Cinema of the United States
The
cinema of the United States, sometimes simply referred to as
Hollywood, is typically used in reference to the larger, studio-produced cinema within the
U.S.. Much like
American popular music, the American film industry has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early
20th century. Its history is marked by four distinct periods: the silent era,
Classical Hollywood cinema,
New Hollywood, and the contemporary period (after 1980).
Early development
|
Justus D. Barnes in Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery |
The birth of cinema, as well as its radical development, can largely be traced back to the United States. 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
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 actorsto 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.
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 salarytheaters 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.
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, and
John Ford's later Westerns were frequently as good as his earlier ones. The number of movies being made dropped sharply, 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.
Changing realities and television's rise
Though 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' or Post-classical cinema
'
The New Hollywood' and 'post-classical cinema' are terms 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, and by the rising importance of
blockbuster movies.
'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/Golden Age 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.
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 were 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.
A major change to American filmmaking occurred during the
1970s when a new breed of young directors who had degrees from film schools and who had absorbed the techniques developed in Europe in the
1960s emerged. Directors 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. Their movies were often both critically acclaimed and successful at the box office. Coppola, Spielberg, and Lucas in particular are credited with shaping the blockbuster model in its current form, with the colossal successes of
The Godfather,
Jaws, and
Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, respectively. These movies, which each set the all-time box office record during their releases, induced studios to focus even more heavily than before on trying to produce humongous hits.
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
Pulp Fiction. 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 which allowed many acclaimed films which performed poorly in their theatrical to find success in the video market such as
The Secret of NIMH and
The Shawshank Redemption. It also saw the first generation of film makers with access to video tapes emerge. Directors such as 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.
Significant American-born film directors include:
*
Woody Allen*
Robert Altman*
Hal Ashby*
John Cassavetes*
Francis Ford Coppola*
Cecil B. DeMille*
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 WiseOther iconic American
actors include:
*
Fred Astaire*
Marlon Brando*
Robert De Niro*
Dennis Hopper*
James Cagney*
Joan Crawford*
Bette Davis*
James Dean*
Clint Eastwood (also notable as a director)
*
Henry Fonda*
Jane Fonda*
Harrison Ford*
Clark Gable*
Judy Garland*
Gene Hackman*
Tom Hanks*
Katharine Hepburn*
Dustin Hoffman*
Samuel L. Jackson*
Gene Kelly*
Grace Kelly*
Steve McQueen*
Marilyn Monroe*
Paul Newman*
Jack Nicholson*
Al Pacino*
Gregory Peck*
Sidney Poitier*
Jimmy Stewart*
Meryl Streep*
Shirley Temple*
Spencer Tracy*
Denzel Washington*
John WayneHollywood*Christopher Ames,
Movies about the movies : Hollywood reflected, University Press of Kentucky, 1997
*George F. Custen,
Twentieth Century's Fox:
Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood; New York: BasicBooks, 1997; ISBN 0-465-07619-X
*Bordwell, David; Staiger, Janet; Thompson, Kristin,
The Classical Hollywood Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985
*Steven Alan Carr,
Hollywood and anti-semitism : a cultural history up to World War II, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001
*Gene Fernett,
American Film Studios:
An Historical Encyclopedia; Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988; ISBN 0786413255
*Otto Friedrich,
City of Nets:
A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s; New York: Harper & Row, 1986; ISBN 0-06-015626-0
*Neal Gabler,
An empire of their own : how the Jews invented Hollywood, New York : Crown Publishers, 1988
*Molly Haskell,
From reverence to rape : the treatment of women in the movies, 2. ed., Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1987
*Mick LaSalle,
Complicated Women:
Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood; New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000, ISBN 0-312-25207-2
*Ethan Mordden,
The Hollywood Studios:
House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988; ISBN 0-394-55404-3
*Stephen Prince,
A new pot of gold : Hollywood under the electronic rainbow, 1980 - 1989 (=History of the American cinema, vol. 10), New York : Scribner [etc.], 2000
*Vincent F. Rocchio,
Reel Racism: Confronting Construction of Afro-American Culture, Westview Press, 2000
*Peter C. Rollins (ed.),
Hollywood's Indian : the portrayal of the Native American in film, Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1998
*Marjorie Rosen,
Popcorn Venus:
Women, Movies & the American Dream, New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973, ISBN 0-698-10545-1
*Steven J. Ross,
Working class Hollywood : silent film and the shaping of class in America, Princeton University Press, 1998
*Jean Rouverol,
Refugees from Hollywood : a journal of the blacklist years, University of New Mexico Press, 2000
*Kerry Segrave,
American television abroad : Hollywood's attempt to dominate world television, McFarland, 1998
*Dawn B. Sova,
Women in Hollywood : from vamp to studio head, New York : Fromm International Publ., 1998
*John Trumpbour,
Selling Hollywood to the World: U.S. and European Struggles for Mastery of the Global Film Industry, 1920-1950, Cambridge University Press 2002
*Eileen Whitfield,
Pickford : the woman who made Hollyood, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1997
American Experimental film*Lauren Rabinovitz,
Points of resistance : women, power & politics in the New York avant-garde cinema, 1943-71 , 2nd edition, University of Illinois Press, 2003
* P. Adams Sitney,
Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978, Second Edition, Oxford University Press 1979
American Documentary film*Bil Nichols,
Newsreel: documentary filmmaking on the American left, New York : Arno Pr., 1980
*Janet K. Cutler, Phyllis Rauch Klotman, ed.,
Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video, Indiana University Press 2000
Independent film*Peter Biskind,
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film, Bloomsbury, 2005
*Greg Merritt,
Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film, Thunder's Mouth Press, 2001
*
English film database*
Academy Awards*
World cinema*
Hindi films*
Tamil films*
Telugu films*
Hollywood-inspired names*
History of Hollywood's Aerial Cinematography*
Ben Stein talks about the very large Jewish element in Hollywood*
Photo exhibit of filmmaking in Florida, presented by the State Archives of Florida
