Crash Course On Film History

In 1891, Thomas Edison and W. K. L. Dickson patented an invention called the Kinetoscope. It was a box that was used to view filmstrips made on a Kinetograph camera. The Kinetoscope used 35 mm film with holes on both sides of the film. This set the standard for film used from then on. He then made a studio to make short films (roughly 30 seconds) to make money off of the Kinetoscope in penny arcades and nickelodeons. Some of the films were of people dancing, famous celebrities of the day like Annie Oakley, and everyday activities like his assistant sneezing.

The real breakthrough in filmmaking was the invention of a projector system by the Lumiere brothers of France in 1894. Their camera was a small one mounted on a tripod that was portable. The first films that they shot were of people leaving their camera factory after the workshift was over. They used the camera to make short home movies, sight gags, and travelogues.

The Lumiere camera/projector soon spread throughout the world and films were being shown in vaudeville shows, burlesque houses, play theaters, and at exhibitions. The public was amazed by the new technology and was eager for more of it.

The rapid rise and spread of films soon gave rise to people making longer films. Some of the films became very popular and were seen worldwide and influenced filmmakers in other counties. The French filmmaker, George Melies did several films involving magic acts and simple disappearing tricks. His most famous film is called "A Trip To The Moon". (1902) It is a film about a group of scientists traveling in a large bullet to the moon and then encountering a group of people there. Another famous director of the period is Edwin S. Porter. He made several films for the Thomas Edison studio. His most famous work is "The Great Train Robbery". Its most famous shot is at the very end of the film where a cowboy looks directly at the camera and shoots at it. It was the first closeup known to have existed since most of the action was shot from a distance. Most of the films had some type of editing where the action jumped from one scene to another or one location to another.

With the rise of popularity of film worldwide, most industrialized nations developed a film industry with companies exclusively making, distributing, and exhibiting films. In France, the two main companies were Pathe (founded by Charles Pathe in 1901) and Gaumont (founded in 1897 by Leon Gaumont). AM&B was founded in 1899 to be the main rival to Edison in America. It survived a lawsuit over patent rights and grew after that point, employing the biggest early American director by the name of D. W. Griffith. Another company making films early on was called Vitagraph.

Other counties like Denmark, Italy, Germany, and Russia were starting to develop their own system of film production companies.

Films started to get longer and studio systems started to be developed. After 1910, most of the major American movie studios were founded out in Hollywood to take advantage of the beautiful weather and diverse scenery since most of the filming was done outdoors. Some of the studios formed were Famous Players, the forerunner of Paramount (1912), Warner Brothers (1913), Fox Film Company, the forerunner of 20th Century Fox (1914) and the companies Metro (1914) and Goldwyn and Mayer (1917) which would become Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) in 1924. 1919 saw the last founding of the oldest film companys by D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and two big stars of the time, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford called United Artists.

Animation also became popular around this time. Short pieces were done. The most famous is one called Gertie The Dinosaur by Windsor McCay.

Most films were distributed around the world and could be viewed by anyone. The reason for this is because no one could here the actors speak. The lines or scene change was set up by intertitle cards giving the actors lines or setting up the next scene. They could be made to fit the countries' language. Sound effects were achieved by people using items behind the screen, music was played on phonographs, and sometimes people would speak lines for the actors on the screen.
This made it easy for films from another country to be popular outside of where they were made.

Hollywood developed into a major producer of motion pictures by 1915. Studios with backlots were created to make films. Movies started to produce big stars of the day like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and directors like D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. The studios also created a film style that became the basis for most filmmaking ever done since then. Films started to use intercutting, moving from one place to another where action was taking place, like in a chase scene or someone coming to the rescue. Another is was analytical editing, which would have a set broken down into different shots, like a shot of the whole set and then closeups of the actors as the talk or move about the set. Hand in hand with analytical editing was the idea of continuity editing. The idea is that motion repeated across different locations would be in the same direction, like if someone was to go from a living room moving to the left side of the screen through a doorway, then the person would appear in the kitchen from the door moving toward the left side of the screen. Another example is a point-of-view shot where we see an actor looking at an object, then we see the object as the actor would see it, and then we see the actor again looking at the object. It also includes the idea of the 180-degree rule that establishes that two actors will be placed on either side, and then the actor on the right side looking left will always be shown that way, and the same for an actor on the left side looking right.

All of these ideas were incorporated into a film called "The Birth Of A Nation" directed by D. W. Griffith in 1914. It was a controversial film when it was released. It was based on a book called "The Klansman". The film was about two families who had befriended each other before the time of the Civil War, and then fought on opposite sides of the war. The film gives a depiction of historical events and figures like Abraham Lincoln and his assassination at Ford's Theater. The film then moves into a revisionist and sympathetic-White Southerner tone depicting Reconstruction in the South as detrimental to the White Southern plantation owner's way of life, African-Americans and carpetbaggers as uneducated and uncivilized people, and the Klu Klux Klan as a heroic endeavor of people trying to save their way of life. The film was popular when it came out, but it received harsh criticism from both African Americans and whites, historians, and intellectuals. The film destroyed Griffith's career and most of his films made after it were not as successful. He did make a film to try to appease his critics in 1915 called "Intolerance". It was a film about intolerance through the ages in four parts: The fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, The St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, and labor strikes and gangster activity in America. The film was not as successful as "The Birth Of A Nation" and it never quelled the anger against him. He did it as a way to show that he was not racist and as a way of telling people that they were being intolerant to what he held were actual truths about the Civil War and Reconstruction. (Note: It is a film that is a landmark because it was the first blockbuster film, incorporated many ideas and was innovative in its use of these ideas. As pure cinema, I recommend it. I do not recommend it for watching because it is highly racist, is repugnant to me, and made me very angry in its portrayal of people who fought and died to preserve human dignity for all people. I recommend only watching it for historical reasons or to create a diologue about racism and discrimination in a classroom environment.

French Impressionism lasted from 1918 to 1928 as a stylistic movement. The origins of the movement came from French directors who liked American films and wanted to make films that were more expressive than the films made in France that seemed more like watching plays. The French saw film as an art form that was an expression of the emotions of the director. The images on the screen were using optical tricks to give the impression of a character's psychology, thoughts, and emotions. This might be using curved mirrors to distort the faces of the actors to convey drunkenness or how the see other people. Other conventions were superimpositions of things suggestion the character's inner turmoil, memories, thoughts, or dreams, filters or gauze screens to imply how a person sees another as beautiful or passionate.

The most recommended film from this style period is "Napoleon" directed by Abel Gance (1927).

The stylistic movement came to an end as directors focused their attention on diverse projects, other experimental forms of cinema took over, and the directors lost control of their projects to the studios who were not interested in financing Impressionistic films.

The style lives on in modern filmmaking in the use of slow motion to exaggerate a character's emotion, people interacting with their dreams as we see their visions in their minds, the wind blowing through a place making someone look beautiful when they look at them, and blurred visions from point-of-view shots in drug-and-alcohol induced states.

German Expressionism lasted from 1920 until 1927. The style used was to make the surrondings blend in with the character and to heighten the emotional state of the actor to make the physical surroundings an expression of the character's emotional state. It would usually use jagged lines and angles to express these states and make the surroundings blend in with the actor. The surroundings were sometime exaggerated or distorted. The acting was exaggerated to go along with the sets, and actors often moved in jagged or jerky motions. Another trait of the style was to juxtapose or match similar shapes in the sets. The camera angles were usually straight on at eye level but would use high and low camera angles to create these juxtapositions. The editing was very slow-paced to allow people to take in all of the scenery and emphasize the scenery. The lighting of the scenes was used to stress the link between the actors and the decor, often making use of shadows itself to create even more distortion in the set. The lighting often made the scenery look dark and foreboding.

Most of the elements of German Expressionism were used in films involving exotic locales or elements of fantasy or horror, even different time periods. Three movies stand out in this regard; "The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari" directed by Robert Wiene is a movie about a man recounting a tale of a sleeping monster awakened by a mad scientist, "Nosferatu" by F. W. Murnau, a retelling of the Dracula story with Dracula being called Orlock (the first vampire movie), and "Metropolis" by Fritz Lang, a science fiction story about the relationship between the rich people who own the city and the workers who run the city below ground (the film includes the first depiction of a robot or android).

The film movement ended when many of the films started to have large budgets, and many directors moved to Hollywood for more money.

The style did influence the use of distortion elements and the use of darkness or minimal use of light in horror and science fiction films, the use of shadow and light in film noirs of detective films in America, and in scenes of suspense.

The Soviet Montage movement lasted from 1923 to 1933. It was a movement of a political as well as an artistic nature. The state run film company, Sovkino, wanted to make films that could be grasped by the mostly uneducated farmers that lived in the Soviet Union so that the Communist Propaganda could be reached to the masses. The artistic nature of the movement was to create revolutionary films that could inspire the audiences that watched them. Several directors came up with their own version of montage, but most revolved around creating discontinuity through editing. The editing style was used to de-emphasize the individual and make the hero a whole class of people. If individuals were shown, they were perceived to be representative of the whole class. Most of the editing was done to emphasize actions taken by people. Some of the effects were overlapping editing where an action would be repeated from a different angle, expanding the time the action takes; elliptical editing where some part of an event would be left out, like jumping to an action without seeing what causes the action; intercutting, where the action jumps between two non-connected places; and inserts where an action is interrupted by a picture used to make a metaphorical statement.

The most famous Soviet Montage film is "Potemkin" (also know as "Battleship Potemkin" directed by Sergei Eisenstein. It is a film about the failed revolution attempt of 1905 against the Czar. The film portrays the entire crew as overworked people who mutiny and take over the ship. The most famous sequence in the film is the Odessa steps sequence where the action of people fleeing the Czar's troops takes longer than it normally would as we follow the flight of different people and the actions they take.

The movement was ended after it faced criticism from the Central Government that is was too complex for the uneducated masses to understand and as the first Five-Year Plan was instituted, taking control of the production out of the smaller companies controlled by the Soviet states.

The style became very influential in Hollywood and Europe as action sequences started to use discontinuous editing during battle scenes, especially large scale scenes that depicted a group of soldiers rather than a single individual.

In 1927, a revolution in pictures had come. A movie called "The Jazz Singer" directed by Alan Crosland was released. It was an unusual title for a movie, but it lived up to the name since the lead actor, Al Jolson sang in the movie. It was the first movie with sound anywhere in the world. The soundtrack featured brief moments of talking and singing, but the musical accompaniment was fully recorded for the picture. The film still made use of intertitles with the actor's lines. It signaled the end of silent films, and many actors did not survive the change. Many new stars came from working in the theater or from singing careers, where their voice talents used in front of an audience would serve the sound movies well. Many other supporting actors were also given leading roles at this time since they had more acting talent with their voices for the sound medium than they had for the more physically expressive silent films. Most of the directing talent did survive, including Charlie Chaplin who made two major silent films in the sound era, "City Lights" (1931) and "Modern Times" (1936). He did direct and star in some sound films.

The development of sound pictures ended the international flavor of cinema where the films were universal with a change of intertitle language. All films from now on would either have to be dubbed in the native language of the country or subtitles would have to be used. Many films from countries other than Great Britain were not shown unless it was at a university campus for film clubs or in art house cinemas.

The Hollywood Studio System soon took off after the invention of sound. Many of the largest studios had a stable of actors and directors hat had exclusive contracts with the studios to make a certain number of movies per year. The movie studios earned the nickname Hollywood dream factories for the large number of movies put out every year from the period of 1930 to about 1950. Most of the movie studios averaged about one film a week. If a star under contract to one studio was going to work for another studio, like Ingrid Bergman who was under contract to MGM and worked on "Casablanca" (a Warner Brothers Production), then the movie studio that owned the contract on that actor would have to agree to allow them to work for the other film company. Usually it was a trade of stars.

The studios developed new styles of film to capitalize on the invention of sound. Many stars became associated with a style of film. Gangster films featured stars like Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart before Bogart became a huge star. Screwball comedies (romantic comedies with many fast jokes) featured stars like Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Westerns became popular with the work of director John Ford who usually worked with John Wayne. Many classic black and white horror films became popular with stars like Lon Cheney (The Wolf Man), Bela Lugosi (Dracula), and Boris Karloff (Frankenstein and the original Mummy). The studios would promote their own films at the movie theaters that they owned by featuring adds for coming attractions at the end of the film (giving the rise to the term trailers). They would also have the stars go onto radio programs and plug the films, much like the talk show circuit now.

Some people managed to work as independent filmmakers and producers like David O. Selznick, who brought Alfred Hitchcock to America to make films directly for him that he could sell to other movie companies. One such film was "Rebecca" (1939) and another was "Gone With The Wind"(1940), which he produced for MGM. Another independent filmmaker getting his start at this time was Stanley Kubrick, with "Killers Kiss" (1955), "The Killing", and "Paths Of Glory". (1957).

Surrealism as an artistic movement in film lasted from about 1927 to about the mid 1930's. The movement came out of Dada art, being very similar in the disdain of orthodox aesthetic traditions of the time, a dislike for organized religion, especially Catholicism, disdain for traditional values, and an artistic sensibility of capitalizing on imagination and randomness. Dada art did try to convey a type of narrative, but Surrealism did not subscribe to any type of narrative. The narrative would be more like the unexplainable logic of dreams, especially since Surrealism was influenced by the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. Because of the influence of Freud, many of the images in Surrealistic films were representing erotic imagery or sexually charged storylines. A lot of the images in the films were imaginative descriptions of every day occurrences, like a door buzzer being represented by a cocktail shaker being shook by arms coming out of a wall or hitting your funny bone actually being portrayed by a laughing bone being hit by an object. A lot of the scenes in Surrealistic films have disconnected timelines, like the stories in Pulp Fiction where events that happen in the future come before events in the past and time becomes distorted, disconnected, and meaningless.

The most famous Surrealistic film is a short subject called " Un Chein andalou" (An Andalusian Dog) by Luis Bunuel. (1928) The film centers on a quarrel between to lovers, but the scenes of when things happen is disconnected as when you see the fight happening, and then an intertitle says "sixteen years earlier" and the same fight happens. Connected space becomes disconnected as when the woman in the film steps through her apartment door onto the beach.

Surrealism died out due to many of the filmmakers becoming involved in leftist or anarchanistic politics and Salvador Dali (who painted the melting clock work and worked on Un Chien andalou with Bunuel) became fascinated with Hitler and the other Surrealistic artists shunned him.

Surrealism influenced much of Hollywood and world cinema when it was released upon the world. It became influential in the depicting of dreams and dream imagery in movies, the use of flashbacks in storytelling, and the depiction of drug and alcohol induced states of consciousness by showing how the drug altered the character's perception of reality. Two modern films that have relied heavily on Surrealism for their storytelling is "The Cell" in which a social worker uses an advanced machine to delve into the mind of a serial killer and we see all sorts of twisted and demonic imagery that represents the man's perception of himself and his world; and "Pulp Fiction", where many of the stories are not told in a linear fashion, but shuffled around to make us try to connect the plot.

The film was an ambitious undertaking by new director Orson Welles, who originally did the War of the Worlds radio broadcast on October 30, 1938. The radio show had convinced the listening public that an alien invasion was underway in the United States and many people committed acts convinced that aliens had actually landed. Many people grabbed guns to fight the aliens, others committed suicide to stop the aliens from getting them, and others had simply hidden from fright.

When Welles had co-written the script, he had an aim to create more controversy. It was a thinly-veiled attack on newspaper magnate William Randolf Hearst, who founded the San Francisco Chronicle and was the grandfather of Patty Hearst of the Simean Liberation Army. The script of the film had drawn heavily from Hearst's own life, including his affair with film star Marion Davies and his attempt to make her a huge star. It especially attacked his use of tabloid journalism to help start the Spanish-American War of 1898 by creating a fake story about a warship that didn't exist being bombed in a Spanish harbor. Hearst had tried to have the film stopped, but was unsuccessful.

The film itself combined all of the major film movements in some of its scenes (Surrealism, French Impressionism, German Expressionism, Soviet Montage, and Classic Hollywood Style), used a new technology called deep focus camera where all of the image in the frame was in focus rather than distant and very close objects being fuzzy, used a documentary newsfilm reel introduction, relied heavily on flashback sequences to tell the story, used long sequences and deep-space imagery (where there are many events happening in different spots and happening in the background and the foreground as well as where the main action is taking place), and used the sound technology in a way it was never used before to create abrupt changes in sound and echoes to mimic vast spaces in the Kane mansion in the film. The film also used ambitious tracking shots (shot where the camera moves independent of the characters and moves on its own) to set up sequences in the film.

The film influenced cinema for the next fifteen years. Many films started to use deep focus camera work, intricate flashbacks to tell the story, tracking shots to create openings for films and sequences in films, the use of different stylistic elements to heighten storytelling (like the use of German Expressionistic shadows and darkness to emphasize the uncertainty and moral flexibility and criminal nature of private detectives in film noirs), and using both the camera and the sound technology to create more realistic worlds, the use of long sequences without any shifting of camera position, and the use of deep-space imagery to utilize all of the space seen on the screen.

After Italy was freed from German occupation in 1945, many of the people began to feel the need to break with the past, especially with the recent past. The filmmakers were especially concerned with this idea. Many of the filmmakers wanted to make simple films following the stories of everyday working people, different from the lavish productions of the studio movies that were produced. Many of the studios were destroyed, so it made it easier for the filmmakers to implement their "realistic" ideas. The Neorealism movement was born out of these realistic ideas. The films usually portrayed the lives of workers and ordinary people and the effect of the economic reality after the devastations of the Second World War. Many of them focused on "popular fronts", coalition movements for the improvement of the welfare of the people, and the fight of many diverse groups combined against Mussolini and Hitler during the war..

The stylistic innovations of Italian Neorealism was to use non-actors in lead roles, using locations to shoot films instead of studios, and using documentary style camera work. The movement spanned from 1946 to 1954. The movements two best films are "The Bicycle Thief" directed by Vittorio De Sica and "La Strada" (The Road) directed by Federico Fellini. "The Bicycle Thief" is about a man trying to find his bicycle that is stolen since he needs it for his job to earn money for his family. "La Strada" is a movie about a man and woman who travel the countryside performing skits and circus acts to earn money and entertain the people who live in the countryside.

The movement went through several variations that softened the harsh reality of the social depictions of the films, depicting traditional romances, melodramas, and historical films in regions that would provide picturesque local color, and the movement was forced to an end when the Italian government passed a law the created a form of censorship by having scripts and budgets for films approved by the government before the films could be made, and banning films from foreign exhibition if it was seen to slander Italy too much.

Italian Neorealism's greatest influences on the cinema was to influence more films to be shot on location for a more realistic feel, the uses of documentary style cameras and storytelling, and more movies telling the stories of ordinary people like "American Beauty".

After World War II, Japan was occupied by American forces who reshaped Japanese society to be more pro-Western. Films that were seen as "feudalistic" or "nationalistic" were banned or destroyed. The American forces set up a rule of modernizing the film industry and its products, including encouraging movies to include kissing scenes and democratic themes like women's rights and the struggle against militarism. The major film companies at this time were Shochiku, Toho, Daiei, Shintoho ("New Toho" which grew out of a strike in 1946), and Toei. The Japanese film industry made a rapid recovery to start producing almost 500 films a year by 1960. Most of the films were gendai-geki, films set in the contemporary period. These included extreme leftist films, pacifist/anti-nuclear films, "salaryman" comedies, musicals, delinquent youth films, monster movies (Godzilla, 1954), and shomin-geki (films about ordinary daily life).

Japanese cinema came onto the interanational scene with jidai-geki (historical films) and chambara (sword films). The breakthrough was with Rashomon (produced by Daiei, directed by Akira Kurosawa) which won the Venice International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1951. The head of Daiei studio decided to concentrate on the high-quality costume dramas to capitalize on an area of cinema subject that was not made in most of the other countries, especially where the Japanese films were more exotic than the films made by the Western film companies.

Akira Kurosawa contributed most of the work. Most of his films were about the samurai of Japan, including "The Seven Samurai", "The Hidden Fortress", and "Yojimbo". Akira Kurosawa was highly influenced by the westerns of John Ford, and in turn, Kurosawa influenced western cinema. "The Seven Samurai" was updated to the western "The Magnificent Seven", "Yojimbo" was updated to "A Fistful of Dollars" starring Clint Eastwood, and "The Hidden Fortress" was a major influence for "Star Wars: A New Hope". Akira Kurosawa's greatest film is "Rashomon", which is about a priest, a thief, and a commoner discussing the latest scandal: The death of a samurai at the hands of his wife and a thief they meet. Four different versions of the story are told in a complex flashback sequence (the point of view of the scandal is told by the dead man through a medium), and the film marks out three different zones of action, the rainy gate where the priest, commoner, and thief meet; the hot and dusty courtyard where the stories are told; and the grove where the action takes place. Most of the work of Akira Kurosawa focuses on social criticism and symbolism and sentiment. His body of work also includes political melodramas (No Regrets For My Youth, Ikiru, Record Of A Living Being), crime (Stray Dog), corporate corruption (The Bad Sleep Well), and an adaptation of lengthy literary subjects ("The Throne Of Blood" is an adaptation of Macbeth).

Other directors of note at the time of the postwar period of prosperity for Japanese cinema (from about 1946 to about 1965) was Teinosuke Kinogasa (Gate Of Hell), Hiroshi Shimizu (Children Of The Beehive), Mikio Naruse (Repast, Lighting, Mother, Floating Clouds, Flowing), Kenji Mizoguchi (Victory Of Women, Women Of The Night, Street Of Shame, The Life Of Oharu, Ugestu Monogatari [A Tale of Ugestu], Sansho The Bailiff, Chikamatsu Monogatari [The Crucified Lovers], New Tales of The Taira Clan), Yasujiro Ozu (Late Spring, Early Summer, Tokyo Story, Equinox Flower, An Autumn Afternoon, Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family, There Was A Father), Kiesuke Kinoshita (The Blossoming Port, Army, Morning For The Osone Family, Twenty-Four Eyes), and Kon Ichikawa (Odd Obsession, The Burmese Harp, Fires On The Plain, Conflagration, An Actor's Revenge).

The influence on cinema from this period of Japanese films was to peak the interest of the kung fu films from China with the horrible dubbing job (Wu-Tang Clan especially), Bruce Lee films, and the use of Eastern martial arts in films starting in the 1970's.

In 1948, the United States Supreme Court made a decision on a government anti-trust suit started in 1938 (United States vs. Paramount Pictures). The court decided that the eight largest studios (Warner Brothers, RKO, MGM, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, and United Artists) had engaged in monopolistic practices. The studios were ordered to sell of their studio chains and end blockbooking of films and other practices which squeezed out the independent producers. This allowed many of the stars and directors who were under direct contract to a single studio to form their own production companies and hire their services to any studio. It also allowed smaller theaters to show many different films besides the independent films. The independent filmmakers still had to go through the large companies to get national distribution, but the big companies set up smaller holding companies to accommadate this.

Other factors led to the decline of the Hollywood studio system. Postwar economic prosperity gave many families money to purchase a radio where entertainment became cheaper and you did not have to travel to a theater. Then the invention of television started to keep people out of the theaters, and people became more selective of the films that they saw. Many independent studios started making cheap horror, science fiction, and "youth" films filled with erotic imagery and violence aimed at the affluent teenagers of the period. The response of this was for the major studios to target particular segments of the population and to start making television shows.

Part of the fallout of this was a loosening of archaic censorship codes, allowing sexual and violent images to be shown more explicitly, creation of better films by spending more money on prestigious films, and the updating or creation of genres of films. A new style of acting that came to the forefront was "Method" acting that utilized personal experiences for creating emotions. The biggest stars to come out of this school was director Elia Kazan (On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire), Marlon Brando, and James Dean.

From about 1959 to about 1967, a film movement in France existed that became known as the New Wave. It was started by film critics who wanted to make films themselves and wanted to make films different from the established patterns in French cinema. They were all aware of cinema history, and liked to make references to past films and filmmakers and references to other New Wave directors. Most of the filmmakers worked for a magazine called Cahiers du cinema.

The style of the French New Wave did not really bring anything new to cinema technique, but relied on new technology that could record sound directly, which would allow all of the sound where the film was shot to be included, and small handheld cameras that could allow the filmmakers to try new types of shooting styles and to film the action directly on location without major preparation to make the films more authentic. The directors also used long takes to film whole sequences without a single edit, choppy editing to make different compositions from shot to shot, and increased the use of montage editing.

Most of the films concentrated on stories of personal experiences, alienation, estrangement, loneliness, and chance events. This was due to the New Wave directors putting forward the theory that a director was the creator (auteur) of the film, making a personal vision of the world for everyone to see. This lead to most of the endings not being a happy ending, but more like an ending.

The two most famous directors of this movement were Jean-Luc Godard and Francios Truffaut. Godard believed that films should be given a new direction to pose fundamental questions about narratives and stories. His plots became fragmented structures, hinting at a storyline, but the story could go in wild and unpredictable paths. He often incorporated documentary material that he would film like shots of crowds, advertisements and comic strips with his staged scenes. He also mixed in philosophy and avant-garde art into conventions from popular culture, like Hollywood movies or crime novels. His most famous work is "Breathless", a story about a criminal trying to flee the country while seeing his girlfriend. Truffaut believed in using New Wave to renew mainstream cinema. He wanted to balance a personal vision of a film with something that the audience could enjoy. He tried to use the startling compositions to forward a point that the audience as himself would be able to grasp. He also tried to make a film reference in everyone of his films. He later went on to make more mainstream films later in his career and took up acting, most notably a performance in "Close Encounters Of The Third Kind". His most famous films are "The 400 Blows", a film about a young runaway; "Shoot The Piano Player", a crime-comedy; and "Jules and Jim", a film about three friends involved in an unhappy love triangle that spreads over several decades.

At about this time, French cinema became very popular around the world, especially in the United States. It created a star out of Bridget Bardou.

The lasting contributions to cinema from the French New Wave is the mixing of styles in film, creation of the nontraditional unhappy ending, especially in Hollywood cinema, and directors becoming students of film history. It inspired many other filmmakers to create New Cinemas in their own countries, modeled along the same lines as the French New Wave, often dealing with social aspects of the country.

From about the 1970's on, Hollywood underwent some style changes that where ushered in by most of the established older directors retiring and many new directors coming to the forefront. Collectively referred to as the movie-brat generation, many of them grew up watching cinema, and some of them went to film school for degrees like George Lucas (USC film school), Spike Lee (NYU film school), Martin Scorsese (NYU film school), and Francis Ford Coppola (UCLA film school).

Most of the directors where revisiting past genres, like the gangster film (The Godfather cycle, GoodFellas), film noirs (Chinatown, LA Confidential, The Usual Suspects, The Long Goodbye), swashbuckling action-adventure movies of the 1940's (Jaws, the Indiana Jones cycle, Star Wars cycle), science fiction (Star Wars cycle, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, E. T., Terminator series, the Alien series, Star Trek series, Blade Runner), musicals (Purple Rain, Saturday Night Live, Flashdance, House Party, Grease), slapstick and romantic comedies (When Harry Met Sally, Porky's, Animal House, Stripes, Ghostbusters, Sleepless In Seattle), crime and cop films (48 Hours, Beverly Hills Cop series, Dirty Harry series, the Lethal Weapon series), and horror (Friday the 13th series, Jason series, Halloween, The Shining, Carrie). Some movies also had a nostalgia appeal (Chinatown, American Graffiti, Animal House, Grease, The Godfather cycle, Indiana Jones cycle, Raging Bull) or some movies were remade (Father Of The Bride, Psycho directed by Gus Van Saint, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Most of these remakes, nostalgia films, and revisting of past genres are mostly updating of the genres to modern tastes. There was a small technological innovation that the directors made use of. Projector cameras were now more powerful, allowing darker colors to be shown. This allowed the directors to shoot in very dimly light sets and bathe the film in a hazy murk and creating pools of light.

Another film style that came out at this time was Blaxplotation films. The first two to mark the movement was "Sweet Sweetback's Baaadass Song" and "Shaft". This propelled African-Americans to star status and concentrated on mostly crime stories like "Superfly" or stories about people trying to stick it to The Man, either being authority or the Mafia. It was a movement that included martial arts films (Black Belt Jones, Black Samurai), horror (Blacula), and many other styles (Car Wash). The movement was influential to rap and hip-hop music, music videos in general, and to the films of directors like Spike Lee (Malcolm X, Do The Right Thing, She's Gotta Have It, School Daze) and John Singleton (Boyz In The Hood, Poetic Justice, Baby Boy), and films like "Higher Learning" and "New Jack City".

As cinema has evolved, it has incorporated many different styles and artistic movements. In some aspects, current cinema in the 21st Century has gotten better. Films are now more expressive and artistic than ever before, especially with the advances in special effects, film stock, camera quality, and the incoporation of new ideas and old movements into the images that we view. Films like Forrest Gump, Pearl Harbor, and Saving Private Ryan would not have been like what they are even twenty years ago. The public is much more aware of the diversity of art with the images of previous genres and artistic movements incorporated into them even if the audience is unaware of where the influence came from. This helps to enhance the enjoyment of the cinema for the audience and the filmmakers.

Cinema is also worse in some aspects. Whether or not Hollywood creates better films, the dominance of Hollywood films worldwide can stifle the creation of new artistic movements and the creation of films in other countries. It also creates a disdain for foreign films to have a chance to be exhibited in multiplex theaters in America and relegates them to art house cinemas and university film clubs usually only found in the big cities and tends to limit the films that people in smaller areas might be exposed to at their local theaters and at the video store. It also creates a dependence on big-budget films that can flop, especially films with a lot of explosions or overhyped films that don't do as well, especially sequels and things with roman numerals in the title. The Hollywood corporate structure lessens the risk of making more artistic films like "Forrest Gump", "Pulp Fiction", and "Schindler's List" unless a big name becomes attached to it or the studio wants to win some prestige.

As I have shown on this page, the development of new ideas can help to enhance the cinematic experience, and by cultivating a balance between money and art, films could be made better than they are now, since most people have diverse tastes and can enjoy something that they normally don't. People might even watch a film with subtitles in it, like with "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon". If anything, this page has just raised awareness of past film history, and can give you a few good ideas for movie rentals/purchases in the future.