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American cinema has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early era, Classical Hollywood Cinema , New Hollywood , and the contemporary period (after 1980). HISTORY Early development The second recorded instance of , which he captured in Palo Alto, California , using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices that would 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 this point, was '' The Great Train Robbery '', directed by Edwin S. Porter . In the earliest days of the American film industry, New York was the epicenter of filmmaking. The Kaufman-Astoria film studio in Queens , built during the silent film era, was used by the Marx Brothers and W.C. Fields . Chelsea, Manhattan was also frequently used. Mary Pickford , an Academy Award winning actress, shot some of her early films in this area. However, the better year-round weather of Hollywood made it a better choice for shooting. 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 ". Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in Hollywood, '' In Old California '', a Biograph melodrama about California in the 1800s, while it belonged to Mexico. 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 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 . Sound also became widely used in Hollywood in the late 1920's . Parallel foreign-language versions In the early times of Talkie s, American studios found that their sound productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among speakers of other dialects of English. The Synchronization technology was still too primitive for Dubbing . One of the solutions was the Parallel Foreign-language Versions . Around 1930, the American companies opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont , France, where the same sets and wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different Time-sharing crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of Photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language. The Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buñuel , Enrique Jardiel Poncela , Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville . The productions were not very successful in their intended markets:
In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version of Dracula compare favorably with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization had advanced enough for dubbing to become usual. Golden Age of Hollywood 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 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 ''. Decline of the studio system 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 . As a result of that antitrust act, actors and technical staff were gradually released from their contracts by movie studios. Now, each film made by a studio could have an entirely different cast and creative team, resulting in the gradual loss of all those characteristics which made MGM , Paramount , Universal , Columbia , RKO , and Twentieth-Century Fox films immediately identifiable. But certain movie people, such as Cecil B. DeMille , either remained contract artists till the end of their careers or used the same creative teams on their films, so that a DeMille film still looked like one whether it was made in 1932 or 1956. The number of movies being made dropped, 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. Although 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 Art s. 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' and Post-classical cinema '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 s", and lines between the Antagonist 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 ''. ''', respectively helped to give rise to the modern " Blockbuster ", and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying to produce enormous hits. Blockbusters The drive to produce a 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 substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that both over- and underperform in a year. Independent film 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 '' Reservoir Dogs ''. 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 . 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 Home Video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit. Films such as '' The Secret Of NIMH '' and '' The Shawshank Redemption '', which performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success in the video market. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin 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 financial resources. With the rise of the DVD in the 21st Century , DVDs have quickly become even more profitable to studios and have 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-born Actor s and Actress es include: BIBLIOGRAPHY Hollywood
American Experimental film
American Documentary film
Independent film
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