The device was first publicly demonstrated at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences on 9 May 1893. The spike in theater attendance that followed the introduction of talking films changed the economic structure of the motion picture industry, bringing about some of the largest mergers in industry history. By 1930, eight studios produced 95 percent of all American films, and they continued to experience growth even during the Depression. The five most influential of these studios—Warner Bros., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount—were vertically integrated; that is, they controlled every part of the system as it related to their films, from the production to release, distribution, and even viewing. Because they owned theater chains worldwide, these studios controlled which movies exhibitors ran, and because they “owned” a stock of directors, actors, writers, and technical assistants by contract, each studio produced films of a particular character. The Arbuckle affair and a series of other scandals only increased public fears about Hollywood’s impact.

Technology has come a long way, and in the future when kids have no idea what film is, which is already happening today, we can point to these facts and remind them that the world wasn’t always a digital playground full of cell phones and USBs. Today’s modern entertainment cannot be imagined without the movie industry, which has helped shape our popular culture and empowered countless artists, crew members, and actors to test the limits of human imagination, emotion, and fashion. They managed to do so by harnessing all the available technical resources and enabling artists to paint on canvases that expanded in their scope with each passing year for over a century. Theatre emerges from social rituals; and as a communal exercise, theatre requires people to work together toward a common purpose in shared and demarcated physical space. Yet, the very notion of “character,” first expressed in the indelibly defining mask of the ancient Greek protagonist, points paradoxically toward the spirit, attraction, and trial of individuation.

Writers like Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol knew what they were doing long before they released their great works. As Lee suggests, it’s important to acknowledge the technical achievement of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind without condoning their horrid subject matter. To escape Edison’s legal monopoly, filmmakers ventured west, all the way to Southern California. French actor and illusionist Georges Méliès attempted to buy a cinematograph from the Lumière Brothers in 1895, but was denied.

Advanced courses in specific national genres, forms, movements, and filmmakers—both Western and non-Western—provide a superb background in the history of film and a basis for sound critical judgment. Students benefit from New York City’s enormously rich film environment, in which film series, lectures, and festivals run on a nearly continuous basis. Live projection of moving images occurs in the camera obscura (also known as “pinhole image”), a natural phenomenon that may have been used artistically since prehistory. Very occasionally, the camera obscura was used to project theatrical spectacles to entertain small audiences.

So Messter invented the Tonbilder Biophon to show films, in which a gramophone played Unter den Linden accompanying the projection of animated images, but it was not a simple add on but to precisely match the series of musical pieces with moving images. In effect, to add sound to the silent cinema, it was necessary to solve problems of synchronization, since the image and the sound were recorded and reproduced by separated devices, which were difficult to initiate and to maintain rigged. On August 31, 1903, Messter held the first sound projection that took place in Germany at the “Apollo” Theater in Berlin. This is an open course designed to enlighten our creative consciousness, using music and nonfiction filmmaking as tools for liberation. Music and other sonic experiences are intrinsically connected to how we witness, experience, and tell nonfiction stories. In this course, we will examine work where the score itself plays a character while also creating films of our own inspired by the soundtrack as a living piece of our form.

World War II and its aftermath

(Two more than usual…) In this lecture-seminar, students will develop a highly interdisciplinary understanding of laughter as a human behavior, cultural practice, and wide-ranging tool for creative expression. Based on the expertise of the three professors, lectures will primarily investigate laughter through the lens of psychology, film history, and visual arts. For class assignments, students may be asked to conduct scientific studies of audience laughter patterns, create works of art with punchlines, or write close analyses of classic cinematic gags. Over the course of the semester, we will examine the building blocks of laughter; classic devices of modern comedy; and laughter as a force of resilience, resistance, and regeneration. Often relying less on words and more on visual interpretations, animation offers unlimited conceptual possibilities for the creative screenwriter. This course will focus on the creation and development of story, characters, and the multiple styles and methods of expressing a narrative in highly visual terms.

Barbie Zelizer notes, “Although atrocity stories had been around as long as war itself, never before had the press come face to face with such extensive evidence of mass brutality and such an ability to document it. Covering the scenes of horror in the camps required overcoming both assumptions about earlier atrocity stories and inadequate standards that existed for depicting violence in word and image” (Wilson, 7). Texts top 10 movies may capture a broader theme, a larger story, but film has the ability to narrow in on the particular horrors or scenes of hope from a past occurrence.

This is reflected in the number of books devoted exclusively to Hollywood and American cinema, beginning with Lewis Jacobs’s The Rise of the American Film (1939) and culminating in Scribner’s ten-volume History of the American Cinema (1990–2000), a towering achievement. Other national cinemas, too, have frequently been a key subject for historians, from New Zealand and Japan to Cuba and Canada. While specific details vary from country to country, this form of film history reinforces what is assumed to be a strong correlation between the cultural, economic, and social life of a particular nation and the films produced in that nation. National histories of film typically celebrate homegrown auteurs and award-winning titles, “new waves,” and the sort of films that circulate on the international film festival circuit. This course will examine literature written by late 19th- and 20th-century Italian women writers. In the newly unified Italy, middle-class women began in great numbers to access and contribute to literature as both readers and writers.

The apparatus used a rectangle of celluloid with perforations between several parallel rows of images. Using an improved pleograph, Prószynski shot short films showing scenes of life in Warsaw, such as people skating in the park. Major film studios tried to emulate Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe’s success with their own franchises. Disney produced live-action or photorealistic remakes of its classic animated films, such as Aladdin, and The Lion King. Film series based on young adult novels became popular, shifting from fantasy to dystopian sci-fi. Since the late 2000s streaming media platforms like YouTube provided means for anyone with access to internet and cameras (a standard feature of smartphones) to publish videos to the world.

History of Film Timeline

Four dramatic short films were made in Kinemacolor in the US in 1912–1913,[71] and one in Japan in 1914. Kinemacolor was popular with members of the British royal family, and both Emperor Taishō and Pope Pius X saw Kinemacolor films in 1913.[72] However, the company was not a success, partly due to the expense of installing the special Kinemacolor projectors. Some of the most acclaimed movies in history were released during this period, including Citizen Kane and The Grapes of Wrath. However, postwar inflation, a temporary loss of key foreign markets, the advent of the television, and other factors combined to bring that rapid growth to an end. In 1948, the case of the United States v. Paramount Pictures—mandating competition and forcing the studios to relinquish control over theater chains—dealt the final devastating blow from which the studio system would never recover.

The Art of Silent Film

A total of 144 tertiary institutions in the United States offer a major program in film studies.[6] This number continues to grow each year with new interest in film studies. Institutions offering film degrees as part of their arts or communications curricula differ from institutions with dedicated film programs. The German Deutsche Filmakademie Babelsberg was founded during the era of the Third Reich in 1938. Students were required to create films in order to complete their studies at the academy. Film studies, it turns out, is not a ruffle on the edge of a film production program.

The film added elaborate, dangerous stunts to the fights and slapstick humor, and became a huge success throughout the Far East. As a result, Chan continued this trend with martial arts action films containing even more elaborate and dangerous stunts, including Wheels on Meals (1984), Police Story (1985), Armour of God (1986), Project A Part II (1987), Police Story 2 (1988), and Dragons Forever (1988). Other new trends which began in the 1980s were the “girls with guns” subgenre, for which Michelle Yeoh gained fame; and especially the “heroic bloodshed” genre, revolving around Triads, largely pioneered by John Woo and for which Chow Yun-fat became famous.

Before we move on from the Silent Era, check out this great video from Crash Course. It’s important to note that Paris wasn’t the only place where dadaist art was being created. But it was the place where most of the dadaist, surrealist film was being created. We’ll get to dadaist film in a short bit, but first, let’s review a quick video on Dada art from Curious Muse.