The history of cinema and the history of film are the same story; for at least the first fifty years, one did not exist without the other. Technical, artistic, and commercial forces drove the development together and constantly influenced each other, which is why I treat them side by side in this chronicle rather than separately; considered apart, the connections are lost. Each era below is split into those three threads: Technical, Commercial, Artistic.
Today, modern film is mostly equated with Hollywood, or at least with the USA. It was not always so. German and especially French filmmakers, alongside the English, shaped cinema decisively from the very beginning, and the story of how the balance shifted, and above all how German cinema’s brains ended up powering Hollywood’s factory, is told in a separate essay: What Happens When a Country Expels Its Storytellers? This post is the reference chronicle behind it: 125 years, decade by decade.
One thread runs through all of it. From the first day, the commercial aspect stood in the foreground, and film’s content appealed to the masses: to those who could not afford the theatre, did not own the evening clothes to be admitted, or simply did not get enough adrenaline there.
1890
Technical
The first film projector was presented in Paris in 1895 by the Lumière brothers at the Grand Café in the Rue des Capucines. They called it the Cinématographe. It was preceded by an experiment in Germany: Max Skladanowsky and his electric double projector, the “Bioskop,” which presented a kind of flowing slide show at the Berlin Wintergarten, a variety stage in operation since 1888.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Because the Lumière method was simpler, better, and smaller, it eventually established itself as the model on which all film projectors were built. Only with Lumière was the full infrastructure in place to record moving images, as film was then called, and play them back through a projector.
To the question of who invented cinema and film, there is no clean answer. Officially the credit goes to Lumière, because they invented the film projector. But in the USA, Edison was at work. If cinema was not invented in the USA, 35 mm film certainly was, in the five years before; that was an Edison patent. He made the first step. The Lumières improved the idea and made it work for the masses, complete with camera.
Before 1895, Edison did not believe in projection as the way to show films. He bet instead on the Kinetoscope, a device with a peephole, a kind of ancestor of video glasses, in which a film could be watched by one person at a time.
After 1895 the Lumières marketed intensively. They traveled the world, shot footage everywhere, and sold their device, camera and projector in one. Edison took note. And because showmen around the globe were suddenly making good money with the new technology as an attraction, it was clear to Edison that he needed such an invention too, and quickly. His corporation bought a Lumière imitation from England and so introduced the projection method to the USA. It should not be forgotten that Edison’s company was already producing its own films to keep its Kinetoscope customers supplied with new material.
Commercial
It may not be easy to digest, but cinema is the heir of the fairground show booths and panopticons, of vaudeville theatre, magicians, and circuses. All of them aimed at a mass audience, offering either exceptional attractions or affordable amusement.
In the beginning, the film itself was the technical attraction; theatres even advertised with the brand of the projector. But show-booth owners could now make films themselves, and so film became the continuous main attraction, because new content was constantly being shot. The attraction now had to go into the film.
Film thus became a medium, a magnet, for spectacle. This is reflected not only in the objectives of film production but in the expectations of the audience, and it runs like a red thread through film history to this day.
The Lumière brothers grasped it immediately. With their one-minute film of a train pulling into a station, shot from an angle that makes the locomotive appear to drive into the hall, they panicked an entire audience into the street. It was realistic and exciting. In effect, they were making the first documentary films:
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Where no adrenaline flows, and where there is no attraction or at least astonishment, the material does not work as cinema. Which also explains why Hollywood films packed with special effects, holding viewers inside impossible worlds and events, remain so popular today.
Artistic
The films of the era were all very short, about one minute. Subjects included voyages on the high seas, a locomotive entering a station, jokes, farm horse races. The footage came from the show-booth owners, not from hired professionals. The goal was to amaze people, offer a sensation, collect an entrance fee. It was a business; show business.
In the USA, however, Edison’s company was producing films as early as 1890, and the productions there appear to have been more professional early on, if still very technocratic. For the purpose, film mechanics were converted into directors and producers.
1900
Technical
Toward the end of this era, films that had run only a few minutes around 1900 grew steadily longer. Before 1910, a film was usually one reel, up to about 12 minutes. From roughly 1910 the average film reached 20 minutes, two reels. After the First World War, the feature film established itself at over 60 minutes.
Among the monumental works of the silent era, some running several hours, are Quo Vadis? (1912), Cabiria (1914), and The Birth of a Nation (1915) by D. W. Griffith.
Until 1927, almost all films were silent, accompanied acoustically by orchestras, announcers, and gramophone records.
Commercial
Until the outbreak of the First World War, French and Italian films led the world. In Berlin alone, 206 cinemas had already been counted. From this period on, comfort and luxury gained importance; spectacular cinema palaces such as the Marmorhaus in Berlin served as premiere houses. It was there, in February 1920, that Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” had its world premiere.
The war forced a devastating interruption on the European film industry. German film was badly weakened; in France, production had to stop entirely at the start of the war because of general mobilization.
Although European production resumed from 1915, it did so at a very limited level; the largest producers had already withdrawn from the business. The Italian industry fared better, but its “diva” films, with their ill-fated leading ladies, were not economically successful.
The war years were a complicated transition for the industry. Programs shifted from short one-reelers to feature films; venues everywhere grew larger and charged higher prices.
The exception were the Nickelodeons in the USA, admission five cents, about 1.27 dollars in today’s money, and the shop cinemas in Europe. These venues were beloved by the working class, which could not afford a theatre performance. By 1910, around 9,000 Nickelodeons had opened in the USA; the number of shop cinemas in Europe was correspondingly high.
In this period the American film industry moved from the East Coast to a suburb of Los Angeles, and the whole industry became known by the suburb’s name: Hollywood. The reasons: stable weather, natural scenery close by, cheap land for studio halls; and, for the Florida contingent, a mayoral election in Jacksonville that turned the city against the film crowd and its famously reckless stunt productions.
The US reached the era of its greatest production output to date, averaging 800 feature films a year, roughly 80 percent of world production. Hollywood has held that position more or less ever since: film factory of the world, exporting to almost every country.
To give an idea how profitable the business already was, and where the power came from, one example: Griffith’s racist and still controversial “The Birth of a Nation” cost around 100,000 dollars in 1915, an astronomical sum for a film at the time. By various estimates it earned Griffith and his partners between 50 and 100 million dollars; between roughly 1.3 and 2.6 billion in today’s money.
The studios were efficiently organized and controlled the entire value chain, which financed increasing luxury and ever more refined technology. Unfortunately this came at the expense of risk-taking: little new was dared, and the emphasis settled on glamorous escapism.
This period also belongs to the comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the adventures of Douglas Fairbanks, and the love stories of Clara Bow, performers who became known on every continent.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Artistic
Until the turn of the century, attention centered on film’s technical aspects; film was used for documentation, like the camera or the gramophone record. That novelty slowly wore off, and filmmakers began to experiment with film as a new medium.
Technical innovation allowed filmmakers like the Parisian cinema owner Georges Méliès to experiment with special effects and conjure magical transformations on screen: flowers turned into women, people vanished in clouds of smoke, a man appeared where a woman had just stood.
Méliès, a former stage magician, invented the trick film, which producers in England and the USA imitated, and he was the one who transformed cinema into the narrative medium we know today, combining short scenes into stories. “A Trip to the Moon” (1902), a thirty-scene film based on Jules Verne, was probably the most-watched production of cinema’s first decade.
Another innovator was Edwin Porter, a projectionist and engineer at the Edison Company. With the twelve-minute “The Great Train Robbery” (1903), Porter broke with stage-like Méliès compositions, using montage, camera movement, diagonal composition, and background projection to create continuous motion. The film was not only the first box-office hit; it established realistic narrative as the standard.
What else played in the cinemas of the time? Reports of current events from the city, the country, and the wider world: society occasions, great fires, natural disasters. This program slot evolved everywhere into the newsreel. Other slots went to comic shorts and trick films of five to twenty minutes, and from 1910 to episodes of serials such as detective series, documentaries, and culture films. The main feature usually came last, as the highlight.
The general trend was toward expressing the narrative content of a story, using the dramaturgical structures known from theatre. Griffith was especially good at this; among North American directors he enjoyed the highest reputation because his films transmitted dramatic excitement to the audience. He also introduced innovations such as the narrative close-up, the flashback, and other structural elements that survive to this day. In this period, continuity editing, now classic, became the visual norm of American and European film.
1920 to 1939
Technical
Sound-film processes had been tried since the world exhibitions around 1900, but the breakthrough came only with sound-on-film, the optical soundtrack, around 1930. Through the 1920s, sound mostly meant records played alongside the film, for example Warner Bros.’ Vitaphone from 1925, the last of the sound-on-disc systems. The challenge was synchronization: film frequently tore during projection and had to be spliced, losing a frame each time, so that over a print’s life the sound and the ever-shortening film drifted out of step, which made for unsightly screenings.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
A pioneer here was the German engineer Hans Vogt, who together with two colleagues at Tri-Ergon realized the sound-on-film idea; the company sat, fittingly, on Babelsberger Strasse in Berlin. In 1922, the first German sound film using the optical process was shown to a thousand spectators at the Alhambra cinema in Berlin. Notably, the press criticism was aimed not at the technology but at the level of the dialogue; with some foresight, critics saw that sound would eventually destroy the true art of silent film, pantomime. In the mid-1920s, Fox acquired the Tri-Ergon patents, and the process reached the world as “Movietone,” finding its way into Hollywood’s films from then on.
Color was also being tried around 1900, but the early processes were expensive and commercially unusable. In 1912, Rudolf Fischer developed the first workable three-color process: his camera recorded three small, blurry color separations through tinted filter discs onto black-and-white film, projected back through matching filters. Despite a successful presentation to the French Photographic Society and sound-accompanied screenings in New York in 1913, the process never caught on commercially.
From 1917, Technicolor introduced its more sophisticated three-color process for recording and reproduction. The color separations were used as gravure printing plates and the positives printed in color onto blank film, which is why film positives are called “prints” in the US to this day. This opened the way to a new Technicolor camera recording three separations, blue, green, and red, simultaneously. The breakthrough for color came in 1937 with Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Technicolor kept refining the process, culminating in 1955 in “Technicolor Process No. 5,” the standard until digital. Agfacolor drew level in 1939 with a three-color process that needed only a single negative, simpler than Technicolor’s, though with weaker and less stable color. UFA’s subsequent color films in Germany all used Agfacolor until 1950.
Commercial
Where Europe had led before the First World War, the tide turned during it. While European production stood still, North American production caught up so far that after the war, by some counts, more than 90 percent of all films shown in Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia came from the USA.
In the last year of the war, all German production companies were united by decree into a state-subsidized conglomerate, henceforth called Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft: UFA. It was so effective that in the 1920s it grew into the largest studio in Europe, and it produced most of the films of German cinema’s golden era during the Weimar Republic (1919 to 1933).
The restriction of German exports under the reparations regime around 1924 plunged the film industry into crisis for lack of export income. The arrival of sound then massively shrank the market for German productions, which were now confined to the German-speaking world.
In this period, Hollywood studios bought independent cinemas in Germany to squeeze UFA, the only serious competition in Europe. UFA became insolvent in 1925 and was rescued by a loan from Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Parufamet agreement, which bought them access to UFA’s studios, cinemas, and creative staff. Immediately afterwards, UFA actors, directors, and technicians emigrated to Hollywood in numbers; Lubitsch, Freund, and Murnau all stayed in the USA on long-term contracts. Many others went back to UFA, disgusted by Hollywood’s industrial mass production, only to emigrate for good under the Nazi regime.
UFA collapsed financially again in 1927. This time its shares were bought up by right-wing financiers, above all Alfred Hugenberg, until the company was folded into Goebbels’ propaganda machine in 1933.
Under the Nazi regime the German industry emptied out: over 1,500 film professionals emigrated, among them Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Max Ophüls, Elisabeth Bergner, Friedrich Hollaender, Erich Pommer, and Detlef Sierck, later Douglas Sirk; many of them of Jewish origin. What that exodus did to both countries’ cinema is the subject of the essay.
In the USA, the production, distribution, and screening of films became a mainstream national business, and perhaps the national passion. Star salaries reached monumental proportions. Filmmaking was standardized, indeed industrialized, as the studio system; Wall Street invested heavily across the industry; and every genre in use today was introduced in the 1920s.
The lascivious lifestyle of the stars produced a run of scandals, and the government stirred. To pre-empt it, Hollywood founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the MPPDA, later the Motion Picture Association of America, an industry body for self-censorship headed by a conservative politician, Will Hays, hence the “Hays Office.” One of Hays’ principles was the on-screen victory of law and morality over crime and violations of conservative social values. But the MPPDA was hardly taken seriously, much as Prohibition (1920 to 1933) was hardly taken seriously, and so from 1927 to 1933 Hollywood produced arguably its most liberal films ever. The ex-UFA director Lubitsch was especially successful with his sensual innuendo, tested earlier in German costume films, and whole ex-UFA legions found a home at Paramount, considered the most “European” and sophisticated of the studios.
It is hard to believe that the switch from silent to sound film was completed within a few years at the end of the 1920s, and that it traces substantially to a marketing move by Warner Brothers. The studios of the 1920s, Paramount, MGM’s parent Loew’s, First National, and the rest, all had ambitious expansion plans and were buying cinema chains at a furious pace. Warner and Fox set out to dominate the smaller chains by offering recorded musical accompaniment to their films; the unexpected success of that move forced the entire industry onto sound and turned Fox and Warner into giants. Warner bought First National. William Fox went further still and acquired a controlling stake in Loew’s, MGM’s parent company, but the Justice Department intervened, forced Fox to give Loew’s up, and likewise blocked a proposed merger between Warner and Paramount, which had meanwhile bought half of the young Columbia Broadcasting System. By 1930, the overwhelming majority of American production was concentrated in eight studios, five of them fully vertically integrated, controlling on the order of 2,600 first-run cinemas.
Hollywood was by then so vertically integrated that its main income was cinema admissions, and accordingly over 90 percent of investment went into expanding the cinema chains, not into films. Hollywood had become an industry of cinema operators who happened to produce their own films in their own studios.
Image: Wikimedia Commons (NARA)
The switch to sound required major investment, on top of the heavy loans taken during the Great Depression. The studios could afford no risk and therefore barely tolerated eccentric or artistically daring directors. Famous talents such as Griffith, Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton struggled to survive as filmmakers inside the rigid system.
Artistic
After legions of UFA employees, directors, cameramen, actors, designers, lighting technicians, musicians, had emigrated between 1925 and 1933, most visibly to Paramount, let us return to the golden decade of German film itself.
UFA’s first productions at the start of the 1920s were elaborate costume films modeled on the pre-war Italian super-spectacles. The master of the genre was Ernst Lubitsch, whose films gave German cinema a firm place on the world market. A very different film pointed elsewhere: Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920), the first expressionist work, which gave the impetus to the movement known as German Expressionism.
Caligari influenced the UFA films that followed enormously. It depicted disturbed mental states above all through décor; in the post-war years electricity had to be saved, so lighting was sparse anyway. These were films of fantasy and terror, using dreadful plots to express the theme of the soul in search of itself; shot entirely in the studio, with distorted sets and lighting effects creating a radically subjective mood.
Alfred Hitchcock, then an unknown assistant director, shot his first film work at Studio Babelsberg in 1924. Years later he summed it up: “Everything I needed to know about filmmaking I learned in Babelsberg.”
Expressionism brought Germany international prestige and created world figures such as Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1927) and F. W. Murnau. Lang made his early sound masterpiece “M” in 1931, left Germany in 1933 shortly after the Nazis came to power, and reached Hollywood the following year.
Murnau made several smaller expressionist films, but it was “The Last Laugh” (Der letzte Mann, 1924), a chamber piece, that made him world-famous. He built a complex narrative through the innovative use of camera movement and subjective point-of-view shots; he strapped a lightweight camera to his chest and stumbled through a bedroom set to capture the view through a drunken doorman’s eyes, and he mounted the camera on moving bicycles, fire ladders, and taut ropes to create flowing motion, pushing camera movement further than anyone before him.
Image: production still, Der letzte Mann (1924), UFA
“The Last Laugh” is generally regarded as a masterpiece and probably influenced the style of Hollywood films more than any other foreign film. It also brought Murnau a long-term Hollywood contract, which he took up in 1926.
The counterpart to Expressionism was the “New Objectivity”: films about the disillusionment, cynicism, and resignation of ordinary people whose lives had been ground down by post-war inflation. A master of these was G. W. Pabst, whose work established conventions of continuity editing that became indispensable for sound film. Pabst built complex, continuous sequences using methods that later underpinned Hollywood’s so-called invisible editing: the cut on action, the cut from a character’s gaze to what the character sees (the motivated point-of-view shot), and the cut to the reverse angle.
The former Soviet Union’s contribution to film is often underestimated. Lenin was the first political leader of the twentieth century to recognize film’s importance as propaganda instrument and communication medium: “For us, cinema is the most important of the arts.” But there was little infrastructure to build on; most pre-revolutionary producers had fled to Europe, wrecking their studios and taking equipment and film stock with them. So the state founded the Vsesoyuznyi Gosudarstvennyi Institut Kinematografii, the VGIK, the first film school in the world.
Lev Kuleshov was its great teacher. He obtained a print of Griffith’s Intolerance and screened it to his students in the “Kuleshov Workshop” until they knew the shots by heart and could rearrange its intricate cutting patterns on paper in hundreds of combinations. Kuleshov and his students became intellectual masters of montage; for them, editing was the great overriding structural element, capable of steering the direction and meaning of the narrative.
Two of his most brilliant students were Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin. Eisenstein, an intellectual who formulated a modernist theory of montage, made many films successful in the Soviet Union. As usual, Battleship Potemkin (1925) was propaganda, designed to provoke a strong emotional response in the spirit of Soviet mass ideology; but the film goes far beyond propaganda in form and content and has repeatedly been ranked among the most influential and best films of all time. In Potemkin, Eisenstein demonstrates a new method of film montage; in his view, montage was cinema’s highest structural element.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
In Hollywood, self-censorship returned to the agenda in the early 1930s. The MPPDA had been trying to censor Hollywood since 1922, and it simply had not worked; cinema moved on unchecked despite the many condemnations.
With the transition to sound, Hollywood began trying new, experimental directions. Some films dared nudity; others portrayed criminals as heroes. The wild 1920s had brought a radical liberalization in how North America viewed sexuality; for the first time in the country’s history, women began to be respected as professionals, having only won the vote in 1920. None of this suited the Catholic Church.
From 1929 to 1934, Hollywood produced some of the most progressive films of the twentieth century, and box-office hits at that: The Divorcee (1930), Frankenstein (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Red-Headed Woman (1932), Baby Face (1933). This period, and its films, is known as Pre-Code Hollywood, characterized by progressive ideals, women’s emancipation, gangsters, social questions, monsters and chaos, and commentary on the church.
High-ranking representatives of the Catholic Church in the USA were angered by cinema’s direction and fought for “better,” “more moral” films. In 1933 the bishops organized as the Legion of Decency, with a mandate from the Vatican, and when a nationwide cinema boycott was called in 1934, it was too risky for Hollywood to ignore. The result was the Production Code, this time successfully enforced by the MPPDA and observed by the studios until 1968.
1940
Technical
At this point we have half a century of film history behind us, and in my opinion these first fifty years are the most exciting. Technically and artistically, comparatively little happens between here and 2020, apart from the introduction of television (just another kind of individual “film projector”), surround sound, computer-generated effects, and digital film and cinema.
Commercial
The 1940s were record years for attendance. From 1942 to 1944, the roughly 7,000 cinemas in Germany, Austria, and the occupied territories reached annual audiences of over one billion. Yet from 1933, German film had already lost its international tradition; the main reasons were sound (German is not a world language with a mass audience) and the continuous drain of talent, which carried on after the Second World War. The long reckoning with the war and the division of Germany then severed many film traditions altogether, accompanied by a rejection of regional, national, and even European identity. West German cultural funding largely withdrew from film, the art form that had become the leading medium of the twentieth century, and the country came to rely on imports from the USA.
In the early 1940s, film was the eleventh-largest industry in the USA. During the Second World War, with the American economy booming, two thirds of North Americans went to the cinema at least once a week.
Image: Michelle C. Pautz, “The Decline in Average Weekly Cinema Attendance, 1930 to 2000”, Issues in Political Economy vol. 11, University of Dayton, 2002
Post-war inflation, the temporary loss of key foreign markets, and the arrival of television ended this rapid growth. Then, in 1948, the antitrust case against Paramount forced the studios to give up control of the cinema chains: a devastating blow from which the studio system never recovered. The great studios were eventually taken over by multinational corporations, and the powerful studio bosses lost the influence they had held for thirty years.
Artistic
The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system was Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial subject and experimental technique made it a classic. Using newly developed film stock and a wider, more light-sensitive lens, Welles pushed montage, staging, and sound to their limits and redefined the medium.
After the Second World War, new film movements emerged around the world: the French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, the Scandinavian revival. They wanted to bring movement back into cinema, much as Pre-Code Hollywood had. Many of the era’s themes were taken up again by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini. Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist films stood in deliberate contrast to Hollywood: shot in the streets, with untrained actors, on grainy black-and-white stock, capturing lyrically the desperation and confusion of post-war Europe.
1950
Technical
For the film industry, the greatest threat was television. Having lost the cinemas through the Paramount ruling, the studios now lost audiences to the small screen, and they fought back by exploiting film’s two real advantages: the size of the image, and, in an era when all television was black and white, color. Stereo sound followed from 1952.
Technicolor’s monopoly as sole producer of color prints was ended by decree, and Kodak, as it happened, introduced a new multi-layer stock at the same time, with all the color layers on a single roll. The process offered excellent color at low cost and worked in conventional cameras, which accelerated the changeover: by 1954 more than half of US features were in color, and by 1970 the figure was 94 percent.
There was also heavy experimentation with widescreen (Cinerama, 1952) and stereoscopic 3D (Natural Vision, 1952). In the end, Twentieth Century-Fox’s CinemaScope won out, using anamorphic lenses to capture a wide image on standard stock; its great advantage was that no special cameras, stock, or projectors were required. From 1954, many films were shot in the new widescreen format, above all visually spectacular subjects of epic proportions.
Yet despite the studios’ ingenious strategies, attendance kept falling through the 1950s and 1960s, and serious competition arrived from independent and foreign filmmakers; many films were now shot around the world, outside the studios, to save costs.
The Production Code of 1934 lost its legitimacy as a series of US Supreme Court decisions between 1952 and 1958 extended free-speech protection to motion pictures. Foreign films, which the studios could not keep out and which were not bound by the Code, added pressure. By the end of the 1960s enforcement had become impossible, and the Code was abandoned entirely. In 1968 the MPAA switched to a ratings system, the ancestor of today’s G, PG, PG-13 (added in 1984), R, and NC-17 (which replaced the X rating in 1990). Distributors of pornographic films carried on using their own X, XX, and XXX symbols as marketing.
Commercial
The cinemas’ sole reign had lasted not even half a century. Only in the United States did one special form boom in this period, favored by post-war motorization: the drive-in. Otherwise, television’s popularity drove attendance drastically down, and many cinemas went bankrupt or closed.
The film industry in Germany continued to struggle. Beyond the structural losses of the post-war years, the occupying powers’ film-policy goals, which amounted to consolidating the irrelevance of the German film industry, made any recovery difficult; creatively, too, it had little left to offer.
Innovation came instead from France, from directors like Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1960) introduced many elements of the French Nouvelle Vague at once: the jump cut, the handheld camera, loose improvised direction; films made for 90,000 dollars in four weeks. The jump cut was an attack on “invisible,” seamless, traditional editing, and thus on film’s narrative continuity of time. Suddenly, things were dared that lay outside the Hollywood norm.
Image: still from Breathless (1960), Les Films Impéria
Artistic
The 1950s were the golden age of Indian cinema, producing 200 films a year, with Indian independent films gaining recognition through international festivals. Among the most famous works of the period is the Apu Trilogy (1955 to 1959) by the Bengali director Satyajit Ray, whose films profoundly influenced world cinema and directors from Akira Kurosawa and Martin Scorsese to James Ivory, François Truffaut, Steven Spielberg, and Jean-Luc Godard.
Japanese cinema was also highly active and creative, producing successes such as Akira Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress (1958), which later inspired George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). Other famous Japanese filmmakers of the period include Kenji Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse, Hiroshi Inagaki, and Nagisa Oshima. Japanese cinema became one of the main inspirations of the New Hollywood movement of the 1960s to 1980s.
Image: still from The Hidden Fortress (1958), Toho; via akirakurosawa.info
1960
Technical
In Hollywood, the studios kept trying new presentation techniques to win viewers back from television. The widescreen strategies of the 1950s had not delivered lasting success; 3D triggered a brief boom; and the frantic experimentation with new wide formats continued.
The “death of the cinemas” went on, with more operators giving up into the early 1980s, joined by new competition from video stores, computer games, and private broadcasters.
Commercial
Hollywood films still aimed largely at a conservative family audience, and the rather old-fashioned films brought the studios their greatest successes: Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965) were among the decade’s biggest hits.
The studio system kept losing influence as many films were now shot on location in other countries or in studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecittà in Rome.
Hollywood was in a deep financial crisis. Despite isolated successes, most films lost money, because the industry had missed the shift to a new, diversified, younger audience. The result was a series of takeovers of all the studios by financial investors, whose new managers, after 1965, opened the doors to the hitherto unthinkable New Hollywood directors.
Artistic
In the USA, interest in foreign-language cinema grew. French Nouvelle Vague directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard broke Hollywood’s rules of narrative structure in films such as The 400 Blows, Breathless, and Jules and Jim. Deutsche Welle notes that alongside Godard, Truffaut became the movement’s most famous face, his films more popular than Godard’s; works like “Jules and Jim” (1961) proclaimed new forms of love and hinted at what would gain broad social relevance in 1968: a different approach to sexuality and a new image of women.
Image: still from Jules and Jim (1962), Les Films du Carrosse / SEDIF
As one of the most influential film movements ever, the French New Wave changed how films were made for good and influenced some of the greatest directors of our time. It produced a new kind of film: confident, authentic, sincere, and therefore revolutionary. By 1968 there were local new-wave movements all over the world.
In the UK, meanwhile, the Free Cinema of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, and others led to a series of realistic, innovative dramas including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving, and This Sporting Life. Other British films, Repulsion, Darling, Alfie, Blowup, Georgy Girl (all 1965 to 1966), helped roll back the prohibitions on sex and nudity on screen. Hence, too, the popularity of the James Bond films, which from Dr. No (1962) onward made sex and violence acceptable worldwide as incidental elements.
Germany had its own “new wave” in the 1960s. A group of young filmmakers wrote the “Oberhausen Manifesto” in 1962, demanding a departure from the dusty German post-war cinema: “The old film is dead. We believe in the new one.” The director Alexander Kluge became the intellectual head of the German cinema awakening; the manifesto was signed by Haro Senft, Edgar Reitz, Peter Schamoni, and Franz Josef Spieker, among others, later joined by Volker Schlöndorff, Werner Herzog, Jean-Marie Straub, Wim Wenders, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. With this movement, German film regained some international standing for the first time since the 1920s and early 1930s, though primarily among critics rather than audiences.
In Europe, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and François Truffaut ranked among the leading directors of the new wave era; together with Japan’s Akira Kurosawa, these four changed the landscape of their home industries with radically new ideas. The movements also inspired North American directors; Italian Neorealism in particular left its mark on Scorsese. Distributors brought the foreign films to the USA regularly, where the new film-school generation devoured them.
In the mid-1960s, the cultural upheaval in the US began reaching the film industry. In a step not seen for decades, the big studios again let authors like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese take complete charge of a film: the beginning of New Hollywood, which rewrote the rules of film production.
In the late 1960s, Hollywood began making more innovative and unconventional films reflecting the social upheaval: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Midnight Cowboy (1969), Easy Rider (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969) all found international success. Bonnie and Clyde is often taken as the start of “New Hollywood.”
New Hollywood was a film movement in the United States between 1967 and 1976, led by a group of film students determined to overturn a stagnant status quo. Thanks to Hollywood’s new open-mindedness they could work inside the studio system while bringing a fresh perspective to mainstream production. Its best-known filmmakers: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Brian De Palma, and Francis Ford Coppola.
Two films from 1967 finally rang in the era: The Graduate, with its explicit sexuality, and Bonnie and Clyde, with its sex and violence. Both were very daring.
Image: still from Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Warner Bros.
1970
Commercial
The complete liberalization of American society hoped for in the late 1960s did not arrive. What arrived instead were mergers and inflation, especially between 1972 and 1979; the average cost per feature rose by more than 500 percent, reaching 11 million dollars by 1980.
Some films by the New Hollywood directors had unprecedented success: Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). The enormous profits stimulated financial risk appetite, and it became normal for the big companies to put their working capital into only five or six films a year, hoping one or two would hit.
The phenomenal success of Jaws, a genre mix of drama and thriller with expensive technical effects, founded the model of the modern “blockbuster”: nine million dollars of production cost against 472 million at the box office. Studio managers saw in Jaws a recipe that could be reproduced indefinitely, and the summer blockbuster was born.
Image: still from Jaws (1975), Universal Pictures
The even greater success of Star Wars two years later, eleven million dollars in costs against 776 million in receipts, then cemented the blockbuster strategy in Hollywood’s business plans: fewer films, huge budgets, massive marketing.
With the blockbuster strategy, the days of New Hollywood were numbered. Artistic risk was out; duplicating proven recipes was in. The irony is that it was the outsized success of Spielberg and Lucas, two of New Hollywood’s most prominent members, that rang in the movement’s end, and that the escapism of their hits stood opposed to the socially critical approach New Hollywood had actually pursued.
Artistic
In the early 1970s, English-speaking audiences were exposed as never before to the new West German cinema, whose leading international representatives included Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Wim Wenders.
Among New Hollywood directors, the auteur theory à la Truffaut was especially popular: the director as the intellectual originator and central creator of the film as artwork, free to express a personal vision. The arrival of the auteur approach in Hollywood gave these directors far greater control over their projects than earlier years would have allowed.
It also produced failures, including Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino’s ruinously expensive Western epic Heaven’s Gate (1980), which contributed to the bankruptcy of its studio, United Artists, and marked the end of the visionary auteur style in New Hollywood.
By the end of the 1970s, Hollywood had split in two: one part carried the artistic approach of New Hollywood on in independent productions; the other adapted to the market and became blockbuster directors.
1980
Commercial
The Lucas-Spielberg duo dominated Hollywood cinema in the 1980s, with consequences: two Star Wars sequels, three Indiana Jones films, and a wave of imitations, including three Jaws sequels made without Spielberg.
Hollywood’s new corporate managers largely lacked the film sense of the industry veterans. They relied on the proven and the visually sensational, which produced an unprecedented number of high-budget sequels.
In the 1980s, the North American industry increasingly exploited new technologies of video delivery and image processing. Cable networks, satellite television, and video cassettes opened new distribution channels, and computer-generated graphics (Tron, 1982) opened new possibilities in effects. Many studios devoted most of their capacity to television films for the commercial broadcasters.
The dominance of cable and the video-rental business led Hollywood to optimize films for the medium: some were designed to play well on the smaller television screen (Flashdance, 1983; Footloose, 1984), while others lured audiences into theatres with spectacular 70 mm photography and multi-track Dolby sound (Amadeus, 1984; Aliens, 1986).
British cinema got a lift in the early 1980s with the arrival of David Puttnam’s Goldcrest Films; Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields, and A Room with a View appealed to a middle-intellectual audience increasingly ignored by the major Hollywood studios.
Artistic
Japanese cinema was on the rise again, largely through the success of anime. The 1980s also saw the birth of original video animation, OVA: films that bypassed cinema and television and were distributed on cassette alone. Two prominent early examples are Noboru Ishiguro’s cyberpunk Megazone 23 (1985) and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988), which failed initially in Japanese cinemas and later became an international success.
Image: production board, Megazone 23 (1985); via zimmerit.moe
Hong Kong action cinema also made a comeback. After the death of Bruce Lee it had sunk into a swamp of endless Bruceploitation films; in the 1980s it revived, driven above all by Jackie Chan’s reinvention of the action genre, which upgraded comedic martial arts with elaborate and highly dangerous stunts reminiscent of the silent era.
1990
Technical
In the 1990s, computer-generated images became a standard component of Hollywood action-adventure films; groundbreaking examples include Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), and The Matrix (1999) by the Wachowskis.
Image: behind the scenes, Jurassic Park (1993), Universal Pictures
In 1995, the first fully computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and marketed by Disney. Computer animation became the dominant means of feature animation, with studios such as DreamWorks Animation and 20th Century Fox competing with their own successes. These elaborate effects made films more visually luxurious and helped Hollywood and the new animation studios maintain, indeed expand, their dominance of the global film market at the century’s end.
Image: User:Canoe1967, CC BY 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
A yellow submarine in Second Life.
In the late 1990s another shift began, away from physical film stock toward digital cinema technology, while DVDs replaced VHS cassettes as the standard for video sales and rental.
Commercial
At the turn of the millennium, the American film business was gripped by the idea of synergies, producing an unprecedented wave of mergers and acquisitions. Cinema, broadcast television, cable and satellite systems, networks, theme parks, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, entertainment merchandise, sports teams, internet providers: all of it came under shared roofs in various combinations, on the theory that the products would sell each other. Whether that ever worked remains an open question.
With the multiplex in the shopping mall came the industry’s drive to feed the young audiences there with effects-laden genre works, teen horror and comedies. This generally diminished the director’s influence as the dominant creative figure and eroded the status Hollywood directors had reached in the auteur-oriented 1960s and 70s; a handful of established filmmakers, Spielberg and Scorsese among them, veterans of the earlier era, kept their standing.
In the early 1990s a commercially successful independent film scene developed in the United States. While audiences were flooded with effects films, Terminator 2 (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Titanic (1997), and later Avatar (2009), independents such as Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club (1999) also found major commercial success, in cinemas and in home video.
The origins of the independent wave lay partly in Hollywood’s now limited openings for creative filmmakers, a gap filled by organizations like the Independent Feature Project and the Sundance Film Festival, both founded to stimulate and promote independent filmmaking. Then the big studios began setting up their own “independent” production arms to finance and produce non-mainstream films; one of the most successful independents of the decade, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney even before the release of Tarantino’s later hit Pulp Fiction (1994).
Image: still from Pulp Fiction (1994), Miramax
Thanks to highly attractive films by Soderbergh, Spike Lee, David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Tarantino, and Oliver Stone, independent film became interesting to much of the mainstream audience. That in turn promoted niche films and documentaries dealing with ethnic themes and the search for identity in contemporary American culture, including work by African-American and Native American filmmakers and films engaging with feminism and LGBT themes.
Artistic
By the end of the twentieth century, the concept of national cinema had become irrelevant in Western Europe’s traditional film centers, except in France. The trend ran toward international co-productions and toward filmmakers and actors working across countries and languages. Film movements identified with a single national culture, like Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, or the New German Cinema, no longer existed. A telling example is Heaven (2002), written by Poland’s Krzysztof Kieślowski and Krzysztof Piesiewicz, directed by Germany’s Tom Tykwer, set in Italy, and shot partly in Italian and English with American and Australian leads.
Other prominent figures of European cinema in the period include Pedro Almodóvar of Spain, Manoel de Oliveira of Portugal, Théo Angelopoulos of Greece, Aki Kaurismäki of Finland, and Nanni Moretti of Italy.
The only not entirely unsuccessful attempt to launch one more European film movement came from a Danish filmmaking collective, which presented a doctrine called Dogme 95 at Cannes in 1998: a manifesto against technological gimmickry and for a pragmatic realism of style and content.
After the Turn of the Millennium
Commercial
Measured by number of features produced, India, the United States, China, Nigeria, and Japan are the most active countries. Production has globalized, and even foreign-language films now reach English-speaking markets more often: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin), Amélie (French), Lagaan (Hindi), Spirited Away (Japanese), City of God (Portuguese), The Passion of the Christ (Aramaic), Apocalypto (Maya), Inglourious Basterds (several European languages). At the Oscars, incidentally, Italy has done best among foreign-language cinemas: 14 awards, 3 special prizes, 31 nominations.
Because the industry faces constant new competition from other media, video games above all, it works constantly to increase films’ attraction, building on digital 3D and on epic films, meaning fantasy and superhero pictures, which became the main revenue source. Films are produced in IMAX format in parallel; the first was Treasure Planet (2002), a Disney animation, followed by The Matrix Revolutions (2003) as the first live-action IMAX release, then a re-release of The Matrix Reloaded and later The Dark Knight.
From 2001 there was the Harry Potter series, which by its final installment in 2011 had become the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, until the Marvel films overtook it from 2015. That is a phenomenon worth pausing on. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) is familiar to nearly everyone; the first Captain America, and the first Marvel-based film at all, dates from 1944, which is why Second World War scenes keep turning up. Several more Captain America adaptations followed, and the four Avengers films from 2012 to 2019 alone took in 7.6 billion dollars. I count some 60 Marvel live-action adaptations from 1944 to today; add the animated and television versions and the number triples. Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man, Wolverine, Daredevil, Deadpool, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Logan, Guardians of the Galaxy; and to round out the picture, DC delivers Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Aquaman, Green Arrow. We live in a curious film era.
Image: Alan Light, derivative work by Jayblue42, CC BY 2.0 (Wikimedia Commons)
Happily, documentaries such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 also found success, which led to documentary film being taken more seriously commercially. With Martin Kunert and Eric Manes’ Voices of Iraq, a new docu-reality genre was born: 150 cheap video cameras were distributed to people in Iraq, and ordinary people suddenly became filmmakers.
German film has a weak presence in its home market, with a share of roughly 20 to 25 percent, and no notable success with international audiences; the usual diagnoses are weaknesses in realizing audience-effective screenplays and productions with insufficient emotional pull. How German cinema arrived at this position, from having once been the brains of the world’s film industry, is the story the essay tells.
Technical
A defining feature of the post-2000 period is the decline of traditional television and the rise of digital streaming services, broadly the successors of the DVD rental business of the 80s and 90s.
The rise of video streaming transformed television within a decade. With the spread of Netflix it became easy, at least in the USA, to cancel the TV subscription entirely; series were now on Netflix too, cheaper and more convenient. Cable and satellite broadcasters felt it from 2010 onward, recording their first subscription declines as millennials and recession-strained consumers cancelled or never subscribed at all.
Netflix pressed on into original production, finding first success with the mob drama Lilyhammer in 2012, and made television history in 2013 with 14 Emmy nominations for House of Cards, the first nominations ever for web-based programming. Competitors moved quickly to fill the gaps in Netflix’s catalogue: Amazon, Hulu, Apple, Disney, HBO, Paramount, Peacock, all with offerings more or less adapted to other countries and languages. These streaming services supply the independent film industry with a comparatively large number of projects, producing a continuous stream of films and series at small to medium budgets.
Outlook
In the first fifty years of film history, the cinema was the only place films were shown, so every genre played there; there was no alternative, which also explains the era’s enormous weekly attendance. With the arrival of small personal screens, first television, then streaming after the millennium, exhibition sorted itself across the different “projection methods.” What the newsreel, the serials, and the vaudeville acts once were has largely moved to the TV screen; what the B-pictures of the 1930s were, the cheaper productions, series, and documentaries, now lives mainly on streaming devices; and the epic, high-gloss films with elaborate effects and premium sound are still watched first in cinemas, with friends and family.
When I first wrote this chronicle, in the middle of the pandemic, the open question was whether film could survive without the cinema at all. The years since have answered it, in the direction this chronicle predicted: attendance did not return to pre-2020 levels, and thousands of screens closed, but the cinema survived by leaning into exactly the thing it has sold since the fairground era, the attraction and the shared experience. Premium formats like IMAX thrive; event films still fill halls; and the art-house cinemas hold their niche, around 17 percent of the market in Germany and up to 30 percent in countries like France and Switzerland, serving an audience that comes less for popcorn than for demanding films in a proper setting, perhaps with a good espresso in hand. The dinner comparison still holds: takeaway did not kill the restaurant, it clarified what restaurants are for.
The open question of the next decade sits further up the chain, in production: for 130 years, this chronicle has been a story of machines changing what stories cost and who gets to tell them, from Edison’s patents to Kodak’s color stock to Pixar’s processors, and generative AI is simply the next entry in that column. Where it lands, between tool and author, is the first genuinely new question the medium has faced since sound. This chronicle will be updated as it plays out; the file stays open.
Summary
It seems that what the fairground attractions with their magicians once were has been perfected, and inherited, by the Hollywood film. The founding decades on the German side ran through Babelsberg: in the early years, essentially everything in the German industry was organized under UFA around Babelsberg in Potsdam, and after all the restructurings of the past decades, Studio Babelsberg remains the oldest large-scale film studio in the world and the largest film studio in Europe, while UFA, with its eventful history, carries its production expertise on in film and television. Alongside the Bavaria Studios (Das Boot, 1981), a number of further production and service companies are spread across Germany today.
What that founding decade meant, why its people ended up building Hollywood’s golden age, and what Germany might do about the forgetting, is the argument of the companion essay: What Happens to a Country That Expels Its Storytellers? The questions I investigate beyond film history live in the Open Files.
Filed under Migration, an open file on this desk.
