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Cinema of the United States

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Films

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   Much like American popular music, the cinema of the United States has
   had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th
   century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the
   silent era, Classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the
   contemporary period (after 1980).

History

Early development

   Justus D. Barnes in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery
   Enlarge
   Justus D. Barnes in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery

   The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing
   motion was Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs of a running
   horse, which he captured in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still
   cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors
   everywhere to attempt forming devices that would similarly capture such
   motion. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to
   produce such a device, the kinetoscope, whose heavy-handed patent
   enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives.

   In the United States, the first exhibitions of films for large
   audiences typically followed the intermissions in vaudeville shows.
   Entrepreneurs began travelling to exhibit their films, bringing to the
   world the first forays into dramatic filmmaking. The first huge success
   of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to
   its point, was The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter.

Rise of Hollywood

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   In early 1910, director D.W. Griffith was sent by the Biograph Company
   to the west coast with his acting troop consisting of actors Blanche
   Sweet, Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and others. They
   started filming on a vacant lot near Georgia Street in downtown Los
   Angeles. The company decided while there to explore new territories and
   travelled several miles north to a little village that was friendly and
   enjoyed the movie company filming there. This place was called "
   Hollywood". Griffith then filmed the first movie ever shot in
   Hollywood, In Old California, a Biograph melodrama about California in
   the 1800s, while it belonged to Mexico. Biograph stayed there for
   months and made several films before returning to New York. After
   hearing about this wonderful place, in 1913 many movie-makers headed
   west to avoid the fees imposed by Thomas Edison, who owned patents on
   the movie-making process. In Los Angeles, California, the studios and
   Hollywood grew. Before World War I, movies were made in several U.S.
   cities, but filmmakers gravitated to southern California as the
   industry developed. They were attracted by the mild climate and
   reliable sunlight, which made it possible to film movies outdoors
   year-round, and by the varied scenery that was available. There are
   several starting points for American cinema, but it was Griffith's
   Birth of a Nation that pioneered the filmic vocabulary that still
   dominates celluoid to this day.

   In the early 1900s, when the medium was new, many immigrants,
   particularly Jews, found employment in the U.S. film industry. Kept out
   of other occupations by religious prejudice, they were able to make
   their mark in a brand-new business: the exhibition of short films in
   storefront theaters called nickelodeons, after their admission price of
   a nickel (five cents). Within a few years, ambitious men like Samuel
   Goldwyn, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Louis B. Mayer, and the Warner
   Brothers (Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack) had switched to the
   production side of the business. Soon they were the heads of a new kind
   of enterprise: the movie studio. (It is worth noting that the US had at
   least one female director, producer and studio head in these early
   years, Alice Guy Blaché.) They also set the stage for the industry's
   internationalism; the industry is often accused of Amero-centric
   provincialism, but simultaneously employs a huge number of foreign-born
   talent: from Swedish actress Greta Garbo to Australian Nicole Kidman,
   from Hungarian director Michael Curtiz to Mexican director Alfonso
   Cuarón.

   Other moviemakers arrived from Europe after World War I: directors like
   Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, and Jean Renoir; and
   actors like Rudolph Valentino, Marlene Dietrich, Ronald Colman, and
   Charles Boyer. They joined a homegrown supply of actors--lured west
   from the New York City stage after the introduction of sound films--to
   form one of the 20th century's most remarkable growth industries. At
   motion pictures' height of popularity in the mid- 1940s, the studios
   were cranking out a total of about 400 movies a year, seen by an
   audience of 90 million Americans per week.

Parallel foreign-language versions

   In the early times of talkies, American studios found that their sound
   productions were rejected in foreign-language markets and even among
   speakers of other dialects of English. The synchronization technology
   was still too primitive for dubbing. One of the solutions was the
   parallel foreign-language versions. Around 1930, the American companies
   opened a studio in Joinville-le-Pont, France, where the same sets and
   wardrobe and even mass scenes were used for different time-sharing
   crews. Also, foreign unemployed actors, playwrights and winners of
   photogenia contests were chosen and brought to Hollywood, where they
   shot parallel versions of the English-language films. These parallel
   versions had a lower budget, were shot at night and were directed by
   second-line American directors who did not speak the foreign language.
   The Spanish-language crews included people like Luis Buñuel, Enrique
   Jardiel Poncela, Xavier Cugat and Edgar Neville. The productions were
   not very successful in their intended markets:
     * The lower budgets were apparent.
     * Many theatre actors had no previous experience in cinema.
     * The original movies were often second-rate themselves, since
       studios expected that the top productions would sell by themselves.
     * The mix of foreign accents (Castilian, Mexican, Chilean for example
       in the Spanish case) was odd for the audiences.
     * Some markets lacked sound-equipped theaters.

   In spite of this, some productions like the Spanish version of Dracula
   compare favorably with the original. By the mid-1930s, synchronization
   had advanced enough for dubbing to become usual.

Golden Age of Hollywood

   During the so-called Golden Age of Hollywood, which lasted from the
   virtual end of the silent era in the late 1920s to towards the end of
   the 1940s, movies issued from the Hollywood studios like the cars
   rolling off Henry Ford's assembly lines. No two movies were exactly the
   same, but most followed a formula: Western, slapstick comedy, film
   noir, musical, animated cartoon, biopic (biographical picture), etc,
   and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same
   studio - for instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always
   worked on MGM films, Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for
   twenty years, Cecil B. De Mille's films were almost all made at
   Paramount, director Henry King's films were mostly made for
   Twentieth-Century Fox, etc. And one could usually guess which studio
   made which film, largely because of the actors who appeared in it. Each
   studio had its own style and characteristic touches which made it
   possible to know this - a trait that does not exist today. Yet each
   movie was a little different, and, unlike the craftsmen who made cars,
   many of the people who made movies were artists. For example, To Have
   and Have Not (1944) is famous not only for the first pairing of actors
   Humphrey Bogart ( 1899- 1957) and Lauren Bacall ( 1924- ) but also for
   being written by two future winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature:
   Ernest Hemingway ( 1899- 1961), author of the novel on which the script
   was nominally based, and William Faulkner ( 1897- 1962), who worked on
   the screen adaptation.

   Moviemaking was still a business, however, and motion picture companies
   made money by operating under the so-called studio system. The major
   studios kept thousands of people on salary--actors, producers,
   directors, writers, stuntmen, craftspersons, and technicians. And they
   owned hundreds of theaters in cities and towns across the
   nation--theaters that showed their films and that were always in need
   of fresh material.

   Many film historians have remarked upon the many great works of cinema
   that emerged from this period of highly regimented filmmaking. One
   reason this was possible is that, with so many movies being made, not
   every one had to be a big hit. A studio could gamble on a medium-budget
   feature with a good script and relatively unknown actors: Citizen Kane,
   directed by Orson Welles ( 1915- 1985) and widely regarded as one of
   the greatest movies of all time, fits that description. In other cases,
   strong-willed directors like Howard Hawks ( 1896- 1977) and Frank Capra
   ( 1897- 1991) battled the studios in order to achieve their artistic
   visions. The apogee of the studio system may have been the year 1939,
   which saw the release of such classics as The Wizard of Oz, Gone with
   the Wind, Stagecoach, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Only Angels Have
   Wings, Ninotchka, and Midnight. Among the other films in the Golden Age
   period that remain classics to the present day: Casablanca, It's a
   Wonderful Life, the original King Kong, and Snow White and the Seven
   Dwarfs.

Decline of the studio system

   The studio system and the Golden Age of Hollywood itself succumbed to
   two forces in the late 1940s: (1) a federal antitrust action that
   separated the production of films from their exhibition; and (2) the
   advent of television. As a result of that antitrust act, actors and
   technical staff were gradually released from their contracts by movie
   studios. Now, each film made by a studio could have an entirely
   different cast and creative team, resulting in the gradual loss of all
   those "characteristics" which made MGM, Paramount, Universal, Columbia,
   RKO, and Twentieth-Century Fox films immediately identifiable. But
   certain movie people, such as Cecil B. DeMille, either remained
   contract artists till the end of their careers or used the same
   creative teams on their films, so that a DeMille film still looked like
   one whether it was made in 1932 or 1956. The number of movies being
   made dropped, even as the average budget soared, marking a change in
   strategy for the industry. Studios now aimed to produce entertainment
   that could not be offered by television: spectacular, larger-than-life
   productions, while others would lose the rights to their theatrical
   film libraries to other companies to sell to television.

   Although television broke the movie industry's hegemony in American
   entertainment, the rise of television would prove advantageous, in its
   way, to the movies. This is because public opinion about the quality of
   television content soon declined, and by contrast, cinema's status
   began to be regarded more and more as a serious art form as worthy of
   respect and study as the fine arts. This was complemented with the
   Miracle Decision in which the Supreme Court of the United States
   reversed its earlier position and stated that motion pictures were an
   artform entitled to the protection of the First amendment.

The 'New Hollywood' and Post-classical cinema

   'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods
   of storytelling in the New Hollywood. It has been argued that new
   approaches to drama and characterization played upon audience
   expectations acquired in the classical period: chronology may be
   scrambled, storylines may feature " twist endings", and lines between
   the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The roots of
   post-classical storytelling may be seen in film noir, in Rebel Without
   a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's storyline-shattering Psycho.

   'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the period following
   the decline of the studio system in the '50s and '60s and the end of
   the production code. It is defined by a greater tendency to dramatize
   such things as sexuality and violence.

   'New Hollywood' is a term used to describe the emergence of a new
   generation of film school-trained directors who had absorbed the
   techniques developed in Europe in the 1960s. Filmmakers like Francis
   Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian de Palma, Martin Scorsese, and Steven
   Spielberg came to produce fare that paid homage to the history of film,
   and developed upon existing genres and techniques. In the early 1970s,
   their films were often both critically acclaimed and commercially
   successful. While the early New Hollywood films like Bonnie and Clyde
   and Easy Rider had been relatively low-budget affairs with amoral
   heroes and increased sexuality and violence, the enormous success
   enjoyed by Coppola, Spielberg and Lucas with The Godfather, Jaws, and
   Star Wars, respectively helped to give rise to the modern "
   blockbuster", and induced studios to focus ever more heavily on trying
   to produce enormous hits.

Blockbusters

   The drive to produce spectacle on the movie screen has largely shaped
   American cinema ever since. Spectacular epics which took advantage of
   new widescreen processes had been increasingly popular from the 1950s
   onwards. Since then, American films have become increasingly divided
   into two categories: blockbusters and independent films. Studios have
   focused on relying on a handful of extremely expensive releases every
   year in order to remain profitable. Such blockbusters emphasize
   spectacle, star power, and high production value, all of which entail
   an enormous budget. Blockbusters typically rely upon star power and
   massive advertising to attract a huge audience. A successful
   blockbuster will attract an audience large enough to offset production
   costs and reap considerable profits. Such productions carry a
   substantial risk of failure, and most studios release blockbusters that
   both over- and underperform in a year.

Independent film

   Studios supplement these movies with independent productions, made with
   small budgets and often independently of the studio corporation. Movies
   made in this manner typically emphasize high professional quality in
   terms of acting, directing, screenwriting, and other elements
   associated with production, and also upon creativity and innovation.
   These movies usually rely upon critical praise or niche marketing to
   garner an audience. Because of an independent film's low budgets, a
   successful independent film can have a high profit-to-cost ratio, while
   a failure will incur minimal losses, allowing for studios to sponsor
   dozens of such productions in addition to their high-stakes releases.

   American independent cinema was revitalized in the late 1980s and early
   1990s when another new generation of moviemakers, including Spike Lee,
   Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Quentin Tarantino made movies like,
   respectively, Do the Right Thing, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Clerks.,
   and Reservoir Dogs. In terms of directing, screenwriting, editing, and
   other elements, these movies were innovative and often irreverent,
   playing with and contradicting the conventions of Hollywood movies.
   Furthermore, their considerable financial successes and crossover into
   popular culture reestablished the commercial viability of independent
   film. Since then, the independent film industry has become more clearly
   defined and more influential in American cinema. Many of the major
   studios have capitalised on this by developing subsidiaries to produce
   similar films; for example Fox Searchlight Pictures.

   To a lesser degree in the 2000s, film types that were previously
   considered to have only a minor presence in the mainstream movie market
   began to arise as more potent American box office draws. These include
   foreign-language films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero
   and documentary films such as Super Size Me, March of the Penguins, and
   Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11.

Rise of the home video market

   The 1980s and 1990s saw another significant development. The full
   acceptance of video by studios opened a vast new business to exploit.
   Films such as The Secret of NIMH and The Shawshank Redemption, which
   performed poorly in their theatrical run, were now able to find success
   in the video market. It also saw the first generation of film makers
   with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino
   and P.T. Anderson had been able to view thousands of films and produced
   films with vast numbers of references and connections to previous
   works. This, along with the explosion of independent film and
   ever-decreasing costs for filmmaking, changed the landscape of American
   movie-making once again, and led a renaissance of filmmaking among
   Hollywood's lower and middle-classes—those without access to studio
   financial resources.

   The rise of the DVD in the 21st century has quickly become even more
   profitable to studios and has led to an explosion of packaging extra
   scenes, extended versions, and commentary tracks with the films.

Notable figures in U.S. film

   Significant American-born film directors include:
     * Woody Allen
     * Robert Altman
     * Hal Ashby
     * Tim Burton
     * John Cassavetes
     * Francis Ford Coppola
     * Cecil B. DeMille
     * Brian De Palma
     * John Ford
     * Howard Hawks
     * George Roy Hill
     * John Huston
     * Jim Jarmusch
     * Stanley Kubrick
     * Spike Lee
     * Barry Levinson
     * George Lucas
     * Sidney Lumet
     * David Lynch
     * Joseph L. Mankiewicz
     * Leo McCarey
     * Alan J. Pakula
     * Arthur Penn
     * Sam Peckinpah
     * Sydney Pollack
     * Martin Scorsese
     * Steven Spielberg
     * Oliver Stone
     * Quentin Tarantino
     * Orson Welles
     * Robert Wise

   Other iconic American actors include:
     * Fred Astaire
     * Humphrey Bogart
     * Marlon Brando
     * Robert De Niro
     * James Cagney
     * Claudette Colbert
     * Joan Crawford
     * Bette Davis
     * James Dean
     * Clint Eastwood (also a notable director)
     * Tom Cruise
     * Henry Fonda
     * Jane Fonda
     * Harrison Ford
     * Clark Gable
     * Judy Garland
     * Cary Grant
     * Gene Hackman
     * Tom Hanks
     * Katharine Hepburn
     * Dustin Hoffman
     * Buster Keaton
     * Gene Kelly
     * Grace Kelly
     * Steve McQueen
     * Marilyn Monroe
     * Paul Newman
     * Jack Nicholson
     * Al Pacino
     * Gregory Peck
     * Sidney Poitier
     * James Stewart
     * Meryl Streep
     * Shirley Temple
     * Spencer Tracy
     * John Wayne

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