A Brief History of Film

[Music] Film, I'd like to ask a question. It may seem like a simple question, but I think it's a question that the average moviegoer doesn't think too much about. How did film develop from this into this? Let's find out.

Hello, welcome to Film Thoughts Project, a channel dedicated to cinema. My name is Rudy, and today we're bringing you a brief history of film. Let's get into it.

To start, we have to go back to the 1870s and the birth of the Moving Image. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge, an English-American photographer, was commissioned to take some pictures of a horse. What he produced was this. The images were taken for a scientific study into the gait analysis of a galloping horse. The participants were interested in whether or not all four horses' feet come off the ground at once while moving at speed. Little did Eadweard Muybridge know, he had just created what would widely become known as the first ever moving image.

Shortly after the images were taken, Muybridge discovered that while projecting the images in quick succession, this happened. What you're seeing is the horse in motion, widely considered to be the first ever movie. As you can imagine, this got people interested. For the next few years, inventors from all over the world jumped on this newfound technology. Filmmakers such as Thomas Edison, yes, that Thomas Edison, and the Lumière brothers were seen as pioneers in this new technology.

The early 20th century is when films began to take on a more narrative role, with filmmakers such as Georges Méliès in France and Edwin S. Porter in the USA. More complex films with refined storylines and detailed characters began to emerge. Movies were evolving from sideshow attractions into artistic narrative mediums, comparable to books or theater. Notable movies of the early 20th century include *A Trip to the Moon*, *The Great Train Robbery*, and *The Birth of a Nation*. Um, yeah, that last one was controversial.

As film progressed throughout the 1910s and into the 1920s, one artistic trend began to emerge. Let me ask you, can you see a similarity between all of these early movies? It's all very static in terms of film form. The cinema became fairly one-note, although there were some exceptions. In general, the filmmakers would simply set up a static wide shot, and the characters would perform in front of the camera. Few close-ups, no shot-reverse-shot, definitely none of this. In a strange way, film was becoming more of a silent, performative art form.

This style of static wide shot, however, was perfect for one thing: comedy. In the 1920s, artists such as Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin were taking full advantage of this filmmaking style, pushing the limits of performative comedy in cinema, perfecting the visual gag.

While these artists were doing great things in America and Western Europe, something big was happening elsewhere. Something that would change film form forever: Soviet Russia. It may seem unlikely, but Soviet Russia was one of the most important players in film history. Here's a pretty important term in film: montage, or more specifically, Soviet montage theory. What is this? Well, during the 1920s, a Russian filmmaker named Sergei Eisenstein wrote a groundbreaking essay in which he outlined five methods of montage. Eisenstein's ideas about how film editing techniques could be used to convey far more than the narrative helped to shape the future of the media. He describes the different ways that shots could be compiled to achieve various outcomes: metric, rhythmic, tonal, /tonal/, and intellectual.

What does this mean? Well, put simply, the idea is that a combination of connected images cut together can create complex ideas more effectively than the content of the shots themselves. Eisenstein argued that cutting in film is just as important as the images. Here's an example: the Kuleshov effect. In the 1920s, Kuleshov, a Russian filmmaker, film theorist, and co-founder of the Moscow Film School, created an experiment. He took a shot of an expressionless man's face, followed by a shot of a bowl of soup. He took the exact same shot of the expressionless man's face, followed by a shot of a girl in a coffin. He then took the same shot of the man for a third time, followed by a shot of an attractive woman.

Once the audience had viewed the film, he asked them what they thought the man was feeling during each section. Interestingly, when they saw the bowl of soup juxtaposed with the man's face, they believed he felt hungry. When they saw the girl in the coffin juxtaposed with the man's face, they believed he felt sad. And when they saw the attractive woman juxtaposed with the shot of the man's face, they believed he felt lust. Of course, the man did not change his expression at all during the film. This was a revelation in filmmaking terms. The audience did not have to be told that the man was feeling sad. The man did not have to act sad theatrically in front of a still wide shot for the audience to understand the emotion. They simply had to be presented with images cut together in specific ways, and the audience can fill in the gaps themselves. This added an entirely new layer to filmmaking. Film grammar had been created.

But how far could you push this idea? Can you create entire stories with complex emotional themes simply through editing? Yes, that's it. Sergei Eisenstein. Yes, you could. And so, Soviet montage was born. While American films were looking like this in the 1920s, Eisenstein was making films that looked like this. [Music] Notice the fast-paced editing, the more diverse use of shot selection, close-ups, panning shots, tracking shots, high angles, low angles, movement, overly theatrical performances being replaced with gritty realism. All of this culminating into something far more intense than your average American motion picture at the time. Looks quite modern, doesn't it?

Let's go back to the USA for now. While the Soviets were busy creating film grammar as we know it today, the Americans were busy creating something else. In 1927, *The Jazz Singer* became the first feature-length motion picture to incorporate synchronized music, singing, and dialogue. At the time, the term "talkies" were coined to describe such films. The American film industry never looked back. Sound became the new norm.

Sound in film, it sparked a huge growth in the American film industry. Sound recording required large pieces of equipment on set at all times. This pushed film productions indoors into sound stages, and production companies were built in gigantic studios on the west coast of America. The studio system was born. By the beginning of the 1930s, most all large-scale motion picture productions were being made by what was known as the Big Five: MGM, Paramount Pictures, RKO, Warner Brothers, and 20th Century Fox. This brought in a new era, which many refer to as the Golden Age of Hollywood, an era that lasted until the 1960s. This is when the American film industry grew into a true global phenomenon, with enormous conglomerate companies powering the engines. Hollywood became a machine, churning out 400 motion pictures a year, with new ones being seen by 19 million Americans per week.

Here's a list of some of the things that the Golden Era of Hollywood brought us: The first movie stars were born, with actors and actresses such as Greta Garbo, Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn, John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, James Stewart, Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, Rita Hayworth. The list goes on. Some filmmakers took the low-key lighting stylistics of German Expressionism and incorporated it into their dark, gritty detective dramas, with movies like *The Maltese Falcon*, *Double Indemnity*, and *The Big Sleep*. Film noir was born. Orson Welles' incredibly ambitious, groundbreaking masterpiece *Citizen Kane* propelled cinema to new heights, giving people a fresh idea of what a motion picture could be. Color film became commonplace, adding a whole new layer to the art form. All of a sudden, filmmakers were figuring out the psychological effect that different hues had on their audiences. Color theory was born. Alfred Hitchcock took the inventiveness of Soviet montage theory, added his own artistic flair and genius to direct some of the greatest films of all time. Hitchcock created filmmaking techniques that we see in almost every motion picture made today. He understood film like no other and solidified himself as one of the most significant figures in filmmaking history. Seriously, if I could recommend one thing to anyone who's interested in studying film direction, it would be to study Hitchcock.

Simultaneously during this period, there was an emergence of filmmakers from Asia. Japan became a filmmaking hotspot, with great directors such as Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu creating their own masterpieces that would go on to be studied for decades to come. In short, the Golden Age really was a golden age. A lot of things happened, a lot of progress was made, but it wouldn't last forever. Something was wrong with the American studio system. Let me explain.

Here's a quick rundown of how the studio system works. These huge movie studios were enormous conglomerates that had a complete monopoly over the entire movie industry. This basically meant that they had control over not only the production of movies but over the movie theaters too. The way they did this was by something known as block booking. Studios had the ability to pick up movie theaters to exclusively show a whole year of their productions. In other words, if you were a small movie theater and you wanted to screen *The Wizard of Oz*, you had to sign a deal with MGM, the production studio, to show every single movie that MGM made that year, including all the mediocre B-movies that would be shown in theaters before screening the A-list movies.

This monopoly over distribution and exhibition created a business model for the studios. The technique was to only make a small amount of attractive, high-production A-list movies a year, but make hundreds and hundreds of mediocre, low-production B-list movies to be sold alongside to cover the cost of the A-list productions and make a profit. As this business model grew, money came pouring in over the decades. So, this was not sustainable. We'll get back to this in a moment.

Meanwhile, France. In the late 1950s, something was happening. Back in 1948, a French film critic and director named Alexandre Astruc had an epiphany. He decided to publish his ideas in a manifesto entitled *The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: The Camera-Stylo*. Possibly the most influential piece of writing in all of film theory. You see, in Hollywood at this time, the perceived masterminds of a motion picture was whoever was in charge of the money: the producers. The directors of films were not seen as the artistic creators that they are today. Film directing, for the most part, was seen as nothing more than a technical job to be done behind closed doors. In fact, most studio directors were not well known at all.

Alexandre Astruc rejected this. Astruc argued that the true creator of a film was, in fact, the director. In his manifesto, he famously writes, "Direction is no longer a means of illustrating or presenting a scene, but a true act of writing. The filmmaker/author writes with his camera as a writer writes with a pen." The camera-stylo literally translates to "the camera pen." Astruc writes, "Was *Citizen Kane* satisfactory in any other form than that given to it by Orson Welles?" This manifesto was the birth of a new filmmaking theory known as auteur theory. The crux of the argument being that film directors are true artists and not just technicians, and their work should be recognized. This seemingly simple idea, despite an important turning point in French filmmaking, an artistic movement emerged known as the French New Wave.

By the late 1950s, filmmakers in France were putting these ideas into action. The two most prominent figures in the French New Wave became François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Directors were exercising that artistry, breaking filmmaking rules that had been commonplace for decades. They were defining new techniques, one of the most well-known being the jump cut, as you can see here. Granted, a lot of these techniques were pure experimentation, but within the experimentation emerged a wealth of new ideas. These movies were the breath of fresh air that the art form needed. Something was changing, and the American studios were taking notice.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood. Remember that block-booking monopolizing business model that big studios were using? Yeah, that's no longer a thing. The United States Department of Justice filed a lawsuit in what was known as the Paramount case. It's quite complicated, but essentially, this outlawed block booking by big Hollywood Studios, deeming it to be illegally monopolistic. This sent shockwaves through the American film industry. With no block booking, their entire business model had to change. Long story short, the studio system kind of lingered on for a few years after the lawsuit, but after a few big deals were signed, eventually, the studio system fell.

By the 1960s, the Golden Age of Hollywood had come to an end. Most actors and filmmakers became freelance workers, not attached to studio contracts. Studios found themselves in new territory. Hollywood was losing money. Audiences had changed. The Baby Boomer generation was coming of age. Young people were becoming the main demographic of filmgoers, and they weren't interested in classical Hollywood. These were affluent, college-educated young people interested in things like European arthouse films. They enjoyed the movies of the French New Wave, they loved the so-called Spaghetti Westerns coming from Italy, and Japanese cinema was making its mark in the US. The market had changed.

"How do we accommodate this new young demographic?" ask the studios. "How can we make money with no block booking?" It was a time of desperation for the film industry, and in times of desperation, risks are taken. And that's exactly what the studios did. They took a risk. Hollywood knew that their audience had changed, and they also knew there was a new generation of college-educated filmmakers, fresh out of film school, who had studied the likes of foreign cinema, i.e., the French New Wave. The studios concluded that they didn't quite understand their new audience and their demands, so why not hire filmmakers who do?

Enter the New Hollywood movement. This was a period that started in the mid-1960s in which Hollywood began hiring a brand new generation of young filmmakers. Heard of any of these? Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma, Stanley Kubrick, John Cassavetes, Terrence Malick. *Bonnie and Clyde*, *The Graduate*, *Easy Rider*, *In the Heat of the Night*, *Chinatown*, *The Godfather*, *Taxi Driver*, *Jaws*, *Apocalypse Now*, *The Exorcist*, *2001: A Space Odyssey*, *Dog Day Afternoon*, *Annie Hall*, *The Shining*, even *Star Wars*. All products of the New Hollywood movement. These were highly talented students of film who were in exactly the right place at the right time, and they made great movies.

Scorsese brought socially realistic character studies to the American screen with movies like *Raging Bull* and *Taxi Driver*. Spielberg took thrilling tales of horror, action, and mystery to new heights with movies such as *Jaws* and *Close Encounters of the Third Kind*. These huge successes would bring rise to the modern-day blockbuster. The New Hollywood movement is widely regarded to have come to an end by the early 80s, but the influence lives on to the present day.

In the 80s, new filmmakers came to prominence. Movies like *Blade Runner*, *Aliens*, *Star Wars*, *Terminator*, and even *Back to the Future* sparked a resurgence in the science-fiction genre. As special effects evolved, large-scale action sequences came to be much more commonplace. This actually became almost comical in some aspects; almost every blockbuster at this point just had to have explosions.

In the early 90s, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, became much more prominent, with movies such as *Terminator 2* and *Jurassic Park* laying the foundations for the CGI spectacle movies that would emerge later in the 2000s. New, alternative indie filmmakers such as Paul Thomas Anderson, the Coen brothers, and Quentin Tarantino came onto the scene, creating character-driven movies with unique storylines and, of course, cool soundtracks that gave audiences an interesting alternative to the action sci-fi blockbusters of Hollywood.

In 1998, Steven Spielberg rejected 80s-style action and replaced it with the gritty realism of war in *Saving Private Ryan*. This was a pivotal point that helped change how action was shot in film, inspiring the action realism movement of the 2000s and into the present day. In 1999, *The Matrix* marked the end of an era. It was the culmination of everything that had emerged in American cinema in the 80s and 90s: a high-budget blockbuster sci-fi movie with large-scale CGI action sequences, taking influence from Asian and European cinema, a cool soundtrack, and, of course, explosions.

In the 2000s, CGI continued to find its footing, with some great results and not-so-great results. CGI capabilities gave rise to superhero movies becoming the new American movie genre. Alejandro Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, and Emmanuel Lubezki became an interesting group of Mexican filmmakers, creating a new movement of the ultra-long camera shot filmmaking style with movies such as *Gravity*, *Birdman*, *The Revenant*, *Roma*, and *1917*.

In 2020, Bong Joon-ho made history with his film *Parasite*, becoming the first foreign-language film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. And that's it. That brings us to the present day, 2020. [Music]

So, what's the future of film? I don't know. I think it's probably got something to do with streaming services and the internet. Although, there's something that slightly concerns me. You see, if you go to Google right now and you want to watch, say, *The Irishman*, you'll notice the only possible way to watch this film is through a certain streaming service. You cannot purchase it, you cannot download it. Now, this might change, but right now, this is a movie that's been produced by the streaming service, and now it's being exclusively exhibited by this streaming service. And the only possible way to watch it is by paying monthly for all other productions from this same streaming service. Isn't this just a modern-day equivalent of block booking? Isn't this the same thing that studios were doing in the Golden Era of Hollywood? "If you want to watch our movie, you have to buy all of our movies." Is this a path that's going to lead us to another Hollywood monopoly? Let's hope not.

Hey guys, thanks for watching. Film Thoughts Project is a brand new YouTube channel that we'll be posting videos on film theory, film history, and general fun discussion. So, if you enjoyed this video, please give it a like and subscribe. I'm new to this, so it's really gonna help out. See you soon. [Music]