Happy holidays! Here is a little reading pleasure for your relaxation, a perusal of the development of motion pictures as entertainment. Enjoy!
Most folks use decade demarcations, but I see the history of film as evolving pretty much in 15-year increments:
1885-1900
In this first era, the creation of a device, most prominently in France and the United States, that could enable still photographs to be shown in rapid sequential fashion led to three primary uses for the resultant ‘moving pictures.’ The first was the documentation of temporal reality. The second was the recording of the human condition for the purposes of entertainment. And the third was the advancement of stagecraft through sleights of hand and the innovative stopping and starting of time.
1900-1915
After an initial 15 years of pioneering invention, experimentation and development, the next period, from 1900 to 1915, represented the establishment of motion pictures (first with a box that a person inserted a coin to view, but soon projected onto a screen for a larger audience) as a viable industry, with the most enduring artistic creations from the period emanating from the United States, France and, later in the era, Italy. In America, film studios proliferated initially in the New York City area, close to Broadway theatrical talent, of course, but also near Thomas Edison’s first studios. As more entrepreneurs got on board, however, and wanted to avoid the high fees patent owners were charging, they found that Southern California was not only far enough away to cool the licensing heat, but the weather was much more favorable to shooting with natural light.
The basics of film grammar were worked out, as was the establishment and exploration of genres. Notably, the back-and-forth depiction of concurrent events, which had been developed in literature in the previous century by authors such as Charles Dickens, was found to create a strong emotional dynamic when presented and accelerated through manipulated editing on film.
By the end of the era, film comedians were making use of physical stunts that could not be achieved on the stage, and with populations that could not be confined in a stage, to expand their capability for creating humor, much of which has not lost a chuckle in the passage of a century. Writers were employed to develop narratives. Cinematographers were needed to set up and run the cameras, and someone was providing the money. The person overseeing the execution, in front of the camera, of what was written in the script, however, the director, became the focal artist of a motion picture’s creation, despite it being such a collaborative effort of talent.
1915-1930
The third period, from 1915 to 1930, represented the maturation of the short film and the reign of the silent feature film. From Charlie Chaplin’s Mutual Films to the groundbreaking (and since, deservedly shamed) D.W. Griffith feature-length The Birth of a Nation, it is said that there has been no real invention in filmmaking, no ‘new idea,’ that was not developed or utilized in this era. It was in this phase that movie stars emerged, somewhat unexpectedly despite the previous popularity of stage performers, as a singular entity that then fed into the artistry and popularity of film, like a double sun exchanging solar flares. While most feature films maintained the literary equivalency of a novella, some strove to emulate the breadth and depth of novels, and a few even succeeded, at least artistically, at that endeavor. Physical comedy flourished, and created an environment that could nurture and grow comedic narrative.
The laws of economic natural selection led inevitably to the consolidation of the various film companies, and as the companies discovered the advantages of shared resources for production, the studio system arose. The studios not only owned the real estate where films could be shot, and the equipment, but they also, in exchange for lucrative contracts, owned the human talent making the films. While the United States remained the central chamber of the artform’s heart, many nations began developing their own cinema, from Japan and Australia to Sweden, Denmark, Italy and France, and several national cultures began to rival America in the quality of their motion picture output, particularly Germany and Russia, and towards the end of the era, Great Britain.
1930-1945
1930 to 1945 saw the integration of sound with image and an accompanying explosion of creativity and achievement. Once films were projected in theaters in the previous eras, they were accompanied by live music, but with the advent of sound, the final integration of the three primary human art forms—literature, music and the replication of images—was achieved. The era didn’t just see the birth of the musical, which flowered immediately with the advent of sound and has endured forever after. Verbal comedy was able to supplement physical comedy. Drama could be properly expressed. The western had been an integral part of American motion pictures from the beginning, but with sound it stopped being a sideshow and became part of the main event.
The advent of sound forced nations to develop films in local languages, but did not hinder their artistry, with movies from France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Latin America and elsewhere attracting worldwide attention at the time, or being ‘discovered’ at a later date after the world war concluded. A number of respected motion picture directors in Europe, America and Asia had established themselves in the silent era, such as Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, but went on to create even greater accomplishments working with sound.
The American film studio system—colloquially known a ‘Hollywood’—was at its height during this period, with a soup-to-nuts control over the creation and distribution of a film. This had artistic advantages, when it came to a singular vision with resources to back it, and disadvantages, when it came to suppressing unproven creative ideas (in some cases, the studio head rivaled the director when it came to guiding the artistic quality of a film, although most executives were smart enough to let the talent do their jobs). Nevertheless, many critics look upon this era as the greatest of all, and there is plenty of evidence to justify their claims, from The Wizard of Oz to Citizen Kane.
Collaterally, attending a theater to see a film was never so popular as it was in this era, with many people ‘going to the movies’ twice a week or even daily. Short films—comedy pieces, music performances, travelogues and other miscellany—had continued to be produced as a supplement to the presentation of paired feature films, to enhance theater attendance as a full evening’s ‘double bill’ entertainment. Serial cliffhangers, a series of short films advancing a genre story with the intention of being presented in weekly installments, were created in the silent era and readily transitioned to the sound era, rarely offering more than repetitive plotting but advancing the inventiveness of action stunts and similar physical gags while offering, in a few instances, advancements in genre parameters that were considered too outrageous for the discipline of a feature. Animation, which had been a staple of the short film during the silent era and continued in popularity in that format when sound arrived, achieved feature film status thanks to Walt Disney. The documentary recording and presentation of important (and arcane) events were jammed together in shorts known as ‘newsreels,’ which would fill out the double bill with the cartoon, the live action short a serial chapter, what was often a shorter, full-length genre film and the main feature presentation.
It is also worth noting that it became clear in this era that abstract or ‘experimental’ films would continued to favor the short film format rather than a longer presentation time, in part because the economics of their creation were more restricted by their limited viewership and in part because the abstractions were easier to absorb in shorter increments. Throughout the history of movies, experimental films eschewed narrative to emphasize the manipulation of images and sound for their own sake, often shadowing, although sometimes spearheading, the technological developments of popular films.
The outbreak of World War II did little to dampen the output or the artistry of filmmakers. While America’s domination of the business was ensured by the War, artistic gems were still chiseled out amid the chaos of destruction not just in Britain, but even in France and Italy. In Latin America, production never ceased even though it is only now thanks to restoration technologies that many of the gems from this era are being disseminated to the rest of the world.
1945-1960
The War’s impact upon the world was far-reaching, and created a sort of retrenchment in the next era, from 1945 to 1960. With the exception, perhaps, of Douglas Sirk, even artists who are seen to have reached the pinnacle of their accomplishments during this era, such as Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Luis Buñuel, Orson Welles and Howard Hawks, can have the quality of their works from the other eras compared to their works in this period with at least arguable parity.
The development of television, stalled by the War, burst forth once it was over, and, by the end of the era, became the dominant entertainment format of moving pictures in the United States. Since the appliance was somewhat pricey at first, it played initially to a high end audience, and many works of dramatic importance were developed for the medium, particularly works that might not have succeeded under the profit demands of motion picture production. Several magnificently skilled comedians also arose through the medium of television in this era.
During this era, as well, the first ‘new’ genre surfaced in America (and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere as well, from Britain to Argentina), the ‘film noir’ crime thriller. Its dark themes arose with a remarkable unplanned spontaneity as a response to the realities of life and death that had been witnessed during the world war, accentuated with strikingly heightened lighting effects that were drawn, ironically, from a black-and-white stylism that had been popular in Germany before the war.
The western became even more predominant as a popular entertainment, in theaters and then on the TV. Additionally, genres that had been on the outer edges of motion picture entertainment, such as horror, fantasy and science fiction, began to make inroads on the general marketplace. To combat television, which steadily degraded the popularity of live action and cartoon shorts, and eliminated serials and newsreels altogether, the movies did what they could to be technologically different. Color films, which had been around as curiosities since the beginning—and had become a marketing choice for event pictures in the latter half of the previous era—grew far more common as an alternative to what TV could offer. And, of course, the size of the cinema screen widened. With that rectangular wide screen dominating a viewer’s field of view, a sense of grandeur could deluge the psyche of the viewer with the wonders of the world and human imagination.
Because of government anti-trust action, American movie studios were forced to divest their theater chains, which initiated, along with the rise of television, the gradual deterioration of their power. Despite continued American dominance, the film industries of England, France and Italy generated enduring works as soon as the War had finished (filmmakers in Italy, in particular, overcame scrappy budgets by avoiding professional casts and focusing on social topics that became, in effect, another new genre, ‘Neorealism’), and as other countries also recovered, they began anew to establish their own national cinemas that the rest of the world could savor. Having been spared the War, Mexico and Brazil, along with Argentina and Cuba, had particularly fruitful outputs. Although their films, even those of exceptional artistic quality, would not become available to the rest of the world until much later, the dragon of Japan’s movie industry had never really gone to sleep.
1960-1975
But my favorite era, and seemingly hands down the richest so far as world cinema was concerned, is the period from 1960 to 1975. That this period coincides with my childhood motion picture viewing experiences is suspect, to be sure, since it is quite often that the films a critic saw as a child or adolescent are the ones the critic cherishes the most, but since I was the product of the same post-War ‘boom’ that was fueling the motion picture industry around the world, then why not? Three of my five favorite films, five of my ten favorite films and forty-six of my hundred most favorite films came from this era.
Artists in America and around the world who had begun making films in the Fifties or earlier created their greatest works in this period, including Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni, David Lean, Stanley Kubrick, Yasujirô Ozu, Kon Ichikawa, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica. An entire coterie of young French film critics rebelled against the overly formulaic production habits of the French film industry and started directing their own movies with a startling originality of technique and subject matter in what became known as the ‘New Wave.’ Czechoslovakia, briefly emerging from the cocoon of Communist oppression, had a New Wave of its own and, lagging just a few years behind the others when its post-War generation took a little longer to coalesce, Germany also developed a robust film industry, so that by the end of the era, its New Wave had arisen, as well. There were wonderful films coming out of Greece and the Middle East, too.
Even new genres flourished throughout the world. James Bond could be a genre in and of itself, but the spy film took seed all over the place, as did the caper film. Without the support of studio infrastructure, African-American filmmakers nevertheless found ways to make movies that spoke to their experiences and suited their specific entertainment tastes and social needs from the earliest silent features, and managed to sustain careers, albeit on a far more modest basis than their white counterparts, making films specifically for African-American audiences. In this era, however, social upheaval allowed for a greater pooling of resources and therefore a greater proliferation of Black artists both in front of the camera and behind it. Thanks to competitive and adventuresome marketing, action films with African-American stars, known as ‘Blaxsploitation’ films, found a popularity that expanded well beyond a core audience. Not only did Sidney Poitier become an enormous boxoffice star, but directors such as Gordon Parks and Melvin Van Peebles proved that their films could achieve ‘crossover’ popularity without compromising on content, inspiring generations of African-American filmmakers to follow.
In Italy, which lagged other European countries in developing a television market, genre films, from exploitation documentaries and muscular sword and sandal ‘peplum’ features to science-fiction movies, blossomed. The unique Italian ‘Spaghetti Western’ (essentially finite to that era) and the ‘giallo’ thriller have only belatedly been recognized for the wealth of cinematic delights they contain (as well as, a bit later, Italian ‘poliziottesco’ cop films). Japan, which was also slow to shift to TV, was just as prolific with its samurai films, ‘yakuza’ gangster and private eye features, and even with its monster movies, often executing even the lowest seeming genre films with a formalizes compositional stylism that becomes intoxicating in its own right. Chinese language features, and in particular martial arts films (initially those produced in Hong Kong, which had developed a Hollywood-style studio film industry), began to flourish resplendently in this era, although the rest of the world would not latch onto them until the era began to close.
The fight with television spurred a relaxation of censorship that enabled the rise of new artists freed from the restrictions of expression (and many, having received their training working on television, learned how to create motion pictures on a modest, profit-friendly budget), including Sam Peckinpah, Robert Altman, Ken Russell, Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer, Sidney Lumet, Richard Lester and so on. Technology in the previous era hadn’t just made the cinema screen bigger, it had also made cameras and sound equipment smaller. This led to an astonishing establishment of the documentary as an artform, as well as a low budget flexibility that opened the movies to masterworks from freewheeling filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and the ‘BBS’ production team of Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. The budgetary flexibility also allowed an increased focus on films exploring social awareness. Under the studio system in the previous eras, just a handful of female film directors, such as Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino, had been able to achieve artistic success, but as the changes in funding became available, films made by women proliferated so quickly their works no longer seemed like a unique artistic niche, even those that focused specifically upon female experiences. Because of the success of these low budget entities, the studio system collapsed, leaving just a handful of motion picture investment and distribution companies that could still afford to bankroll larger budgeted productions, failing spectacularly with some, but rescuing themselves with others.
As all of this was happening, television flourished, as well. Although, artistically, programming stepped a bit backwards from the previous ‘Golden Era’ of television, there were massively popular comedies, dramas and westerns that have had an enduring appeal. In Britain, where TV had the advantage of government funding, there continued to be genuine artistic and creative experimentation, not just in adapting classical literature or historical dramas, but as an adjunct to the spy craze and the greater stirrings of science fiction as a mainstream TV genre.
There’s more to be said about the era, but that’s a decent start.
1975-1990
The battle between television and theatrical film created the defining aspect of the next era, from 1975 to 1990, the summer blockbuster. Distribution companies discovered that if there was enough pent up interest in a film, a massive initial release could generate more cash for them (the longer a film subsequently sat in theaters, the greater percentage of income the theaters got to keep). More and more filmmakers, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, graduated from film schools, rather than studio apprenticeships, and learned immediately which filmmaking strategies work best, thus accelerating the medium both artistically and commercially. At the same time, perhaps egged along by what was happening in Italy, the horror genre branched out into a number of indelible subgenres, particularly the zombie film, the vampire film and the slasher film. In contrast, the western and the samurai film contracted as genres, with audiences seeking more contemporary thrills.
Although movies made in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan had existed since the beginnings of silent film, those produced in this era finally achieved an international recognition and enthusiasm, particularly the films from the previous era directed by King Hu, Lau Kar-leung and Chang Cheh, all of whom continued to create masterworks in this era, as well, aided by the loosening of restrictions against violence, which is what had also energized Japan’s samurai features. While predominantly seen as martial arts movies, these films are actually masterworks of elaborate and intricate gymnastic choreography. As Hong Kong’s studio system, like all of the others around the world before it, fell by the wayside during this era with the rise of television, a group of exciting and dynamic Chinese filmmakers who had gotten their starts within the studio system and its training, but were then freed from its strictures by the studio collapse, such as John Woo and Tsui Hark, spearheaded Hong Kong’s New Wave.
The German New Wave also rolled on in earnest and, along with artists such as Pedro Almodóvar in Spain and Manoel de Oliveira in Portugal, represented pretty much the final pieces in the totality of western Europe as a worthy filmmaking entity. Thanks to the discovery of tax incentives as a way to attract motion picture business, countries around the world saw blossoming artistic accomplishments, although they were overwhelmed in some instances by what some would consider to be the weeds of genre and exploitation filmmaking, particularly in Australia and Canada. Wonderful films from Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and so on achieved greater dissemination through burgeoning film festivals and home video markets that could make them available to the world. The only thing that has ever really baffled me is why Russian films, which had been so masterful in earlier eras under the same governmental restrictions, subsided in quality, to the point where an artistically exceptional film from Russia in this era and the previous era, beyond the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, was a curiosity and not part of an expressive movement, the way that films in the other Iron Curtain countries had become.
Although advancing throughout the world, animation had in some ways been dormant in the previous era, but its artistic innovation and popularity surged again, not just with Disney productions (because of how animation is produced, Disney remained more of a ‘studio’ than the other film companies), but with the creativity and industry of Asian animation studios. Finally, with the implementation of home video and especially laser discs (LDs), the general public could watch a movie in near-theatrical quality whenever it suited them, instead of when it suited a distributor.
1990-2005
The next demarcation occurred on TV. Previously, film artists had dabbled with success in television, including Michael Mann, James L. Brooks and even Altman, but it was David Lynch’s Twin Peaks which stated without ambiguity that works created for television could have the same artistic validity as works created for the big screen. His efforts there would in turn inspire several of Lynch’s best theatrical features during this period. It was in 1976, when I first saw Rich Man, Poor Man, that I realized television, rather than motion pictures, was the ideal format for the true adaptation of a novel. But other than a few industrious British efforts (and Rainer Werner Fassbinder), it wasn’t until the advent of cable TV and HBO that this promise truly came to be realized. Programs such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, From the Earth to the Moon and Six Feet Under had the maturity and visual finesse of feature films, yet with narratives that were not confined to theatrical running times and were novelistic in scope and intention.
Motion picture special effects had been advancing in tandem with the development of the computer, but it was in this era that they ceased to be a component of a movie and became, instead, the centerpiece of its design. This would culminate with Peter Jackson’s magnificent Lord of the Rings trilogy, after which it was just assumed that every science fiction and fantasy blockbuster would be created substantially in green rooms and on computer screens. With the integration of computerized animation tools, animation achieved new heights in artistic accomplishment.
‘Bollywood’ films, by which I mean films produced all over India and not just in Bombay, had been a mainstay of the cinema of India and much of Asia since the beginnings of sound. Not so much musicals as the accepted integration of musical numbers in every movie, regardless of genre (and yes, even the great Satyajit Ray and other serious artists often conformed to these requirements, or at least gave lip service to them), the Bollywood film as a specific entity reached a pinnacle of sorts during this era. Even more so than America in the Thirties and Forties, the Indian pop music industry and the Indian film industry became for all intents and purposes one entity once the Bollywood format was established, and then stayed that way. It was in this new era, however, with the maturation of artists who were working within the genre, with technological improvements both in moviemaking and in sound recording, and with the proliferation of home video and cable following the emigration of Bollywood genre enthusiasts to other parts of the world, that Indian films exploded in worldwide popularity. It was the songs from this period that really grabbed the attention of world culture (including Broadway musicals), but the films they came from just followed right along.
And the Iron Curtain fell, opening Eastern European cinema to the freedoms of expression that had been cramping the styles of great filmmakers, or even endangering them, in the previous era, especially in Poland and Hungary (it also opened some wonderful, untouched period architecture and cityscapes to American filmmakers). Iranian films had been blossoming since the Sixties, but it was in this era, when restrictions there were briefly relaxed as well, that the Iranian New Wave and filmmakers such as Abbas Kiarostami achieved true worldwide recognition.
Television screens became wider, and home video became not just an ancillary film market but a dominant method of distribution, to the point where the theatrical run of a movie was simply marketing for the home video release, and pocket-sized DVDs became as plentiful as paperback books. Hence, every person in the world obtained virtually complete access to films from all of the previous eras and from everywhere in the world, something that was barely achievable in film schools or museums beforehand, opening the way not only to advanced film scholarship, but an even wider enthusiasm and knowledge base for filmmaking.
2005-2020
In the most recently completed era, 2005-2020, computer generated images became absolutely integrated with ‘real’ images, in film and on television, even in programs that have nothing to do with fantasy or science-fiction. During the previous era, more and more productions were shot in high definition video instead of on traditional film stock, thus enabling alterations to everything from shadows to color with the twist of a button. As the advancement of the technology continued, period settings could be tweaked, actors could be removed or added to a scene, or mistakes during shooting could be corrected. The advancement of computer digital effects enabled the ‘comic book’ film to become a full-fledged genre and perhaps the most successful genre of all time—it is interesting that, because of these technological advances, how (unlike, say, the western) comic book movies from previous eras, however entertaining, look hopelessly archaic. Especially at Disney, where the structure of a studio could still be applied to their productions, the comic book movie became a principle example of the ‘franchise film,’ which, along with television, has replaced the studio system as a means of industrializing film production.
Digital exhibition of films replaced analog in most venues. Films could be made from pocket phones (not really great ones yet, but that may be coming), but at the very least, they could be made with simple, portable equipment that was within the cost range of any filmmaker working anywhere in the world. Because of a delay in the loosening of prohibitive governmental restrictions, Korean films finally had an especially prominent artistic blossoming in this era, including those by Sang-soo Hong, Joon-ho Bong and Chang-wook Park.
Television shows demonstrated their equality with motion pictures (although they still haven’t entirely mastered how to make an ending) in terms of production values and artistic accomplishment (as have video games, which are beyond my purview), not just in America, but again throughout the world. I would be challenged to name more than a handful of films that have impressed and inspired me as much as during this era as Twin Peaks the Event Series, Sherlock, Fosse/Verdon, the first half-dozen seasons of The Walking Dead, the first half-dozen seasons of Game of Thrones, or the French spy series, The Bureau. Indeed, to a greater and greater extent, true episodic television, even when it comes to half-hour situation comedies, has given way to at least the lip service of an extended and sequential narrative template across its episodes.
Many of the filmmakers working in this era were the ones who grew up with home video supplementary features in the previous era, and make films based upon what they learned from the shared knowledge of filmmakers and film scholars from every era beforehand. Blu-rays (BDs) were introduced in 2006, raising the quality of DVDs to surpass LD levels, and as distributors attempt to grab back control of their properties with streaming, 4K BDs became the new LDs for dedicated collectors.
2020 and beyond
The next era has just begun, but it has started with such a prominent demarcation—the advent of the pandemic in 2020—that a line will be drawn not only in motion pictures, but in every other field of endeavor, including the creation of the populace itself (‘Gen C,’ perhaps?). While the streaming trend had been advancing as a home video and television broadcast alternative, the pandemic exploded streaming’s potential, so that as virus fears subside—if they subside—it is difficult to imagine that any beyond large scale blockbuster films will be created for widespread theatrical presentation. Streaming has opened the floodgates not just to world cinema, but to the very format of film, and made it available to anyone with a computer. From foreign language television dramas to 5-minute gag films shot by your next-door neighbor, everything and anything can be accessed by everyone. So far, traditional feature films are hobbling along in this environment. While I see that the eight-to-ten episode dramatic series is an ideal replication of what, with the written word, is a novel, the 90-minute or so movie has, over the years, demonstrated an equivalency not with the short story or even the novella, but with the poem, and will continue to achieve success as an artist’s singular (though when it comes to filmmaking, collaborative) vision, as much as it will still achieve commercial success in the manner of poetry’s money-hungry sibling, the popular song.
A version of this article appeared previously in The DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter. For more information and a sample, visit https://substack.com/search/DVD-laser%20disc%20newsletter or write to DVDLaser@rocketmail.com.
