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HISTORY Early development The birth of cinema, as well as its radical development, can largely be traced back to the United States. The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was , using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt forming devices that would similar capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the '' Kinetoscope '', whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives. In the United States, the first exhibitions of films for large audiences typically followed the intermissions in Vaudeville shows. Entrepreneurs began travelling to exhibit their films, bringing to the world the first forays into dramatic filmmaking. The first huge success of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to its point, was '' The Great Train Robbery '', directed by Edwin S. Porter . Rise of Hollywood In early 1910, director D. W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche Sweet , Lillian Gish , Mary Pickford , Lionel Barrymore , and others. They started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in Downtown Los Angeles . The company decided while there to explore new territories and travelled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called " Hollywood ". D. W. Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood called '' In Old California '', a Biograph melodrama about Latino/Mexican occupied California in the 1800's. Biograph stayed there for months and made several films before returning to New York. After hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie-makers headed west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on the movie-making process. In Los Angeles, California , the Studios and Hollywood grew. Before World War I , movies were made in several U.S. cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are several starting points for American cinema, but it was David Wark Griffith 's Birth Of A Nation that pioneered the filmic vocabulary that still dominates celluoid to this day. ]] In the early to Australian Nicole Kidman , from Hungarian director Michael Curtiz to Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón . Other moviemakers arrived from , Alfred Hitchcock , Fritz Lang , and Jean Renoir ; actors like Rudolph Valentino , Marlene Dietrich , Ronald Colman , and Charles Boyer . They joined a homegrown supply of actors--lured west from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films--to form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid- 1940s , the studios were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an audience of 90 million Americans per week. Golden Age of Hollywood in '' The Wizard Of Oz '' (1939).]] During the so-called ( 1899 - 1961 ), author of the novel on which the script was nominally based, and William Faulkner ( 1897 - 1962 ), who worked on the screen adaptation. Moviemaking was still a business, however, and motion picture companies made money by operating under the so-called Studio System . The major studios kept thousands of people on salary--actors, producers, directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspersons, and technicians. And they owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the nation--theaters that showed their films and that were always in need of fresh material. Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema that emerged from this period of highly regimented filmmaking. One reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: '''', '' It's A Wonderful Life '', the original '' King Kong '', and '' Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs ''. The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood itself succumbed to two forces in the late 1940s: (1) a Federal Antitrust Action that separated the production of films from their exhibition; and (2) the advent of Television . The number of movies being made dropped sharply, even as the average budget soared, marking a change in strategy for the industry. Studios now aimed to produce entertainment that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-life productions, while others would lose the rights to their theatrical film libraries to other companies to sell to television. Changing realities and television's rise '' (1969).]] Though television broke the movie industry's hegemony in American entertainment, the rise of television would prove advantageous, in its way, to the movies. This is because public opinion about the quality of television content soon declined, and by contrast, cinema's status began to be regarded more and more as a serious art form as worthy of respect and study as the Fine Arts . This was complemented with the Miracle Decision in which the Supreme Court Of The United States reversed its earlier position and stated that motion pictures were an artform entitled to the protection of the First Amendment . The 'New Hollywood' or Post-classical cinema ' The New Hollywood ' and 'post-classical cinema' are terms used to describe the period following the decline of the Studio System in the 50s and 60s and the end of the Production Code . It is defined by a greater tendency to dramatize such things as sexuality and violence, and by the rising importance of Blockbuster movies. 'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new approaches to and Protagonist may be blurred. The roots of post-classical storytelling may be seen in ''film noir'', in '' Rebel Without A Cause '' (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering '' Psycho ''. Blockbusters ''.]] The drive to produce spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of new and Independent Film s. Studios have focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon star power and massive Advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production costs and reap considerable profits. Such productions carry a subtantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year. A major change to American filmmaking occurred during the '', respectively. These movies, which each set the all-time box office record during their releases, induced studios to focus even more heavily than before on trying to produce humongous hits. INDEPENDENT FILM and Samuel L. Jackson in '' Pulp Fiction '' (1994).]] Studios supplement these movies with independent productions, made with small budgets and often independently of the studio corporation. Movies made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation. These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to garner an audience. Because of an independent film's low budgets, a successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor dozens of such productions in addition to their high-stakes releases. American independent cinema was revitalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s when another new generation of moviemakers, including Spike Lee , Steven Soderbergh , Kevin Smith , and Quentin Tarantino made movies like, respectively, '' Do The Right Thing '', '' Sex, Lies, And Videotape '', '' Clerks. '', and '' Pulp Fiction ''. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent, playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies. Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce similar films; for example Fox Searchlight Pictures . '' (1994).]] To a lesser degree in the 2000s, film types that were previously considered to have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market began to arise as more potent American box office draws. These include foreign-language films such as '' Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon '' and '' Hero '' and Documentary Film s such as '' Super Size Me '', '' March Of The Penguins '', and Michael Moore 's '' Bowling For Columbine '' and '' Fahrenheit 9/11 ''. Rise of the home video market The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full acceptance of Video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit which allowed many acclaimed films which performed poorly in their theatrical to find success in the video market such as '' The Secret Of NIMH '' and '' The Shawshank Redemption ''. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Tarantino and P.T. Anderson had been able to view thousands of films and produced films with vast numbers of references and connections to previous works. This, along with the explosion of independent film and ever-decreasing costs for filmmaking, changed the landscape of American movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among Hollywood's lower and middle-classes—those without access to studio megabucks. The rise of the DVD in the 21st Century has quickly become even more profitable to studios and has led to an explosion of packaging extra scenes, extended versions, and Commentary Tracks with the films. NOTABLE FIGURES IN U.S. FILM Significant American-born film directors include:
Other iconic American Actors include:
BIBLIOGRAPHY Hollywood
American Experimental film
American Documentary film
Independent film
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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