

The motion picture is a remarkably effective medium in conveying drama and especially in the evocation of emotion. The art of motion pictures is exceedingly complex, requiring contributions from nearly all the other arts as well as countless technical skills (for example, in sound recording, photography, and optics). Nonetheless, probably no other art has proliferated as much in the last century nor can any other equal it in popularity or influence.The motion picture is one of the newest of the generally recognized “fine arts.” During its early development, the motion picture was discounted by many critics for its supposed subservience to commercial interests, for the immediacy of its appeal to the uninstructed, for its seemingly mechanical technique, and for its apparent lack of an identifiable artist as its primary creator. After the middle of the 20th century, however, increasing attention was devoted to the motion picture as a form of artistic endeavour that is as legitimate as the theatre, literature, dance, music, or the visual artsEmerging at the end of the 19th century, this new art form became one of the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond.


Essential characteristics of motion pictures

In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound. It exists today in styles that differ significantly from country to country and in forms as diverse as the documentary created by one person with a handheld camera and the multimillion-dollar epic involving hundreds of performers and technicians. Despite its diversity, however, an essential unchanging nature can be discerned in most of its manifestations.



Still, the escape into the world of the film is not complete. Only rarely does the audience react as if the events on the screen were are real—for instance, by ducking before an onrushing locomotive in a special three-dimensional effect. Moreover, such effects are considered to be a relatively low form of the art of motion pictures. Much more often, viewers expect a film to be truer to certain unwritten conventions than to the real world. Although spectators may sometimes expect exact realism in details of dress or locale, just as often they expect the film to escape from the real world and make them exercise their imaginationsimagination, a demand made by great works of art in all forms.

The sense of reality most films strive for results from a set of codes, or rules, that are implicitly accepted by viewers and confirmed through habitual filmgoing. The use of brownish lighting, filters, and props, for example, has come to signify the past in films about American life in the early 20th century (as in The Godfather, [1972; ] and Days of Heaven, [1978]). The brownish tinge that is associated with such films is a visual code , one that may have some basis in reality: brown was a leading decorative element in clothing and furniture of the timeintended to evoke a viewer’s perceptions of an earlier era, when photographs were printed in sepia, or brown, tones. Storytelling codes are even more conspicuous in their manipulation of actual reality to achieve an effect of reality. Audiences are prepared to skip over huge expanses of time in order to reach the dramatic moments of a story. La battaglia di Algeri (1966; The Battle of Algiers, 1966), for example, begins in a torture chamber where a captured Algerian rebel has just given away the location of his cohorts. In a matter of seconds that location is attacked, and the drive of the search-and-destroy mission pushes the audience to believe in the fantastic speed and precision of the operation. Furthermore, the audience readily accepts shots from impossible points of view if other aspects of the film signal the shot as real. For example, the rebels in The Battle of Algiers are shown inside a walled-up hiding place, yet this unrealistic view seems authentic because the film’s grainy photography plays on the spectator’s unconscious association of poor black-and-white images with newsreels.


Qualities of the film image


Intensity, intimacy, ubiquity








Characteristics of the medium



The intense brightness of the picture projected by powerful light onto a coated screen in itself transforms the most mundane element of reality. The appeal of a luminous picture is attested by efforts of advertisers to achieve luminous effects in posters and displays. The luminosity of the motion-picture image also results in a considerable range of tone, between the brightest highlight and the deepest black. Both in In both black-and-white and in colour films, the most delicate gradations in the image are therefore possible.









Several major contributions to the theory of montage were made by Soviet directors. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet films were encouraged for their propaganda value, but film stocks were scarce. Soviet directors carefully studied the films of D.W. Griffith and other masters to make the most effective use of their own meagre resources. One of these those early Russian directors, Lev Kuleshov, conducted an experiment involving identical shots of an actor’s expressionless face. He inserted it in a film before a shot of a bowl of soup, again before a shot of a child playing, and still again before one of a dead old woman. An unsuspecting audience, which was asked to evaluate the actor’s performance, praised his ability to express, respectively, hunger, tenderness, and grief.




The motion-picture experience

Other distinguishing characteristics The viewing of the motion picture are more closely related to the conditions under which they are normally seen.

The Kinetoscope, a peep-show motion picture that could be seen by only one person at a time, became obsolete soon after it was introduced by Thomas A. Edison in 1894, because it could not compete with projected films, which could accommodate audiences. Since that time, an atmosphere of group entertainment has been associated with films. Even for films being seen on broadcast or cable television, this aspect of community viewing remains significant; although the audience before any particular television set may be as small as a single individual, each spectator brings to it past associations of films seen in the theatre and the realization that millions of other people are watching the same show.

Since 1980, however, this tradition has been reversed, and the peep show has returned in the guise of the videocassette and, more recently, the digital videodisc (DVD). The proliferation of videocassette recorders (VCRs) and DVD players and the advent of novel venues for entertainment—as in automobiles where digital entertainment devices are growing in popularity—demonstrate that films serve multiple functions in culture. The function usually deemed primary might be termed “concentrated entertainment.” The private viewing conditions provided by the videocassette and DVD can enhance this function and may be preferred by some viewers in the same way that a stereo recording of a Beethoven symphony is preferred by some to the concert hall experience. The less socially acceptable function of pornography, which has been represented in motion pictures since their inception, is also well served by the anonymity and privacy characteristic of contemporary movie viewing.

Other, more public, functions of motion pictures contribute to sociability. Although the movie theatre remains a key site for such activity, television serves a significant population that prefers to stay at home either because of convenience or because the more casual viewing conditions permit them to participate in additional activities. This latter quality is also found in older phenomena, such as the drive-in theatre, where families or small groups maintained their own cohesiveness while viewing a motion picture. Such epiphenomena as talking and eating, which were encouraged by the drive-in venue, are replicated in living rooms where movies are watched on videocassettes and DVDs. Conversely, television and home-viewed films may be used to preoccupy children whose parents are either incapable of or uninterested in joining them or entertaining them in any other way.

In sum, the motion picture raises questions of privacy and sociability more insistently than any other medium, but few generalizations about its “pure” state stand up. Different eras and different cultures use motion pictures in different ways. A motion picture’s connection to both personal and collective vision is always relevant and is always affected by the site of its exhibition.

Although the motion-picture experience is most often a group experience, it is exceptional for its impersonal nature. In this respect the cinema is quite different from live theatre, for example, in which the audience feels the presence of the actors and the equally compelling presence of the audience. Whether at home in front of a television set or in a movie theatre, the film viewer feels less inhibited. People come and go as they please, generally unnoticed, in an easy, relaxing atmosphere. Especially in the heyday of the large movie palaces, there was little feeling of association with the rest of the cinema audience, whereas members of the audience at a ballet, opera, or play sense a collective ritual that is reinforced by intermissions during which they mingle with one another. The impersonality of the motion-picture experience enhances its private function, although the informality of the cinema has probably contributed to the tendency to regard it less seriously than other performing arts.

Another basic feature of motion pictures is their accessibility to an audience of vast size. A drama presented in a theatre is generally attended by no more than a few hundred persons at a time. In a film, however, the same drama and the same performers may be seen throughout the world by millions of people almost simultaneously. Accessibility has been a determining characteristic of films. From the start, they were a sidewalk attraction, and, with the advent of television in addition to cinemas, motion pictures are available almost anywhere at almost any time. This mass audience allowed the motion-picture industry to develop vast production and distribution organizations, but it also limited the artistic development of films, since it was commercially safer to present the simplest and least-demanding entertainment that would appeal to the widest audience. After television took over much of this mass audience in the 1950s, many motion pictures were taken more seriously by a more discriminating audience. Since the days of the film d’art movement in France (c. 1910), many films have claimed the status of art, but the “art films” that are shown in specialized art theatres are a product of this competition with television. After 1980 cable distribution as well as the videocassette market decentralized distribution, providing outlets targeting limited audiences. Despite these developments, the motion picture, and critical or artistic attitudes toward it, have been greatly shaped by its seemingly universal appealmotion pictures began as an experience limited to a one-person audience. Soon after, the advent of motion-picture projection transformed the medium predominantly into a form of theatrical entertainment viewed by large numbers of people simultaneously. By the end of the 20th century, new technologies had made possible a wide variety of viewing options, ranging from the solitary spectator to audiences of thousands in a single space or of millions over many venues.






Expressive elements of motion pictures

Many observers have seen in films a means of expression comparable to a language. The French poet and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, for example, called the cinema “picture writing.” The language of motion pictures, however, is not the language of words, even though spoken dialogue has been an integral part of motion pictures since the late 1920s, and written captions were usually required to explain the action before that. It is primarily in the qualities of its images and sounds that the expressivity of the cinema must be sought. Certain basic traits of motion pictures may operate with the logic of natural language, but few theorists have held that cinematic expression follows rules like those of natural language. As Christian Metz, one of the foremost modern film theorists of the 20th century, argued, it is not linguistics so much as poetics that should serve as a model for those interested in understanding or explaining how a film works; making and watching a film is far closer to writing or appreciating a novel or symphony than a sentence or discourse.

Various codes of expression have, nevertheless, been shown to operate naturally or to have been inculcated, and their effects can be calculated. Such codes and effects occur in all aspects of the medium moviemaking and can most readily be categorized into those affecting cinematography, editing, sound, the script, acting, and design.

Cinematographic expression






Regardless of its ratio, the frame may be divided to show two or more scenes at the same time. This technique is generally reserved traditionally used for credit sequences, musical interludes, or moments when the presentation on a single screen of two or more simultaneous occurrences results in comic interrelationships, although frame division can be used to dramatic or purely aesthetic effect, as in John Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966).




Since scale in the cinema constantly changes from shot to shot, the spectator can easily be deceived about the size of objects. When appearing next to enormous tables and chairs, for instance, the actors can be made to look like midgets or children, as in the Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy comedy Brats (1930). By contrast, in King Kong (1933) a small-scale model of New York City was used to give the illusion of the actual city under attack by a giant gorilla. Scale may have a marked effect on the emotional tone of a scene. In the distance an actor may seem lonely, remote, helpless, pathetic; close up he may appear powerful, threatening, bestial. The scale of shots for artistic purposes ranges from an extreme long shot (the widest view on the smallest scale), with houses or ships appearing as tiny dots on the horizon, ; through medium shots, two shots (i.e., a shot of convenient size to include two actors), and others, ; to the extreme close-up, with part of a face, an eye, or a fist filling the screen (the most restricted view on the largest scale). Telescopic or microscopic shots beyond these extremes are usually often of scientific rather than of artistic interest.

Different scales are occasionally juxtaposed in a single shot to produce an unmistakable dramatic or rhetorical effect. In Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), significant characters are repeatedly framed in the right or left foreground while in the background an action takes place which that disturbs that character or which that that character somehow controls. The gigantic political poster of Kane that rises behind the podium on which he, in the foreground, makes a speech promising to ruin his rival, Gettys, becomes suddenly the size of a postage stamp when the shot changes to one in which Gettys is in the foreground looking down from a balcony on the insignificant speaker from a balcony. Through this use of different scales, Gettys is shown to have power over the action.



Shooting angle and point of view





Camera movement



Often commercial vehicles, such as trolleys, automobiles, or airplanes, are used to transport the camera; the relatively jerky ride they supply simulates real movement more accurately than does the steady motion provided by a specially designed apparatus. Nevertheless, the film industry has long sought equipment that would allow the camera (and the viewer) to weave in and out of action in the most ethereal way. The crane, which facilitates aerial movement, was developed in the late 1920s, replacing the jerry-built movable platforms, the slings, and the sleds that ingenious directors, such as Abel Gance (for Napoléon, 1927) and Marcel L’Herbier (for L’Argent, 1929), both in France, had devised to achieve vertical or elevated swinging movements. Numerous special camera supports now existwere developed in the later 20th century, many of which were originally developed for use on medical and scientific films. The most advanced equipment can Equipment developed in the 1970s and ’80s could be operated from a distance with electronic viewfinders, allowing the camera to follow vigorous , continuous action with unprecedented an ease and intimacy that had previously been unknown, as in the pre-credit precredit sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). The look and style of film art is constantly changing as technological advances increase the mobility of the camera and consequently the flexibility of the spectator’s viewpoint.





Colour and black and white


A black-and-white motion picture is not merely a picture that lacks colour but rather is an artistic creation with positive qualities of its own. An ample range of effects can be obtained—from precise images, in which every hair, every grain can be clearly seen, to a smudged charcoal effect. Oddly, black-and-white film often gives a stronger impression of realism than colour does, perhaps because of associations with newsreels and newspaper photographs. Black and white may suggest the hard news of the daily paper, while colour may connote the fantasies of glossy fashion magazines, advertisements, and comic strips. In the cinema, black-and-white composition is often stronger and more dramatic than colourhas often been designed to attain a distinctive dramatic impact.


Role of the cinematographer




The process of trimming and piecing together lengths of film in order to make an artistically concise and complete motion picture is certainly the most obvious technique of film language and the one most often discussed. The terms editing, cutting, and montage are often applied interchangeably to the process. In montage the emphasis is on the juxtaposition of ideas resulting from this process, ; cutting stresses the physical work with the actual strips of film, ; and editing encompasses both.





The director may introduce creative touches in cutting. The German-born director Max Ophüls, for example, connected the separate episodes of La Ronde (1950) by means of the musical leitmotiv leitmotif of a hurdy-gurdy tune. In Vivre sa vie (1962; My Life to Live, 1962), Jean-Luc Godard, one of the outstanding French New Wave directors of the late 1950s, introduced chapter headings marking the heroine’s step-by-step involvement in prostitution and, ultimately, her murder, as if it were a didactic 19th-century novel. In his British film The Thirty-nine Steps (1935), Alfred Hitchcock, probably the greatest director of suspense films, in his British film The Thirty-nine Steps (1935) cut from a woman’s scream to the similar sound of a train whistle, an effect so dramatic that it was frequently imitated thereafter.



Like camera work, editing is a function that is ordinarily hidden from the audience, but it is vital to the finished picture. It is the editor’s job to judge the length of each shot, choosing the exact moment to cut. The length of a shot may depend upon the end a segment on the basis of the amount of detail it contains, its scale, its dramatic impact, or and its context in relation to the shots that precede and follow it. Though the audience is unconscious of these judgments, the The impact of the finished film depends on how well they edits are made.


Cinema time



Time conventions



To emphasize important scenes of short duration, repetition is an effective device. Such a scene may be shown from different angles , or from a distance and then close up, and it may occupy much more time on the screen than would the actual event. By emphasizing what is important and eliminating the rest, a motion picture can give the illusion of covering a lifetime in only 90 minutes.






Tempo is not necessarily related to the actual length of a motion picture. A poorly made short film may seem longinterminable, for example, while Intolerance (1916), whereas a three-and-a-half-hour masterpiece, such as D.W. Griffith’s 3.5-hour masterpiece Intolerance (1916), can command the and sustain a viewer’s full attention of connoisseurs.


Mechanical reproduction of sound was developed as early as the first motion pictures, but the problems of amplifying sound sufficiently for an audience and synchronizing it with the film image were not solved until the late 1920s. Although sound attracted crowds to the cinema to hear the new miracle, the artistic levels of the best silent pictures gains were not reached immediately apparent. The new “talkies” were “talkies,” mostly poor imitations of theatrical plays, with dialogue and sound used indiscriminatelyfell short of the artistic levels of the best silent films. Sound equipment was cumbersome and imperfect. The once-mobile camera of the silent film lost its freedom, and the editing of film tied to a sound track became stodgy and slow.


Like images, sounds can be used to represent subjective thoughts, indicating not what the character is saying but what is in his mind. For example, in Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), the first English sound film, the words “knife, knife, knife” are word knife is repeated in the thoughts of a frightened girl who thinks that she has committed a murder.



The live music that accompanied silent films varied from a full orchestra to a honky-tonk piano, according to the size of the cinematheatre. Music was effectively used on the film set to improve an actor’s performance. With the advent of sound, music became an integral part of the picture on the screenfilm experience. Early mood music was so expressive that now it often it now seems overblown. Conscientious filmmakers soon learned the virtue of restraint, using music less frequently but with more to greater effect. Since From the 1960s onward, electronic music, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), has come to be commonly usedwas commonplace.


Sound engineering

It is the function of the sound engineer to select and modify sound as the cameraman selects visual images. Since the noise of crockery, cutlery, or paper or the chirping of crickets would be intolerable transferred in full volume to the screen, the sound engineer must tone them down. Treble and bass must be balanced. In other cases, in order to get the effect needed, sound has to be built up and orchestrated as if it were music. Again, sound need not correspond exactly with the visual images. Artistic use can be made of Creative use of sound in motion pictures can lend remarkable delicacy, richness, and variety by using such devices as asynchronism—that is, contrasting the sound to with the visual image. Motion-picture sound is capable of remarkable delicacy, richness, and variety. Sound libraries put most conceivable sounds readily at the disposal of filmmakers. Instruments and voices can be modified, overlapped, echoed, or given a resonance and volume that transform them. Dialogue can be crystal-clear, bringing the audience far closer to an actor than in the theatre, or it may deliberately reproduce the careless enunciation of everyday speechbe nearly inaudible by design.

The script



Some scripts are subsequently modified into novels and distributed in book form, such as the U.S. best - seller The English Patient (1996), by Michael Ondaatje, and, in . In the instance of Dylan Thomas’s The Doctor and the Devils (1953), a script became a literary work without ever having been made into a motion picture.


Well over half of all fiction films made since 1920 have been during the 20th century after 1920 were adapted from plays or novels, and it is understandable that certain formulas have been came to be tacitly accepted to facilitate the remaking of literature into moving pictures. Adaptation has been thought of as an aesthetically inferior exercise, because most such films merely illustrate the classics or reshape a literary text until it conforms to standard cinematic practice. The particular qualities that made the original interesting are often lost in such a process. Certain films and filmmakers, however, have achieved an aesthetic premium by accepting the literariness of the original and then confronting this with the technology and methods of the cinema . Since the 1970s numerous (The French Lieutenant’s Woman, 1981; Adaptation, 2002). Numerous directors have explored literature in an almost documentary manner. The artifice of the French director Eric Rohmer’s Die Marquise von O. (1976), for example, aptly expresses the literary sensibility of Heinrich von Kleist’s romantic, ironic work. On the other hand, less-adventurous big-budget adaptations continue to reshape the literary works on which they are based into conventional “Hollywood” movies, as some critics complained about Sidney Pollack’s Out of Africa (1985). The delicate and changing sensibility of the main character, evident in the prose of the original, was not reflected in the film’s traditional, albeit grand, presentation.

Although many eminent literary authors, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner, have worked on film scripts, the ability to write a good original script, especially under strict studio conditions, frequently belongs to lesser-known scenarists with a strong visual sense. Some writers, particularly in France, have tried to narrow the gap between the written and cinematic modes of expression. Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet became leaders representative of a new kind of author who is able and willing to “write” directly on film. Both have directed their own films, which they see considered as equivalent to their novels and plays.

Motion-picture acting



Some actors, however, have deliberately tried try to avoid being typecast. Robert De Niro, for example, was well known for the violent, obsessive characters he played in such films as Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull, but he has been was equally effective in quieter, more - controlled roles, such as the charismatic hero in The Deer Hunter (1977) or the sneaky political consultant in Wag the Dog (1997). In his films, De Niro downplayed his own personality to “become” the characters he portrayed, even transforming himself physically by gaining excessive weight for his role in Raging Bull. Actors who have been strongly identified with one role have found it harder to change their image. Sean Connery, for example, has appeared in more than 40 films, playing such diverse characters as an eccentric poet in A Fine Madness (1966), an Arab chieftain in The Wind and the Lion (1975), a medieval monk in The Name of the Rose (1986), and a Prohibition-era Chicago policeman in The Untouchables (1987), but he remains most recognized for the seven films in which he starred as the identified with the sophisticated British secret agent James Bond, whom he played in seven films.

A motion-picture performance can be synthesized bit by bit, by the joint efforts of the actor, the director, the cameraman, and others. The conditions of film production, however, are such that some actors find them trying. They may have to put up with long hours on the set and endless repetition, ; they must adapt to shooting scenes out of sequence, ; and in close-ups they often have to respond to the camera rather than to another actor. They require a talent different from, but equal to, that of theatrical performers.

Throughout the history of the art, acting styles have frequently led to major revolutions in film style. Most of the shifts in acting have been toward what is deemed a more “realistic” approach. Often this realism is the result of the studied application of acting precepts, as when Marlon Brando brought to On the Waterfront (1954) the lessons he had digested at The the Actors Studio (the professional workshop in New York City). In the 1960s several successful Czechoslovak films featured effective performances by what appeared to be average citizens; , but in truth the players’ long silences, their bumbling, and the foibles that seemed so natural were the result of lifelong practice and interminable endless rehearsals. Some films, however, have exploited the documentary power of the medium to reveal the behaviour of untrained but expressive individuals. Many of the masterpieces of the postwar Italian Neorealist movement relied on absolute amateurs, who were frequently picked up off the streets by the casting director.


Comedy requires other considerations. The impassive visages of the silent star Buster Keaton and the French comic Jacques Tati helped transform their bodies into expressive machines that interacted with the greater machine of the films they starred in. The Marx Brothers, on the other hand, depended on loose cinematic construction , and dialogue , and on zany , spontaneous action. In short, there can be no single theory of film acting.

Motion-picture design



The strongest single artistic influence in motion-picture set design was the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s, which combined elements of Max Reinhardt’s theatre, a Wagnerian philosophy of doom, and Expressionist painting and graphics. Expressionist films such as Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919; The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919), Der Golem (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis (1926) created a world of fantasy and horror peopled with menacing, shadowy figures. In other German Expressionist motion pictures, such as Der Student von Prag (1926; The Student of Prague, 1926) or Die Nibelungen (1924), there was a baroque beauty of architectural, woodland, and floral settings. The influence of Expressionism can be seen in later cinema in the work of directors Orson Welles and Carl Dreyer and in many gangster movies.


In historical epics, such as Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), or and science-fiction films, such as Blade Runner (1982), settings vie with actors and story for the viewer’s attention. In carefully constructed , intimate dramas, such as those by Robert Bresson (L’Argent, 1983) or Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than than Paradise, 1984), the setting can embody the tone of the film. Numerous stylistic options are attached to decor: its richness or sparseness, its naturalness or artificiality, its contemporaneity or period look, its cleverness or simplicity. Because all these factors are related to the full conception of the film, the set designer is one of the first artistic collaborators called in by the director in the quest for a strong, forceful production.








A salient feature of the cinema is its ability to reproduce natural scenery. From Since the earliest years filmmakers have mixed outdoor footage with scenes shot inside the studio to give audiences the impression that the carefully calculated dramas they are witnessing are faithful records of events that occurred spontaneously in the real world. Just after World War I the Swedish directors Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjöström stunned audiences with their films featuring simple folktales set in the mountains. The seasons of the year, the weather, and the Swedish streams, lakes, and waterfalls were active participants in these tales. After the success of documentary features such as those by Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North), even Hollywood made room for films in which the natural setting was clearly the main protagonist, with the fictional drama used as a way to convey the audience around the landscape. More often the landscape provides an alternative attraction, allowing viewers to see favourite stars in exotic and beautiful locations, as in Under the Tuscan Sun (2003). Another trend has been the use of familiar surroundings Familiar surroundings are sometimes used as the sets for futuristic dramas. Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) turned Paris into an oppressive metropolis on another planet, and Blade Runner made in (1982) created a compelling portrait of Los Angeles in the year 2019.

With the invention of lighter, more portable equipment, filming on location—that is, in an actual setting like the one in which the story takes place rather than in a studio set—has become set—became less difficult and less expensive and is today used more often. As a result, many earlier motion pictures now look artificial, since no studio set can equal the authenticity of a real location. Nonetheless, films may have to be shot in a studio when natural settings are unavailable, as in historical films, or are too remote. On the other hand, the effect of certain films can be utterly lost when inauthentic locations are substituted for genuine ones. The 1948 British Technicolor epic Scott of the Antarctic, for example, was shot in the Swiss Alps, which facilitated filming but ruined the documentary aspect of the film. In some cases, rear screen projection can be used to provide a background setting against which the actors perform.



Costume also once played a more important role in an actor’s identity. Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Mae West, and other stars of the 1920s and ’30s all created characters in which costume was an integral part of the total identity. Audiences were often able to discern the type of character an actor was portraying—herobeing portrayed—hero, villain, comic foil, romantic rival—by the clothes that he was wearingrival—simply by regarding the character’s clothing.



The cosmetics industry grew up in the 1920s alongside motion pictures. Max Factor’s fame owes much to the work his company did in modifying makeup to adjust to new types of film and lighting, including the shift to colour cinematography. With changing audience perceptions, caused by television and other factors, more natural makeup styles became just as popular as the “idealized” methods applied to the great studio stars. Sylvester Stallone is one actor whose makeup is exceedingly important in emphasizing his craggy, often sweating features. Ironically, the “natural look” is often the result of extensive makeup tests.

While makeup generally is meant to remain unnoticed or to play servant to the beauty of a face, in science-fiction and horror films it may take centre stage. Although it is an art as old as society itself, makeup, like other aspects of cinema, is subject to technological development. Advances in contact lenses, prosthetics, and chemistry have made possible magnificent and startling displays such as those in Planet of the Apes (1968), Time Bandits (1981), and The Lord of the Rings trilogy and those creating the never-ending flow of creatures that terrorize horror-film audiences.

Motion-picture directing










Major directors throughout the world have often enjoyed such respect. Among others, Mizoguchi Kenji and Kurosawa Akira of Japan, Satyajit Ray of India, Federico Fellini of Italy, Luis Buñuel of Spain, and Carl Dreyer of Germany have been Denmark were given rare opportunities to make individual artistic statements. Some have been treated as virtual national treasures whose films bring cultural glory to the countries within which they work.



Successful directing has much to do with intangible social relations, such as keeping harmony (or productive competition) alive on the set, drawing the best performances possible from actors, shaping a script into a form that takes advantage of the talents of the director of photography or of the main actor, or beseeching the producer for the money needed for a special shot. Beyond such routine expectations, the great director is identified for a unique or ingenious approach to the medium. Directors have earned praise for their audacious handling of stories. Refusing to be hemmed in by the standard requirements of a two-hour drama dealing with a few central characters, Francis Ford Coppola, for example, pieced together a truly epic fresco in his two-part masterpiece The Godfather, as did Robert Altman in such collage narratives as Nashville (1975) and Short Cuts (1993) and Paul Thomas Anderson in Magnolia (1999). Italian directors have experimented with the epic form, as in Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (1979; The Tree of Wooden Clogs, 1979) or and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento (1976; 1900, 1976)) and The Last Emperor (1987), and with narrative structure, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946; Paisan, 1946) and Ettore Scola’s Le Bal (1983; The Ball, 1983), which abandon traditional plot construction and a single story line in favour of separate short episodes that are thematically or historically linked.




Directors may be characterized by the solutions they regularly arrive at when a story or scene is presented to them. Murnau and Mizoguchi preferred the languorous tracking shot to editing a dramatic situation , so that the drama could be seen to arise in the midst of the shot. Antonioni let the camera continue to shoot well after the characters were out of range , so that the spectator could observe the way a dramatic scene disappeared or sense its smallness in the landscape that remained. Most After 1970 most American directors have employed hard-hitting, swift techniques to give power to the gritty stories that dominated came to dominate world cinema after 1970. CloseThese techniques—close-up sound, pounding music, and abrupt editing editing—were used to keep the spectator interested and excited. Within this general American style, however, individual directors have found different methods to achieve similar effects, and they have discovered that using similar techniques does did not guarantee similar results.


Types of motion pictures

Most connoisseurs of the art of motion pictures feel that the greatest films are the artistic and personal expression of strong directors. The cinema exists, however, for many social functions, and its “art” has served many types of film that do not set out to be artistic. In practical terms these functions divide films into what are usually termed modes“modes,including the documentary, the experimental, and the fictional. The documentary mode incorporates those films relying primarily on cinema’s power to relay events in the world. The experimental includes the variety of approaches that have tested and played with the technological limits and capabilities of the medium, including animated (nonphotographic) and computer-generated images. The fictional is the mode most often thought of as simply “the movies.” It has adopted the forms of storytelling that have always existed in culture, creating various cinematic languages to convey its tales. Each of these three modes can in turn be subdivided into genres (i.e., commonly recognized types of stories or forms).

The documentary

The turn of the 20th century witnessed not only the invention of the motion picture but also tremendous growth of popular interest in journalism, picture postcards, lectures by travelers (frequently illustrated with slides), and so forth. The motion picture quickly came to serve society’s need to learn about the geography and social conditions of the world at large. Some of the first motion pictures depicted exotic locations, contemporary events (battles, coronations), and unknown cultures. Indeed, as late as 1908 such a major company as Biograph actually produced more nonfiction films than narratives. This would soon change, in part because the production of documentary films is dependent on world events and is therefore more haphazard and more difficult than the fully controlled process of making fiction films in studios. The decline of the nonfiction film has also been attributed to the belief that, after a decade, audiences were saturated with “views” and “actualities,” as such films were called. Moviegoers were no longer drawn to the sheer recording ability of motion pictures; they demanded imaginative entertainment instead.

Travelogues and ethnographic films

One sort of film that has had continuous appeal, albeit for a specialized audience, has been the travel film. Much of the attraction of such films—from the crude pictures cranked out by Lumière cameramen in Japan, Africa, and the Arctic, to Robert Flaherty’s films about the Eskimos, the South Sea Islands, and the wild western coast of Ireland Nanook of the North (1922) and other films, to National Geographic Society presentations on television—results simply from the thrill of seeing a foreign culture or a distant location. Flaherty proved, however, that there could also be tremendous artistry in such films. His unforgettable compositions matched the harmonious rhythm of his editing to render the lives of his subjects in a gloriously romantic tone.

Both anthropologists and Hollywood producers immediately recognized the value attraction of Flaherty’s work, initiating several long-lived genres. In Hollywood, King Kong (1933), one of the most famous monster movies ever made, was conceived by producer-director Merian C. Cooper, who was inspired by his experience shooting travel documentaries. The surprising success of The Gods Must Be Crazy (1981), a comedy about life in the Kalahari desert of Botswana, shows that audiences continue half a century later continued to enjoy the a mixture of foreign locations and familiar dramas. The San (Bushmen) of the Kalahari are also the subject of an important ethnographic film, John Marshall’s The Hunters (1958). Marshall’s tradition dates to the 1930s and to the films the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson made in the Pacific.

Most scholars prefer that all artistry be eliminated from ethnographic films so that the visual data recorded by the camera remains remain as fresh and uninterpreted as possible. The audience for these films typically consists of members of a university or museum community for whom entertainment is less significant than authenticity. When such films are prepared for mass television audiences, however, many concessions may be necessary, including the addition of extensive explanatory narration, musical accompaniment, and scenic photography.

Newsreels and documentaries

The argument over the role of art and artlessness in travelogues and ethnographic films is also pertinent to newsreels, where the standard principles governing journalism must apply. In the first years of cinema, reconstructions of such events as The Dreyfus Affair (Méliès, 1899) and the assassination of U.S. President Pres. William McKinley in L’Assassinat de McKinley (Pathé, 1901) were commonly accepted. Since then, viewers have required that newsreel material be neither prearranged nor fabricated, and they have become aware of the effects of the intrusiveness of the reporter and the limitations of point of view on the objectivity of any documentary film.

News films, more than any other type of motion picture, depend on their timeliness. Hence, for all of its ability to show the actual world, the motion picture failed to provide genuine news until it did so by means of television. Too stale and infrequent for day-to-day coverage, newsreels showed not news but parades, ceremonies, sporting events, bridge building, and similar events. The March of Time, inspired by Time magazine and produced by Louis de Rochemont from 1935 to 1951, was a series in which a topic of political or social importance was discussed in depth in a 30-minute film. The series was an immediate and continued success. It is televisionFrom the mid-20th century, however, it was television that has developed the screen presentation of news, comment, and discussion beyond anything known before.

It is less in the straight presentation of reality than in its creative interpretation that the documentary has produced works of lasting value. Among the pioneers of the documentary besides Flaherty were the Russian theorist Dziga Vertov, whose films include Chelovek s kinoapparatom (1929; The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929), and the British producer-director John Grierson, whose Drifters (1929) inspired a school of fine directors to produce a succession of memorable documentaries through the 1930s. With the outbreak of World War II, Humphrey Jennings’s Fires Were Started (1943) and Harry Watt’s Target for Tonight (1941), two among many outstanding British wartime documentaries, dramatized Britain’s war effort better than fictional films could.

In the United States, Pare Lorentz made dramatic documentaries about soil erosion and the Dust Bowl, such as The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937), during the era of the Great Depression, and, during World War II, Frank Capra, who had been an outstanding director of Hollywood comedies, made a series of documentaries under the title Why We Fight. The later French movement , cinema verité , made films that are much closer to journalism than to the careful compositions of the English documentary school. Though often untidy, they are fresh and realistic. Television deeply affected the development of the documentary film in two major ways: by providing a training ground for documentary directors and by building a supply of news film that could be adapted to documentary form. Point of Order (1964), an American documentary film that ran successfully in motion-picture theatres, was made from television films of the U.S. Senate hearings on the charges and countercharges made by Senator Sen. Joseph McCarthy and the U.S. Army.

The Vietnam War gave rise to a plethora of documentary essays, some of them politically committed, some attempting a balanced exploration of the situation. American cinema verité, sometimes called “direct cinema,” matured during the war, though not only in response to it. The first of the rock concert films, D.A. Pennebaker’s portrait of Bob Dylan, Don’t Look Back, first played theatrically in 1967, and that same year Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies, which exposed the horrendous conditions in a Massachusetts institution for the mentally ill, caused such an uproar that it was banned in that state. Excitement over public events and celebrations permitted this spate of documentaries to compete with fiction films for screens in larger cities. The films, which were often of inflammatory content, were kept off television but nonetheless influenced that medium tremendously. Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974), for example, a powerful though one-sided attack on U.S. Vietnam policy, had an enormous impact just because it could not be shown on television. Conversely, in the 1980s many documentaries were increasingly seen on television rather than on movie theatre screens. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), for example, a nine-and-a-half-hour examination of the Nazi concentration camps, received limited theatrical distribution in many areas because of its length but still managed to reach wide audiences through the distribution markets provided by the growing cable television and videocassette industries. Ken Burn’s Burns’s 11-hour film The Civil War (1990) was made specifically for public television in the United States, where it was widely watched.


In presenting a background, an environment, and characters who behave in a certain way, every motion picture may be said to be propaganda. The term is usually restricted, however, to pictures made deliberately to influence opinion or to argue a point. The During the 20th century, the most powerful and most consistent use of the cinema for propaganda was seen in the Soviet Union. After the 1917 revolution, Soviet films exploded on the screen with fervent conviction. Gradually, however, the pictures became lifeless, and in the 1930s and ’40s, during the Stalin regime, great directors such as Eisenstein and Aleksandr Dovzhenko worked under severe restraints. Nazi Germany produced its own brand of propaganda in the 1930s, the most striking being Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens (1936; Triumph of the Will, 1936), a terrifying spectacle of a huge Nazi rally that had in effect been staged for the film made about it.

Few filmmakers would admit to making propaganda, although, in effect, many so-called educational films and all advertising or promotional shorts, whether featuring consumer products, vacation sites, or religious sectsgroups, may be seen as examples of propaganda. This form of film bears a stigma because of its undisguised aim: to influence ideas and change behaviour. Cinematic artistry serves merely as a tool in propaganda.

The experimental and animated film

Films of all kinds may be the results of experiments or may contain attempts to overturn traditional genres, but the mode of experimental film has always been reserved for those endeavours produced and exhibited with the aim of questioning or revolutionizing the medium itself. The mode is by definition limited, because no real traditions can develop that do not soon cease to be experimental.

The first significant experimental film movements emerged during the 1920s, when sophisticated artists began to play with the film medium and when film societies, specialized theatres, journals, and museum lectures began to cater to audiences wanting to be disturbed or surprised. In France at that time a true avant-garde led by painters such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, and Salvador Dalí scorned the mass market and sought exhibition in clubs and museums. French directors of the time, including Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, and Abel Gance, experimented with narrative structure in their films but were still involved in creating feature films for theatrical release. Although these films, especially Gance’s Napoléon (1927), are full of experimental camera and editing techniques, they are not considered to be experimental films, because of their exhibition histories.

The experimental film has been forged out of two impulses. The first has stemmed from movements in the fine arts, such as Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism. Artists working in these movements have often shifted to cinema as new terrain for their ideas, radically rethinking the medium to make a personal or cultural point. The other impulse has been technological. The experimentalist, curious to see what the medium can do, has explored and expanded the basic processes and techniques involved in filmmaking. The early films of Méliès were precursors of this type of cinema.

The two impulses have rarely been seen separately. Luis Buñuel’s scandalous Un Chien andalou (The Andalusian Dog, 1928) arose as much from his curiosity about film and narrative as it did from his association with the Surrealist movement. The same can be said of Maya Deren, founder of the American avant-garde during the 1940s. Other artists have rejected narrative altogether and linked up with traditions in poetry and the visual arts. During the 1950s and ’60s, the heyday of the American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage manipulated focus, lighting, and sequence in a range of distinctively personal and often mythic films. His most radical technical strategy was to eliminate photography altogether—by scratching directly on film, gluing particles on the emulsion, and even growing algae on the film before copying it—in an attempt to express himself without the mediation of character, plot, or objects. Like other filmmakers of the period, he called on the theories of Action painting to justify his excesses.

Nonphotographic techniques can also be used to produce representational objects and even stories, as the experimentalist Len Lye proved with his short animated films of the 1930s. Laboriously drawing black-and-white (and later polychrome) figures on every film frame, he achieved a lightness of effect impossible in photography. Imaginative animation can also be used to demonstrate movements or changes that are difficult or impossible to photograph. It can produce striking, eye-catching effects or make a dull subject interesting and entertaining. In addition, information is often conveyed more quickly and clearly through animation than through live action. For these reasons, animated films are widely used for instructional and advertising or other promotional purposes. Animated films can, of course, exist simply to amuse, and the best-known works of animation are undoubtedly the cartoon comedies.

Whatever their length or purpose, animated films have a motion and characterization more succinct than live action. They can more freely contract or distort both time and space and defy the forces of gravity; they can be as realistic or as fantastic as their designers wish. The potentialities of animation have fascinated filmmakers since the earliest days of the motion picture.

The graphic style of early animated entertainments followed at first that of the cartoon strips of the period—hard outlines, little or no modeling, and the flat application of paint when colour was introduced. Walt Disney was responsible for improving the professionalism of the animated film and for getting it into the standard theatrical distribution system. He also helped to develop and popularize the animated feature film. Disney’s feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) contained about 477,000 photographed drawings; it was the leading international box-office favourite of 1938, and its sound track was dubbed into 13 foreign languages.

The symbolic political fable L’Idée (1934), by the Austro-Hungarian animator Berthold Bartosch, represented a rare use of animation to present a serious, as distinct from comic or legendary, subject; the approach was first achieved at feature length by the British husband-and-wife team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor in their adaptation of George Orwell’s novel Animal Farm (1954). More recently, cartoons were used on occasion in certain communist countries to make social statements in the guise of highly stylized anecdotes or fables. Some of the most advanced, most inventive work of this kind was done in countries such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In the United States, highly individual styles were pioneered in the 1940s by the United Productions of America (UPA) group under the direction of Stephen Bosustow. Among their creations were the series that featured Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing.

Later various kinds of graphic fantasy found expression through animation, and the older style of cartooning associated with Disney was completely overtaken by artists using a diversity of contemporary graphic styles, often extremely elaborate. The work of Jiří Trnka and Kařel Zeman exemplified the long-established Czech leadership in animated puppetry. Trnka’s films, such as Dobrý vojak Švejk (The Good Soldier Schweik, 1955), used stylized puppets in naturalistic settings to dramatize social satires, folk legends, and classics. Zeman’s work used both puppets and live actors moving within real sets.

Since the 1950s the experimental filmmakers Robert Breer and Norman McLaren, among others, have developed new styles and techniques of animation, including collage and pixilation (a technique that makes human movements look like those of animated automatons). In the 1960s the cartoon film appeared to lose ground as pure entertainment, except in the communist countries, but it has steadily advanced in the fields of education and public relations. The growing use of computers in graphic design has further emphasized this use of animationWhile the motion picture developed rapidly as a medium predominantly based on recording actual events and creating narrative fictional stories, from its early decades there were artists and filmmakers interested in exploring the new technology’s potential outside or beyond the mainstream modes. Although extremely varied in form and subject matter, their endeavours have been grouped together under the terms experimental film or avant-garde film, as well as under the broader rubrics of alternative cinema or art cinema.

Experimental filmmaking took form in the 1920s primarily in France, with significant contributions from elsewhere in Europe and also in the United States, where the photographer Paul Strand and the photographer-painter Charles Sheeler made one of the first such works, Manhatta (1921), a meditation on images of New York skyscrapers.

In France, artists associated with the post-World War I avant-garde movements Dada and Surrealism, among them Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, René Clair, and Man Ray, also made abstract, nonnarrative, and animated films. It was also possible in French film culture of that era for experimental works to be made and exhibited commercially, by such filmmakers as Louis Delluc, Jean Epstein, Marcel L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac, and Abel Gance, who went on to make the three-screen epic Napoléon (1927). The most famous avant-garde film of the era was Un Chien andalou (1929; An Andalusian Dog), a Surrealist work made in Paris by the Spaniards Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí.

A number of experimental films were made in the United States during the 1920s and ’30s, but the movement gained important new impetus with the emergence of Maya Deren, a former dancer who made her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), with Alexander Hammid. Deren’s films and writings influenced the development of post-World War II American avant-garde filmmaking with an emphasis on inner psychology, dream states, and exploration of the self. Stan Brakhage was another key figure of this movement, often called New American Cinema, the films of which could be made inexpensively through the wider availability of 16-mm and 8-mm cameras and film stock. The New American Cinema expanded during the 1960s to reflect the cultural transformations of the era, more explicitly taking on such themes as feminism, gay and Lesbian sexuality, and multicultural ethnicity. It reached its peak in the decade 1965–75, when the Pop artist Andy Warhol, among others, made experimental films that were exhibited commercially in theatres. In the 1970s one wing of the movement focused on the formal and structural aspects of film, while political concerns led others to shift more toward a hybrid style combining narrative fiction and documentary elements.

Animation has always played a significant role in experimental filmmaking. In the past, the process involved filming a series of still drawings or objects so that, when projected, an illusion of movement was created. With the development of computer technology, many animated films have been made from computer-generated images (CGI, also known simply as computer animation). Through the popularity of animated cartoons, the techniques of animation have typically played a larger part in commercial cinema than other aspects of avant-garde filmmaking.

Animation in fact developed in early cinema in a commercial context through the works of such animators as Émile Cohl in France, Winsor McCay in the United States, and Wladyslaw Aleksandrowicz Starewicz in Russia, the latter animating insect figures in narrative fiction tales. In Germany after World War I the artists Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling utilized the animation tables at the big UFA studio to make several of the first abstract animation films. While animation continued to interest experimental filmmakers over the following decades, the animated cartoon short became a fixture of exhibition programming, and cartoon characters Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Popeye the Sailor, Woody Woodpecker, and many more became legendary figures in popular culture. In the 1930s the Hollywood animation studios began to produce feature-length films, with Walt Disney leading the way with such classics as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Commercial motion-picture animation slumped in the 1960s as cartoons for children migrated to television, Hollywood studios cut back, and theatres no longer included cartoon shorts as part of their exhibition program. In the 1980s, however, the Walt Disney Company and other producers began to revive the animated feature. An early success, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), combined animation and live action and drew on nostalgia for Hollywood’s classic cartoons. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991) became the first animated feature to be nominated for a best-picture Oscar by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The Lion King (1994), also from Disney, became one of the most popular films in motion-picture history in terms of all-time box-office receipts.

In the 1990s CGI began to supplant traditional methods in commercial feature animation. Pixar Animation Studios produced the first feature-length completely computer-animated work, Toy Story (1995), distributed by Disney. According to the company, some 110,064 separate frames of computer animation were made, and 800,000 machine hours were needed overall, creating at a maximum rate of 3.5 minutes of screen time per week. Such later animated feature films that centred on the ogre Shrek (2001) and its sequels, from DreamWorks Pictures, and Monsters, Inc. (2001), from Pixar, attracted audiences from all age groups.

Japanese animation films, known as anime, which developed a worldwide audience in the 1990s on television, via the Internet, and through video and DVD releases, began to gain further attention through international theatrical distribution. More than his Hollywood counterparts, who utilized a realist style even in their animation fantasies, Japanese animator Miyazaki Hayao fused experimental and mainstream approaches with his dreamscape imagery in animated features Mononoke-hime (1997; Princess Mononoke), Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001; Spirited Away), and Hauru no ugoku shiro (2004; Howl’s Moving Castle).

Fictional genres

Motion pictures were the most important narrative art form of the 20th century, having taken on the functions served earlier by dime novels, serial novels, staged melodramas, wax museum displays, epic paintings, and professional storytelling. These earlier forms continued into the century and were supplemented by comic books, radio, and television, but it is the motion picture that came to dominate them all. Still, most films can be seen as descendants and variants of types of stories and storytelling that predated the invention of the cinema.

Always plagued by the need for a constant flow of new products to satisfy patrons returning to the movies week after week, film companies quickly began to rely on genres to help regularize production and to help presell their motion pictures. A studio that decided to make half a dozen police thrillers in one year could organize its production schedule efficiently, saving time and money by reusing sets, costumes, and other items. More important, the studio could assign the same personnel to certain genres, allowing writers, directors, technical crews, and actors to establish a routine that often resulted in quicker and improved filmmaking from work to work. In addition, it was found that the initial success of a new film was frequently enhanced by the popularity of previous films in the same genre. Viewers knew, to a great extent, what to expect from a genre film; they recognized the stars, or at least the characters, in it, and they were sensitive to music, lighting, and plot devices because of long familiarity with the type of story being portrayed.

Although the movies have created their own genres, most have been derived from prototypes in the other arts, especially literature. The western, for example, has important precursors in popular painting, Wild West shows, and pulp fiction. It does not matter, however, if audiences are unfamiliar with these other mediaforms; viewers quickly learn the rules of the genre, acquiring the ability to recognize the hero from his costume, to anticipate the final shoot-out, and so forth. Genres epitomize the dilemma of the fiction film , in that they promise to deliver to a waiting audience something that is similar to what that audience has enjoyed in the past and yet something that is also quite new and different. Often the most highly acclaimed films are those that invoke the conventions of a genre only to break them down in the pursuit of ideas and visions never attained in that form before. Examples include John Ford’s western The Searchers (1956), the comedies of Preston Sturges, Baz Luhrmann’s musical Moulin Rouge! (2001), Arthur Penn’s gangster film Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Robert Altman’s comedy M*A*S*H (1970).

Well-formed genres typically characterize the production of highly centralized studio systems such as those of Hollywood, Japan, or India. They play a lesser role in countries where individual producers dominate. In France, for example, most films are treated as single-effort productions, a practice that can permit far more revolutionary films to develop, as was seen during the French New Wave of the late 1950s and early ’60s. François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and other New Wave directors utterly overturned standards of storytelling and visualization to the delight of an international audience tired of old formulas. These directors were not oblivious to genres; rather, they played with conventions, mixing comedy and pathos, suspense and spectacle. Their highly personal films confirmed the importance of genre to the fictional mode.

Hollywood genres



The internal mutation of a genre reflects the changing tastes and mores of the public. The modern musical (Cabaret [1972]; All That Jazz, [1979]; Fame, [1980]; Chicago, [2002]) is typically more socially conscious and more serious than the colourful, vividly stylized, self-conscious musicals of the 1940s and ’50s (Singin’ in the Rain, [1952]; The Band Wagon, [1953]), which in turn are derived from, but upend, such early escapist masterpieces as 42nd Street (1933) and Top Hat (1935). Each phase can be seen as a response to the prevailing political, social, and economic conditions of its time.

The western is the genre most scrutinized for this evolution. Its classical phase (Stagecoach, [1939]) mutated after World War II into a variant capable of dealing with social problems (High Noon, [1952]) or with tortured heroes (Winchester 73, [1950]). In the 1960s the Italian “spaghetti western” announced a decadent phase. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) inverted character roles and culminated in a three-man gunfight. The western diminished in popularity during the last decades of the 20th century. However, significant contributions to the genre were made during that time, most notably by actor-director Clint Eastwood (Outlaw Josey Wales, [1976]; Unforgiven, [1992]). Audiences applauded both the attenuated spectacle of these films and their ironic perversion of the codes operating in the standard genre. Some scholars, citing the original Star Wars trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983) as an example, have argued that in the 1970s the mutation went so far as to leap across the boundary of subject matter toward science fiction. Although some science-fiction films may share fascinating properties with the western, it is unlikely that the production or reception of such films was consciously affected by westerns. Genres with strong, well-defined iconographies rarely consciously influence or combine with one another, even when they are clearly related. When Hollywood remade Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) into the western The Magnificent Seven (1960), production personnel and audiences were far more conscious of the new film’s relationship to previous westerns than of its similarities to Japanese samurai pictures.

The serial

While genres implicitly rely on an audience’s interest in and familiarity with earlier movies of a certain kind, the serial is a type of movie that explicitly requires an audience to return episode after episode. Also called the chapter-play or cliff-hanger, the serial flourished in the days of silent films, when moviegoing was a weekly habit. Perhaps the most famous were Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14) and Judex (1916) in France and the American series of the same period with Pearl White, such as The Perils of Pauline. Old serials have been were revived since from the 1960s onward as period pieces of popular art, with their improbable plots, exaggerated acting, and old-fashioned decor appealing to modern, sophisticated audiences. The French director Georges Franju made a modern pastiche Judex in 1963. Since In the late 1970s and ’80s new serials have appeared in the form of multiepisode sagas shown on television. Roots (1977) in the United States had its counterpart in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 16-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), which aired in installments on German television and then played as a serial in art house theatres houses around the world.

Films of art and the art cinema

For want of a better term, interpretation may be used to describe the type of motion picture in which a play, a ballet, an opera, or some other work of another art form is kept virtually intact and recorded by the camera and microphone. Adaptations of novels or plays re-create the work in motion-picture form, but interpretations merely give the performance a wider audience. The English director Tony Richardson’s version of Hamlet (1970) is an example of such a filmed record of a theatrical performance. Most motion pictures of operas and ballets may be classified as interpretations. Public and cable television have become became sponsors and disseminators of this type of film in the last quarter of the 20th century, although some interpretations, including Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), and numerous films of rock concerts continue to thrive thrived in theatrical distribution.

At one time the recording of an already established work of art was deemed “uncinematic” and thought to be a doubtful use of the medium. Such arguments were made as early as 1911 in response to the French Film d’Art company, which photographed high-class stage plays. More recentlyDuring the second half of the 20th century, however, imaginative and innovative cinematic techniques have been were employed to record operas, ballets, and stage plays. The complexity of the resulting hybrid works, such as Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron as filmed by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (1975), have made the validity of the early generalizations questionable. Important filmmakers, including Robert Altman in the United States, Eric Rohmer in France, and Carlos Saura in Spain, have turned turned in the last decades of the 20th century to the filming of works of other art forms as a means to open up the motion picture to new types of experiences.

The motion-picture recording of the acknowledged artistic successes of other media raises the important issue of the artistic stature of the cinema. As early as 1920 an audience of film connoisseurs could be identified in Europe. Ever since that time it has been possible to divide the cinema audience of any nation into a mass audience that seeks entertainment and a smaller group that is consciously concerned with artistic values in the motion picture. The films that appeal to these two groups, however, vary from one nation to another and from one period to another. The Hollywood comedies of the 1920s by Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others, for example, were originally popular entertainment, but they were later taken up by the art-film audience. The comedies of Jerry Lewis received little serious critical attention in their native United States but a great deal in France. The low-budget thrillers of directors who were adopted by auteur critics met a similar experience. The distinction between popular entertainment and high art seems indisputable in most instances, but confusions of fashion and conflicts in artistic standards resulting from experiment and change make it difficult to generalize about them.

Although there may be disagreements over what constitutes cinematic art, certain institutions have developed that foster the art of film. In the United States after World War II, “art houses” catered to sophisticated audiences in large cities, screening primarily European films, such as those directed by Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel, and Antonioni. The distribution of 16-mm films to museums and college campuses sparked interest in avant-garde films as well. In one sense, art films represent a genre; the audience that seeks them out has precise expectations which that producers have been known to exploit. In 1951 Daiei films of Japan, for example, expressly aimed to conquer the export market by winning awards at international festivals. The company, which generally produced cheap domestic genre motion pictures, reserved a portion of its budget to make lavish historical spectacles, such as Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953), that would appeal to the art audience outside of Japan. The art film usually cannot be characterized in advance, however; it does not follow prescribed conventions but prides and sells itself on its uniqueness or distinctiveness.

The study and appreciation of motion pictures

Criticism Within the first two decades of motion pictures generally follows the pattern of the other arts, though it has some peculiar features. In the criticism of painting, music, theatre, and literature, some technical knowledge of the medium has generally been required. Motion-picture reviewers, however, rarely have any filmmaking experience. A lack of experience in filmmaking is not necessarily a handicap. Film is such a complex medium that a technician is unlikely to be expert in every aspect of it and may well be overly conscious of his specialty. In addition, even though the technique is complex, the results are plain to view, and an intelligent critic may well appreciate such technicalities as fine camera work, tight editing, authentic location shooting, or competent direction without knowing in detail how the result was achieved.

Besides reviews in the daily and weekly press, there are specialized monthlies and quarterlies that engage scholars, students, and enthusiasts of the medium. In the United States Film Quarterly, Wide Angle, and Cinema Journal have great influence, just as Screen does in England and Bianco e nero in Italy. France has made cinema a central part of its culture. The French Cahiers du cinéma sustains several times the circulation of the U.S. Film Quarterly and is rivaled by several other serious journals and countless magazines. Aiming at a less specialized but still avid film audience, glossy magazines such as Premiere and American Film in the United States and Sight and Sound in England mix serious reviews, interviews, and features. There are similar publications in Poland and India. Popular magazines, which lure a large readership with their blend of pictures and gossip, have always been a part of movie culture, as have trade papers such as Variety, one of the most reliable and thorough sources of information about the international film business.

Books about the cinema range from serious studies of its economic, sociological, and technical aspects to light memoirs, ephemeral gossip, and innumerable biographies and autobiographies of actresses, actors, producers, and directors. Monumental film histories and theories written by Eisenstein, Pudovkin, André Bazin, Lewis Jacobs, Georges Sadoul, and others have triggered a remarkable industry of book publishing on these topics in many countries. The U.S.-based Society for Cinema Studies enrolls more than 500 teachers of film, who read these books and recommend titles to students. Most major university libraries now routinely collect film books and periodicals, although certain centres of research house the most complete collections. In the English-speaking world these include the British Film Institute, the special collections libraries at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills, California, and the Lincoln Center Library in New York City. Other institutions house important documentation along with archives of films. The International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, is particularly rich in material on the early cinema, while the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison has gathered data pertaining to its collection of films produced by Warner Brothers, RKO, and United Artists, a wide range of discussion about the medium had developed, at many levels of appreciation and analysis—newspaper reviews, professional trade periodicals, books on production technique, fan magazines, and gossip columns, among others. By the World War I era there were even scholarly monographs and the first university courses. In the 1930s archives were founded on the model of, and sometimes associated with, art museums, to collect films for posterity and make important works available for public appreciation. As new media have emerged, sometimes rivaling motion pictures in popularity, they have nevertheless offered additional venues for commentary on many aspects of film.

At the beginning of the 21st century, for example, the Internet provided uncounted thousands of Web sites for information and opinions on motion pictures, stars, directors, the industry, film history, and much more. Both broadcast and cable television channels offered regular programming and frequent specials with news on the lives of actors and the making of new films. Some magazines were devoted entirely to covering the entertainment media, while nearly every popular periodical and newspaper gave coverage to motion-picture personalities, new films, and industry developments. Interest in major Hollywood blockbusters extended to the reporting of how these mega-releases fared each weekend at the box office, with films ranked by income as if they were competing in a sporting event. (Some of this coverage could be explained as a promotional effort by media conglomerates that operate movie studios along with newspapers, television stations, and Internet sites.)

Film studies in universities and colleges greatly expanded beginning in the 1970s, an expansion based in part on a growing recognition that the medium’s artistic achievements were worthy of study and also on the view that its cultural influence in conveying political and social attitudes to wide audiences required analysis and critique. Teaching and scholarship—assisted by the growing availability of older works through archives, television and cable programming, and video and DVD release—explored social issues such as how race, class, and gender were represented in films. Motion-picture genres, directors and stars, industrial practices, and national cinemas became subjects for courses of study and research. University presses annually published dozens of scholarly books on film history, theory, and aesthetics, as well as sponsoring or distributing academic journals.

Preservation of film

The permanence of the motion-picture medium—the fact that films film can be stored and reproduced indefinitely—not indefinitely—makes it not only makes it an enduring theatrical art but also a vivid record of past life. Despite the fact that motion pictures can theoretically last forever, relatively few have been preserved, and many of these are in poor condition. One reason is that inflammable nitrate film stock, which was generally used until the 1940s, when it was replaced by acetate, is chemically unstable. Also, as film runs through a projector, it is eventually worn, scratched, or damaged. Still another factor is that commercial conditions of filmmaking discouraged preservation; the stress was on the present and the future, not on preservation of the past. Early motion pictures were best preserved when filmmakers such as Charlie Chaplin or and Walt Disney had control over their own work and a personal interest in preserving and representing it. During the 1960s and ’70s, however, there developed a tremendous interest in old movies. Revival houses sprang up in most major U.S. American cities, and distribution companies were established solely for the reissue of old films.

Film preservation that allows access to old motion pictures is costly, requiring careful scientific control of storage conditions. Few private organizations or governments have been willing to spend the necessary funds. The earliest film archive was the Swedish Film History Collection begun in 1933. Archives in Paris, London, and New York City followed shortly afterward. An international federation (FIAF; Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film) was founded , with headquarters in Paris, was founded in 1938.

The archivists’ problems are manyArchivists of film face many problems: first, selecting the motion pictures to be preserved; second, acquiring copies (a negative or a fine-grain positive if possible) in good condition; third, storing them under the best-possible conditions of temperature and humidity; fourth, cataloging them and keeping some record of their contents; and fifth, allowing them to be viewed or letting stills or extracts be taken , without damaging the copies. The ideal solution to the problem of choice would be to preserve everything, but the cost would be prohibitive. Even with a limited selection, acquisition and storage are expensive and difficult, and nitrate film requires regular testing to determine whether it has deteriorated enough to require copying.

The preservation of colour films has become presented perhaps the most serious problemdifficulties. While Technicolor films (mostly made before 1953) can be reproduced faithfully and endlessly, virtually all colour films made since 1953 are subject to fading that can be arrested only by storing prints at very low temperatures. Video technology has been used to help preserve some colour motion pictures; computer-driven viewers are able to read the original tints of films and reproduce them on videotape. Nevertheless, until the development of a suitable and inexpensive base onto which colour films can be transferred, the majority of colour motion pictures made after 1953 will continue to deteriorate.

Film societies, film festivals, and awards

Predating and indispensable to the academic study of motion pictures are the linked phenomena of film societies and film festivals. These social institutions provided readership for film journals and serious film books, which eventually led to the acceptance of film study in universities. The first and most lasting function of film societies has been to foster the appreciation of the art of film. The second function has been to emphasize the social dimension of film in culture, sometimes using the film as a prop for the examination and propagation of moral and political ideas.

These two directions were evident by the 1920s. Louis Delluc and Ricciotto Canudo are credited with forming the first important ciné-club (as such societies are frequently were called, especially when devoted to film art). The list of adherents to these clubs contains many luminaries from the film world (Epstein, Gance, L’Herbier, Germaine Dulac) and the other arts (Colette, André Gide). The Film Society of London, for example, was founded in 1925 by H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Augustus John, John Maynard Keynes, and other dignitaries others who wanted to see French, German, and Soviet pictures that commercial exhibitors did not handle. The movement spread rapidly, and cinema was included in several international art forums, beginning with the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes that launched Art Deco. There, for several months, a history of cinema played in the Grand Palais and was accompanied by lectures on technique and appreciation of motion pictures.

Specialized theatres in major cities began to cater to ciné-club audiences. One of Jean Renoir’s first films, La Petite Marchande d’allumettes (1928; The Little Match Girl), 1928) was actually commissioned by a theatre and shot on its premises. Ciné-clubs, too, clubs sponsored films made by their own members, too, until the invention of sound made such amateur productions too expensive and technically intricate.

The political power of film societies was first recognized by Léon Moussinac, an official in Delluc’s club who traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1920s and recognized immediately the importance of motion pictures in the education of the masses. Through his writing and organization, he was responsible for thousands of “average citizens” joining film clubs that featured controversial and sometimes revolutionary films. In 1928 Les Amis de Spartacus purportedly enrolled more than 75,000 subscribers. The mayor of Paris found it necessary to prohibit some of their meetings, the most important being a scheduled appearance by Eisenstein, whose Bronenosets Potyomkin (1925; Battleship Potemkin (1925) was officially banned in some countries.

In the 1930s enthusiasm for film societies waned, perhaps because of the Great Depression, although it was in this decade that the Roman Catholic church Church developed networks of societies for the projection and discussion of exemplary films, particularly in parishes in Italy and France. After World War II a resurgence of film societies occurred internationally. The French film theorist André Bazin was associated with both an artistic club headed by Jean Cocteau and a trade union club, indicating that the old split between “film art” and “film and social issues” remained. In the United States, clubs were devoted primarily to film art, fostering the American underground film movement. This postwar flourishing must be credited in part to the marketing of convenient 16-mm equipment.

The importance of such societies inevitably declined after universities and museums regularly began to include motion pictures as part of their collections, and in most countries film societies eventually attached themselves to universities. In The videocassette, introduced in the 1980s the availability of videocassettes further , and the DVD, introduced in the ’90s, dissolved the strength of the ciné-club by allowing would-be members to select their own films for viewing at times convenient to them model by putting control of the selection and viewing time in the hands of individual viewers.

Film festivals provide a forum for promotion and recognition of artistic achievements of national film industries. The first festival was founded at Venice in 1932. It remained unique until after World War II, when the festival at Cannes, France, was founded , and in 1939 (or, effectively, 1946, because the festival was interrupted by World War II). At this point film festivals began to assume their modern-day importanceeconomic significance. Struggling nations, rebuilding their shattered film industries after World War II, saw in festivals a chance for world recognition. The growing interest everywhere in film imports made the festivals an international marketplace for distributors. Festivals were initiated at Berlin, Moscow, Karlovy Vary (Czechoslovakia), London, Toronto, San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City. Through the early 1960s the American film industry remained wary of festivals; films that won festival awards did not necessarily do well at the box office, though a poor reaction at a festival might reduce the audience for a serious film. After 1965, however, distributor attitudes changed as investments increased in films for specialized audiences, particularly in “foreign” films backed by American companies, and favourable critical acclaim became a vital promotional aid. New festivals in Telluride, Colorado, and The Telluride Film Festival (Telluride, Colo.) and the Sundance Film Festival (Park City, Utah (the Sundance Film Festival organized by the Sundance Institute founded by Robert Redford) , took a pivotal role in the success of independent films since the 1970s. Interest in the festivals persisted, and they continued to increase in number and in size. By the early 21st century there were , more than 700 were scheduled annually across the globe.

Film festivals serve several functions. They Most important, they provide an international marketplace where producers and distributors can exchange ideas, view films, and sign contracts. For example, the phenomenon of the international coproduction, so important to European cinema, arose at the Cannes festivals of the late 1940s. Festivals also provide an opportunity for fans to see popular stars and other celebrities. A further function of film festivals has been to provide a cultural rendezvous for those interested in the art and influence of the movies. Festivals often showcase new films or movements, such as when the Venice festivals of the early 1950s introduced the stunning accomplishments of the Japanese film industry, which had been previously unknown in the West. At other times festivals are sites of artistic and political contention. At the Cannes festivals of 1958 and 1959, for example, advocates and opponents of the French New Wave heatedly exchanged diatribes and manifestos. A decade later several key New Wave directors, most notably Truffaut and Godard, helped close the festival to protest government policies during the events of May 1968 . The Venice film festival, generally deemed more serious and less commercial than Cannes, ceased its juried competition from 1969 to 1979 because of political strife.Festivals are regulated by the Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films (FIAPF), which licenses those who want to award prizes. The competition that is associated with most festivals is in many instances, however, only a publicity device. Film screenings are often not even announced. The real purpose of the festival is to allow distributors to view and bid on the latest moviesto protest government policies. Most festivals are also associated with a competition, although prizes are in many instances bestowed for the publicity they draw rather than to guide producers and distributors in their dealmaking.

The best-known of all competitionsfilm-industry prizes, the Academy AwardsAward, does not take place at is not associated with a festival at all. The American industry, with its overwhelming control of the world’s screens, long had virtually no interest in film awards except for the awards voted each year since 1929 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The academy, which represents various artistic and technical disciplines, originally intended its annual awards as modest peer-group citations within the tightly knit Hollywood industry. After media coverage created widespread interest, however, there was an increase in box-office revenues for winning films, and the Academy Awards, or “OscarsOscars, became valuable in merchandising. The prestige of the academy’s artistic judgments, however, has failed to keep pace with its economic power. Serious students of film tend to place more credence in the awards of the New York Film Critics Circle (founded in 1935) and the National Society of Film Critics (1966), as well as in the oldest U.S. reviewing organization, the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures (1909).