Film

Film. Film is a term for the visual medium also known as motion pictures, cinema, or the movies.The medium's history involves its various aspects as a technology, an industry, an art form, and a means of delivering entertainment and information to spectators in theaters and at home. From its emergence in the 1890s, the film industry became in the twentieth century a major component of U.S. cultural life and a dominant force in global entertainment production.

A New Technology—A New Entertainment Medium

. Film as a technology developed out of several nineteenth‐century scientific pursuits. One was an interest in a visual phenomenon then known as “persistence of vision,” which described the eye's retention of visual images. A sequence of individual still pictures, when set in motion, was found to give an illusion of movement. A further endeavor, building on the technology of still photography, sought to record movement as a means of description and analysis.

A major advance occurred in the 1870s in California when the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, hired by railroad tycoon Leland Stanford to settle a bet whether racehorses ever had all four feet off the ground, took a sequence of photographs that demonstrated that a galloping horse did at times have all four feet off the ground. In the 1880s such sequence photography became more practical when the inventor George Eastman introduced roll “film” made of a synthetic plastic material, celluloid, to replace individual glass plates.

Among inventors working simultaneously in several countries, Thomas Edison employed William K.L. Dickson to construct machines for recording and viewing moving images. By 1891 these machines, called the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope, respectively, were in operation. In 1893 the first public exhibition of motion pictures took place, although only one viewer at a time could watch through Edison's “peephole” device. Projection machines for larger audiences were soon introduced in Europe (1895) and the United States (1896).

Early motion picture exhibitions took place as part of vaudeville programs, at carnivals and fairgrounds, and in lecture halls and churches. Most films ran ten minutes or less, reflecting the amount of film that could be wound on a standard reel. The visual presentation lacked both recorded color and sound, although these were often provided through color tinting of prints and musical accompaniment. Film subjects included travel scenes, newsworthy events, comedies, trick films (using the medium's technology, for example, to make trains appear to run backward), and short narratives. The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed by Edwin S. Porter for Edison's company, was a popular success and demonstrated the medium's commercial entertainment potential.

The scale of film exhibition changed around 1905 when entrepreneurs began opening storefront theaters in urban immigrant and working‐class districts. These nickelodeons, so called because they charged five cents for admission, fostered film production but also called forth public debate about film content and allegedly unsafe exhibition conditions. In 1908 Edison, among others, organized the Motion Picture Patents Company to pool patents and assert control over production, distribution, and exhibition, with a goal of eliminating cheap theaters and raising admission prices. Excluded companies, however, called independents, continued to thrive and innovated in longer feature‐film production. In 1915 a federal district court ruled in a lawsuit that the Patents Company had attempted illegally to restrain trade in violation of antitrust legislation. Its appeals failing, the company dissolved in 1918.

After 1910, film production, which had been centered in New York City, began to shift to southern California, which offered more sunlight, more varied terrain, and lower wage scales. Hollywood, a Los Angeles suburb, became synonymous with the film industry and American movie culture. During World War I, with European film production disrupted, U.S. films dominated world markets. D.W. Griffith directed The Birth of a Nation (1915), a three‐hour historical epic on the Civil War and Reconstruction that set new standards for cinematic spectacle but also aroused lasting controversy over its racist themes. Charlie Chaplin became world famous as the Tramp in silent comedies.

The 1920s and 1930s: Heyday of the Studio System

. During the 1920s Hollywood perfected a so‐called studio system with a few major, vertically integrated companies controlling the bulk of production, distribution, and exhibition. Producing around six hundred films per year, the industry organized its output around stars and genres. Films were sold and promoted on the basis of their star performers and genre category, such as western, mystery, horror, romance, or comedy. Stars like Greta Garbo and Rudolph Valentino became public icons who embodied Hollywood glamour and screen romance. The comedies of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy remain classics.

On the technological front, the mid‐1920s saw the introduction of synchronized recorded sound, eventually standardized in a system that recorded sound directly onto the celluloid film strip. The shift to sound was almost complete by 1930. Although recorded color was less prevalent, the Technicolor process came into use in the 1930s and the number of color films gradually increased.

The advent of sound coincided with the Great Depression, and the technological and cultural transformations of the early 1930s created new controversies over movie content and the medium's social role. Agitation by religious groups and social reformers led to industry self‐regulation in the form of a Production Code, introduced in 1930 and strengthened by establishment of a Production Code Administration in 1934. Although the Depression sent several major companies into receivership, the film industry remained remarkably stable during the 1930s. The major companies—Paramount, Warner Bros., Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer, and RKO (Radio‐Keith‐Orpheum), along with Universal, Columbia, and United Artists—all survived, while Fox grew stronger when it was taken over by a smaller company and became Twentieth Century–Fox. Walt Disney emerged as a leader in film animation.

The 1930s are often viewed as Hollywood's “Golden Age”. Sound fostered verbal comedy—at which the Marx Brothers excelled—musicals, and urban crime films as new genres, while filmmakers such as Frank Capra and John Ford shaped cultural and historical myths amid growing recognition of popular entertainment's social significance. Two movies of 1939—Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz—now rank as much‐loved icons of American popular film. Already a magnet for foreign film talent, Hollywood took on greater international character as a haven for refugees from European fascism.

As awareness of film's role in propaganda and persuasion increased, the U.S. government began producing documentary films, starting with two on agricultural and environmental issues, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937). Additionally, in 1938 the Justice Department, in United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., et al., known as the Paramount case, charged the vertically integrated major film companies with violating antitrust laws. In 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in the government's favor, ordering the movie firms to divest their theater ownership.

From World War II through the 1970s

. During World War II the film industry, considered vital to national morale, functioned as usual, with some supervision over movie content by the Office of War Information. Leading directors, including Capra, Ford, John Huston, and William Wyler, served in the armed forces and made military documentaries. Capra produced the Why We Fight series of seven films that explained U.S. war aims to service personnel and the public. Movie attendance soared during the war and reached its all‐time peak in 1946.

But the postwar years brought multiple difficulties for the industry. Besides the Paramount case decision, which forced fundamental changes in business practices, the film world was divided beginning in 1947 by Congressional investigations into alleged communist infiltration, which led to an industrywide blacklist. Social and demographic transformations produced a decline in movie attendance, which accelerated as television gained ground during the 1950s.

In the early 1950s film companies sought to combat audience loss by introducing technological innovations, including three dimensionality, or 3–D, and widescreen processes, such as CinemaScope, that accentuated the difference from television's then small, black‐and‐white image. 3–D proved a short‐lived fad, but wider screen images (although not CinemaScope) became standard. Nevertheless, by 1957 attendance figures were half the 1946 total, and by 1964 they had fallen by 75 percent from the peak year.

Still, even if displaced as the leading mass medium, movies retained their aura of glamour and celebrity, and 1950s movie stars such as James Dean and Marilyn Monroe became cultural icons comparable to Valentino and Garbo in the silent era. As social mores changed, the industry abandoned its Motion Picture Production Code in the mid‐1960s and replaced it with a ratings system that evaluated sexual subject matter. The late 1960s were a major watershed as a generation of filmmakers and producers active since the silent years passed from the scene. In 1969–1970 many film companies sustained some of the greatest financial losses in their histories and several were taken over by nonentertainment conglomerates.

Amid business turmoil came signs of a revival. The studio system's demise gave film directors greater leeway to pursue artistic visions. The postwar generation took new interest in the medium and gave it new prominence through scholarly studies and cultural criticism. Open to fresh talent, the industry introduced promising young filmmakers such as Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. The early 1970s became to some observers a second “golden age” of stylistic innovation and social engagement.

The film industry also modernized its distribution strategies, utilizing television advertising and releasing major films in hundreds of theaters simultaneously. This tactic, highlighted by the success of Jaws (1975), countered the artistic trends of the early 1970s by emphasizing “blockbuster” elements such as action‐adventure stories and special‐effects spectacle. Filmmakers George Lucas with Star Wars (1977) and Steven Spielberg with E.T.—The Extra‐Terrestrial (1982) became leading practitioners of the new blockbuster film and collaborated as producer and director, respectively, on the Indiana Jones series, three films modeled on children's matinee serials featuring an intrepid archaeologist.

Since 1980: New Markets, New Technologies

. Movies further prospered in the 1980s as the advent of cable television networks and video cassette recorders (VCRs) as home entertainment devices provided new outlets for film viewing. The number of theater screens increased with the construction of new multiscreen, or multiplex, cinemas, and release patterns led to major films appearing simultaneously on several thousand screens nationwide. Movies became a linchpin of new media empires encompassing film, television, publishing and music products, distribution systems, retail outlets, theaters (the Paramount case rulings had been vacated in the 1980s), and even sports teams.

As the major companies concentrated on so‐called high‐concept works with the potential for multiple revenue streams—including games, toys, and theme‐park rides—an independent film movement sprang up in the late 1970s and 1980s, with assistance from organizations such as the Independent Film Project, based in New York, and actor Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah. A niche market developed for these low‐budget works that, by the 1990s, had become to some extent a subsidiary enterprise for the major firms. Meanwhile, mainstream films relied on advances in computer‐generated imagery and ever‐higher production budgets, exceeding $200 million with Titanic (1997), to expand their commitment to special‐effects spectacles.

Critics and social analysts have been assessing the impact of movies on American society almost since their beginnings. While recent scholarly opinion has viewed the medium as a champion of dominant ideologies and the status quo, historically film has more often been feared as an agent of change and a threat to social stability. Both perspectives have validity. As a visual, story‐telling medium, film brought spectators glimpses of unfamiliar behaviors, products, and places and fostered knowledge of other lives and unaccustomed possibilities. But if the movie experience destabilized static social structures, it also bound its audiences to visions of felicity that stimulated the desire not to overthrow, but to be included. Linked to cultures of modernity, celebrity, and consumption, movies have functioned simultaneously as transgressors and conservators in American social life.
See also Anticommunism; Censorship; Consumer Culture; Foreign Relations: The Cultural Dimension; Modernist Culture; Multinational Enterprises; Popular Culture.

Bibliography

Larry Ceplair and and Steven Englund , The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960, 1980.
David Bordwell,, Janet Staiger,, and and Kristin Thompson , The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960, 1985.
Thomas Schatz , The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era, 1988.
Charles Musser , The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, 1990.
Miriam Hansen , Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film, 1991.
Jeanine Basinger , A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960, 1993.
Ed Guerrero , Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, 1993.
Robert Sklar , Movie‐Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, 1975, rev. ed., 1994.
Francis G. Couvares, ed., Movie Censorship and American Culture, 1996.

Robert Sklar