Japanese Cinema's Second Golden Age (http:/ / query. nytimes. com/ gst/ fullpage.
html?res=9507E5D71238F933A15752C0A9649C8B63), The New York Times, January 20, 2002.
[10] Is the Curtain Finally Falling on the Philippine Kovie Industry? (http:/ / www. philnews. com/ 2005/ wa. html). Accessed January 25, 2009.
[11] Aenet: Philippine Film History (http:/ / www. aenet. org/ family/ filmhistory. htm). Accessed January 22, 2009.

Further reading
• Munslow., Alun (December 2007). "Film and history: Robert A. Rosenstone and History on Film/Film on
History". Rethinking History 4 (11): 11.
• Abel, Richard. The Cine Goes to Town: French Cinema 1896-1914University of California Press, 1998.
• Acker, Ally. Reel Women: Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present. London: B.T. Batsford, 1991.
• Barnes, John. The Cinema in England: 1894-1901 (5 Volumes) University of Exeter Press, 1997.
• Basten, Fred E. Glorious Technicolor: The Movies' Magic Rainbow. AS Barnes & Company, 1980.
• Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema 1907-1915 (History of the American Cinema, Vol. 2) Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1990.
• Rawlence, Christopher (1990). The Missing Reel: The Untold Story of the Lost Inventor of Moving Pictures.
Charles Atheneum. ISBN 978-0689120688.
• Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, 2nd edition. New York: W. W. Norton, 1990.
• Cousins, Mark. The Story of Film: A Worldwide History, New York: Thunder's Mouth press, 2006.
• Dixon, Wheeler Winston and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. A Short History of Film, 2nd edition. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2013.
• King, Geoff. New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
• Merritt, Greg. Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film. Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001.
• Musser, Charles (1990). The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons. ISBN 0-684-18413-3.
• Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, ed. The Oxford History of World Cinema. Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Parkinson, David. History of Film. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1995. ISBN 0-500-20277-X
• Rocchio, Vincent F. Reel Racism. Confronting Hollywood's Construction of Afro-American Culture. Westview
Press, 2000.
• Salt, Barry. Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis 2nd Ed. Starword, 1992.
• Salt, Barry. Moving Into Pictures Starword, 2001.
• Robin van Gils met zijn baardje School 2009.
• Schrader, Paul. "Notes on Film Noir." Film Comment, 1984.
• Steele, Asa (February 1911). "The Moving-Picture Show: ... How The Films Are Made, Who Writes The "Plots",
Who Censors The Plays, And What It All Costs" (http://books.google.com/books?id=Zm0AAAAAYAAJ&
pg=PA14018). The World's Work: A History of Our Time XXI: 14018–14032. Retrieved 2009-07-10.
• Tsivian, Yuri. Silent Witnesses: Russian Films 1908-1919 British Film Institute, 1989.
• Unterburger, Amy L. The St. James Women Filmmakers Encyclopedia: Women on the Other Side of the Camera.
Visible Ink Press, 1999.
• Usai, P.C. & Codelli, L. (editors) Before Caligari: German Cinema, 1895-1920 Edizioni Biblioteca
dell'Immagine, 1990.
History of film 24

External links
• View inside an ancient film camera (http://akimages.metacafe.com/watch/820805/
the_best_impressions_of_my_cinematograph_collection/) *popup warning, possible vanity site*
• Museum Of Motion Picture History, Inc. (http://www.MOMPH.com/)
• History exhibit of filmmaking in Florida, presented by the State Archives of Florida (http://www.
floridamemory.com/PhotographicCollection/photo_exhibits/films.cfm)
• American Cinematographer - January, 1930, THE EARLY HISTORY OF WIDE FILMS (http://www.
widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/early-jan1930.htm)
• History of Film Formats (http://www.sparetimelabs.com/animato/animato/filmhist/filmhist.html)
• Technicolor History (http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/oldcolor/technicolor1.htm)
• What is a Camera Obscura? (http://brightbytes.com/cosite/what.html)
• Film Sound History (http://www.filmsound.org/film-sound-history/) at FilmSound.org (http://www.
filmsound.org/)
• An Introduction to Early cinema (http://www.earlycinema.com/index.html)
• List of Early Sound Films 1894-1929 at Silent Era website (http://www.silentera.com/PSFL/indexes/
earlySoundFilms.html)
• Official Web Site of Film Historian/Oral Historian Scott Feinberg (http://andthewinneris.blog.com/)
• Reality Film (https://web.archive.org/web/20080204214050/http://www.realityfilm.com/study/index.
html) at the Wayback Machine (archived February 4, 2008)
• Film History by Decade (http://www.filmsite.org/filmh.html) *popup warning*
• Project "Westphalian History in the film" (http://www.lwl.org/westfaelische-geschichte/portal/Internet/ku.
php?tab=web&ID=86)
• Cinema: From 1890 To Now (http://www.matthewhunt.com/cinema/)
• A Brief, Early History of Computer Graphics in Film (http://www.beanblossom.in.us/larryy/cgi.html)
• Film History @ Video-Film.info (http://www.video-film.info/sites/filmhistory.html)
• The Tex(t)-Mex Gallerblog (http://textmex.blogspot.com/) Meditations on Latina/os in Cinema
• History of Film poster (http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http://www.geocities.com/filmstudies101&
date=2009-10-25+22:09:58)
• Burns, Paul The History of the Discovery of Cinematography (http://www.precinemahistory.net/) An
Illustrated Chronology
• The Film Experience (http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-011-the-film-experience-fall-2007/): an
undergraduate course taught by Prof. David Thorburn in the fall of 2007 at MIT
• hollywood Movies History (http://hiyaa.yolasite.com/hollywood.php)
• Film History New Perspectives (http://cinefilereview.com) Cinefile Review
• Origins of Cinema Documentary (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBahe2_sZk0)
Article Sources and Contributors 25

Article Sources and Contributors

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AVarchaeologist, Aaron Schulz, Ackatsis, Across.The.Synapse, Adambro, Adhib, Aeusoes1, Agent 86, Ahoycoil, AlWisher, Alan Liefting, Alansohn, Albert Isaacs, Alex756, Alexcarter01,
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MichaelAWilson, Michitaro, Mike Rosoft, MikeWren, Mild Bill Hiccup, Mister X, Mkunert, Modster, Moe Epsilon, Mogism, Monkey C Monkey P, Moosehadley, Mukadderat, MusikAnimal,
Mutt, Mütze, Naddy, Nakul Datar, Narsil, Nateji77, NativeForeigner, NawlinWiki, Nbarth, Nehrams2020, NeonMerlin, Nerrolken, Nescio, Neutrality, NewEnglandYankee, Neznanec, Nick
Cooper, Nihiltres, Noirish, Noodleki, Norensberg, ONEder Boy, Oddbodz, Ohnoitsjamie, Okc, Omnipaedista, OnBeyondZebrax, Oscarthecat, Otets, Oxymoron83, PTSE, Paki.tv, Pandmhitt,
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Image Sources, Licenses and Contributors

Image:Video-x-generic.svg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Video-x-generic.svg  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Anomie, Mifter
File:Le Voyage dans la lune.jpg  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Le_Voyage_dans_la_lune.jpg  License: unknown  Contributors: Bryan Derksen, Dänenleo,
Five-toed-sloth, InverseHypercube, Kaldari, Lemuellio, Materialscientist, Mattes, MichaelMaggs, Nv8200p, Origamiemensch, Prosfilaes, Tm, Verne Equinox, 2 anonymous edits
Image:Melstud2.gif  Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Melstud2.gif  License: Public Domain  Contributors: Barrysalt
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Edison, IncPhotographer: Edwin S. Porter.
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File:Charlton Heston as Antony in Julius Caesar, B&W image by Chalmers Butterfield.jpg  Source:
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