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Rc 5a.cinema
The document discusses the history of cinema from its inception to the digital age, highlighting key developments such as the transition from silent films to 'talkies' and the evolution of filmmaking techniques. It covers significant events, influential filmmakers, controversies surrounding censorship, and the effects of societal changes on film narratives. The document also examines Hollywood's competition with television and international cinema, culminating in the digital revolution in delivery systems and modern filmmaking.
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Rc 5a.cinema
- 1. Media History from Gutenberg tothe Digital Age Slides based on the Bloomsbury book by Bill Kovarik Revolutions in Communication Chapter 5 – History of Cinema
- 2. Web site &textbook Textbook: 1st edition – 2011 2nd edition – 2016 http://www.revolutionsincommunication.com
- 3. Who inventedmovies Controversies and impacts Why did movies move to Hollywood? The silent film era What happened when sound arrived Golden age of film 1930s Film in War 1940s Film fights TV 1950s This lecture is about …
- 4. How do wesee cinema history? A succession of inventions? An extension of theater? A shared social experience? A business? An art? A problem of regulation ? A means of social control? A progression of camera, sound and special effects techniques? All of the above?
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- 6. Still projectors goback to 1650s
- 7. Early mechanical animation Achildren’s toy, also called Zoetrope (US) and Daedalum (Britain). It relied on persistence of vision to create the optical illusion of motion.
- 8. Eadweard Muybridge 1877 Itstarted with a bet – Do all four hooves leave the ground when a horse gallops? It’s hard to tell if you’re looking at the horse. San Francisco photographer Muybridge was brought in by California governor Leland Stanford in 1877 to settle the bet. He used trip wires and glass plate photos. The governor won, as you can see.
- 9. The elements arein place Camera / dark “chamber” (ancient) Projector with strong light (from 1600s) Mechanical animation (from late 1700) Flexible celluloid film (1880s)
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- 11. Edison develops peepshow Kinetoscope system 1893 For individual viewers (note viewing port at the top)
- 12. Films made inthe “Black Maria”
- 13. Romance was anearly theme First kiss on film — 1896 -- May Irwin and John C. Rice staged the first kiss ever seen on film for Thomas Edison in the film studio called the “Black Maria” in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1896. Edison’s short subjects were played on hand-cranked personal projectors in Nickelodeon halls.
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- 15. Meanwhile in France… Augusteand Louis Lumière develop the Cinématographe system for theaters. They were able to “get the picture out of the box.” 1895.
- 16. Auguste and LouisLumière “My brother, in one night, invented the cinematographe” -- Auguste
- 19. The first filmdirector Alice Guy-Blaché directed and produced hundreds of films while working as the head of production at the Gaumont in Paris 1896 – 1907 and at her own Solax studios in New York 1910 – 1920s.Although neglected by historians, Guy-Blaché originated techniques for narrative storytelling through film. Overall, she produced more than 1,000 films in her two-decade career. Only a few survive.
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- 21. Early film waslike theater In George Méliès’s 1902 Trip to the Moon, there are no closeups, few medium shots, and only a few transitions from one scene to the next. There was one stationary camera set in front of the stage
- 22. Edwin S. Porterproduced Great Train Robbery 1903, Life of a Fireman … Close-ups, location shots, moving camera, time sequences Directors begin to explore the new medium…
- 23. Movie censorship 1908 Outragefollows. “This sort of treatment can go in Russia, but it can’t go in this country,” one theater owner responded. Post card, UK, 1910 New York mayor George McClellan Jr. revokes the licenses of 540 “corrupt” movie theaters.
- 24. Movie censorship 1910 Thefirst African-American heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, won a July 1910 match, He beat James Jeffries, a white boxer called the “great white hope.” A film showing Johnson’s victory led to rioting in many US cities and at least eight deaths. The film alarmed racists in US Congress who banned interstate sales of all boxing films in 1912. The ban wasn’t lifted until 1940.
- 25. Fathers of film:Eastman, Edison George Eastman (left) – Kodak camera and films founder -- and Thomas Edison used patents to try to control the movie business.
- 26. MPPC – TheEdison Trust Motion picture patents company Included US filmmakers Biograph and Vitagraph, French filmmakers Méliès and Pathé. Wanted: ◦ 1 -- To keep independents from exhibiting in theaters or using patents ◦ 2 – Censorship of immoral movies . Opposed by founders of Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox studios Circumvention: They moved from the East coast to Hollywood, where mild weather and distance from the Edison company allowed feature film expansion.
- 27. MPPC – TheEdison Trust European films from Méliès and Pathé ended with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. In 1915, independent producers won the United States v. Motion Picture Patents Company anti-trust case. Ended the Edison monopoly on film patents Also 1915, Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, Supreme Court rules that films are not protected by the First Amendment.
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- 29. Silent film era Freedfrom the hobbles of Edison’s monopoly, and with competition from European films now halted by World War I, US film makers embarked on an era of innovation and development.
- 30. Birth of anation – DW Griffith 1915 Nor really about US history Plot centers around post-Civil War KKK vigilante heroism African Americans depicted as drunkards, rapists and murderers Riots broke out across US when film is shown – Performances had to be shut down.
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- 32. Sergei Eisenstein: BattleshipPotemkin 1925 Brilliant Soviet director finds that cinema has its own language and logic Montage: a compilation of close-ups, jump cuts and relative motion, to convey symbolic meaning or passage of time.
- 33. Chaplin: cinema super-star Berlin,1931 -- Frenzied crowds surrounded the hotel and besieged the train station… • Left wing newspapers celebrated working class genius. • Conservative newspapers said he should not be so highly celebrated. • Nazi papers were disgusted by the “Jewish film clown.” So now the political parties were defining themselves in relation to the film star, not the other way around. Corey Ross, Media and the Making of Modern Germany (New York, London: Oxford University Press, 2008).
- 34. German expressionism 1922 Cabinetof Dr. Caligari
- 35. Synchronized sound 1927 TheJazz Singer Al Jolson a major hit. Although Jolson’s blackface act is offensive by modern standards, it was meant to be clownish and sentimental at the time, and had none of the virulent racism of Birth of a Nation.
- 36. ‘talkies’ had wooden dialogue and exaggerated gestures much like thesilent films they were replacing. https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=Y2ZU3TiVLUo Esp. 28:00
- 37. Animation takes off WaltDisney’s synchronized sound experiments were one reason for his success with Steamboat Willie, 1928.
- 38. Tearing up thesets The Marx Brother’s first picture Cocoanuts, shot in New York, 1929. “Shot was just the word for it. All they did was point the camera at us while we ran through our old stage version.” The director “laughed so hard he drowned out everything else on the sound track… (they) solved the problem by having the director use hand signals from inside a sound-proof glass booth…” Harpo Speaks
- 39. Widespread censorship In France,“O de conduite” was censored for violence. In the US, the MPPA censored films and kept Americans safe from romance, like the 1933 Czech film Extase. An official board of censors had to approve UK each film.
- 40. Citizen Kane Satirized lifeof publisher William Randolph Hearst Produced 1941, suppressed 1942, revived 1960s The RKO movie was directed by Orson Wells, a New York theater director who had become famous for his “War of the World” Mercury Theater Radio program broadcast in 1938. In the American Film Institute’s top 100 movies of all time, Kane is number one. It is a dark movie, full of cinema technique but not geared to modern tastes.
- 41. Are artists responsible? Aglowing 1935 depiction of the Nazi party celebrations in Nuremberg Germany, Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will is considered a classic in technique but a monster for glorifying the subject. Here Riefenstahl and camera crew are getting a ground-level shot for the 1935 film. Ten years later she would face charges at the Nuremburg, and although never convicted of a crime, spent several years in detention. She claimed that artists should not be held responsible for the political problems their art causes.
- 42. Chaplin’s take onthe Nazis Chaplin’s moral courage in satirizing Hitler and defending Jewish people should not be underestimated. Few people in 1940 would have predicted the end of Nazi rule only five years later. Asked around that time whether he was Jewish himself, Chaplin said: “I do not have that honor. ” The Great Dictator, 1940, used biting sarcasm and slapstick to attack the cruelty of the Nazi regime.
- 43. Hollywood studio system Paramount (1912), Columbia (1920), Warner Brothers (1923), Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer (1924), RKO Pictures (1928) and 20th- Century Fox (1935) Steady supply of films, stable incomes, expertise Actors managed for benefit of studio Theater block booking (ends in 1948 with Paramount anti-trust suit).
- 44. Hollywood goes towar Giving a damn Clark Gable, famed for his role as Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, became an officer in the Air Corps. After narrowly escaping death in combat, he made a documentary called Combat America that featured interviews with pilots and gunners. Other significant films included Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series. Also important: Mrs. Miniver (UK) and Casablanca, the best loved film in movie history.
- 45. Italian Neorealismo 1944–1950s National film movement Stories about the working class Filmed on location Non-professional actors. Rome Open City, Bicycle Thief, Miracle in Milan Impact on French new wave, Polish films, early ‘Bollywood’ productions
- 46. Documentary films Nanookof the North, 1922, about an Inuk family in the Canadian Arctic Battle of the Somme, Geoffrey Malins Man with a Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929
- 47. Documentary films 2 The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau ◦ 1950s – 1980s Atomic Café, 1982 ◦ About nuclear tests Gimme Shelter, 1970 ◦ Rolling Stones disastrous 1969 tour Lots more https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_film
- 48. Post-war witch hunt Blackballedwriter Dalton Trumbo, a screenwriter who was briefly a member of the Communist Party, refused to implicate other Hollywood writers before the House Un-American Activities Committee and served an 11-month jail sentence. He was blackballed (not allowed to work) but brought back in the late 1950s to work on films like Spartacus and Exodus.
- 49. War reconciliation films WWI – Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir) WWII -- It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra) Vietnam -- Forrest Gump Cold War -- K-19, Hunt for Red October Berlin Wall -- Goodbye Lenin Also racial reconciliation, 1950s – 70s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Lilies of the Field, Island in the Sun, Little Big Man
- 50. Color barriers lower Oneof the most important aspects of cinema is its ability to humanize and evoke empathy for people in other walks of life, and nowhere did this occur with as much significance as in the evolution of images of African Americans. By providing these insights, Hollywood helped ease the way for the US civil rights movement.
- 52. Competition from television Movie ticket sales in 1960 were only half of what they were in 1947 Producers reacted by showing things that could not be seen on TV – more sex, more violence, more social commentary Hollywood also expanded into TV production Hollywood revenues picked up again to about ¾ of what they were at peak.
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- 54. 60s films TVcompetition let movies be something more -- to both reflect and lead a major shift in world culture, away from patriotism and simple heroics, toward tolerance, introspection and personal growth. The era is often described as post- classical cinema, characterized by the undermining of cultural hubris and devolution into artistic chaos.
- 55. 60s Blockbusters Epics:Lawrence of Arabia , Spartacus, Magnificent 7, Guns of Navarone Musicals: Camelot, Sound of Music, West Side Story Social: Psycho, Dr. Strangelove, the Graduate, Easy Rider Comedy: Mary Poppins, Producers, Pink Panther Westerns: Good, Bad & Ugly, Misfits Spy: James Bond
- 56. The evolving hero Sergeant York, (1941) From Here to Eternity (1953) Bridge over the River Kwai (57) Guns of Navarone (1961) Dr. Strangelove (1962) The Dirty Dozen (1967). Moral ambiguity: In The Guns of Navarone, Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) says: “The only way to win a war is to be just as nasty as the enemy. The one thing that worries me is we’re liable to wake up one morning, and find we’re even nastier than they are.” Sergeant York would never say that.
- 57. 70s Blockbusters Epics:Godfather, Jaws, Musicals: Grease, Fiddler on Roof Social: Cuckoo’s Nest, Catch 22, All President’s Men Comedy: Rocky Horror, MASH, Monty Python, Animal House Sci-Fi: Star Wars, Young Frankenstein, Alien
- 59. 80s Blockbusters Epics:Princess Bride, Raiders Lost Ark, Batman Social: Top Gun, Stand by Me, Platoon, Amadeus, Gandhi, Brazil, Comedy: Tootsie, Coming to America, Goonies Sci-Fi: ET, Back to Future, Field of Dreams Musicals: Little Mermaid (Disney)
- 60. 90s Blockbusters Epics:Jurassic Park, Saving Pvt Ryan, Bravehart, Mummy, Titanic Social: Forest Gump, Schindler’s list Comedy: Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Big Liebowski Sci-Fi: Matrix, Terminator Musicals: Disney musicals (Mulan, Beauty & Beast, Lion King)
- 61. 2000s Blockbusters Epics:Lord of Rings, Harry Potter, Avitar, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean, Social: Remember the Titans, Brokeback Mountain, V for Vendetta, Inglorious Bastards Sci-Fi: Day after tomorrow, X-men Musicals: Almost famous, Frozen
- 62. Special effects WillisO’Brien ◦ Lost World, 1925; ◦ King Kong, 1933 Fritz Lang ◦ Metropolis, 1927 Ray Harryhausen ◦ Sinbad 1958; Gulliver 1960; Jason 1963.
- 63. Stop motion animationcon’t Like musicals, which are now an animation genre, stop motion is an animation genre. Nick Park – creator of Wallace & Gromit
- 64. Digital special effects JohnDykstra’s computer controlled camera created the new look of Star Wars in 1977 But the big studios closed special effects units 1970s, missing the digital curve in the road until 1990s when they became a huge part of the medium. Although digital effects are great, make a model first, says Jurasic Park’s Denis Muren: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET5B68eV5DA
- 65. Effects wrap themedium Avatar 2009 shot almost entirely on a sound stage with green-screens Zoe Salanda after digital effects (left) and in motion-capture suit (right)
- 66. Digital revolution indelivery Declining cinema audience with TV, cable, on demand home video Nicholas Negroponte, predicted in 1996 that the first entertainment industry to be displaced by digital transmission technologies would be the video rental business. “And it will happen fast,” he said. By 2010, video rental stores like Hollywood Video, Blockbuster, MovieStarz and others had filed for bankruptcy. Cinemas now use 4K DCI pixel screens instead of 35 mm film
- 67. International cinema 21stCentury Hollywood now competing with films from Asia and Europe ◦ Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ◦ Amelie, color-saturated French romance ◦ Lagaan, Indian film about poverty ◦ Spirited Away, Japanese anime; ◦ Slumdog Millionaire Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, Disney’s Frozen, created in many languages to appeal to the growing international audience
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- 69. Review: people ThomasEdison, George Eastman, Auguste & Louis Lumiere, Alice Guy- Blache, George Melies, D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Orson Wells, Walt Disney, Leni Riefenstahl, Frank Capra, Clark Gable, Dalton Trumbo
- 70. Review Early filmcensorship, Edison Trust, MPAA code, silent film era, “talkies,” animation, Golden Age, Propaganda, Citizen Kane, HUAC hearings, anti- heroes, special effects blockbusters, end of the mass audience
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Editor's Notes
- #4 The story of cinema, from the Lumière brothers to the Cohn brothers, from Hollywood to Bollywood, from the Oscars to the Cannes Film Festival, is a story that parallels the social revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
- #6 A camera is just a chamber, and a “camera obscura” is a dark chamber. Poke a pin hole in one side of a camera obscrua, and on a sunny day, an upside down image will appear on the opposite wall.
- #7 Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens was the first, or among the first, to develop the original device in the late 1650s The most elaborate “magic lantern” shows provided narration, music and moving images in darkened theaters.
- #8 Zoopraxiscope, developed by photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1879, which projected a series of images in successive phases of movement. These images were obtained through the use of multiple cameras. The invention of a camera in the Edison laboratories capable of recording successive images in a single camera was a more practical, cost-effective breakthrough that
- #9 Muybridge inspired other inventors, but glass plates would not work for moving images. The introduction of flexible celluloid film in the mid-1880s led to a flurry of invention and two different film systems in France and the US
- #11 Muybridge met with Edison in 1888, and they talked about the possibility of “a phonograph for the eyes.” Edison decided not to work with Muybridge, but he did file a disclosure form with the patent office concerning his own ideas for a motion picture system. He also set some of his assistants to work on the device – one of a dozen projects around the Menlo Park factories. Edison’s Kinetoscope was marketed around 1894.
- #12 Invented between 1889 and 1892
- #13 Note the turntable underneath to allow the studio to be turned to take advantage of light. The Black Maria produced very short films for individual viewing in Kinetoscopes Motion pictures The first big invention to come out of Edison’s new lab was motion pictures. In October 1888, he began working on a machine he called a “kinetoscope,” writing that he was “experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear, which is the recording and reporduction of things in motion, and in such a form as to be both cheap, practical, and convenient.” Working with a small research team that included photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and machinist Charles Brown, Edison developed a motion picture camera, called the kinetograph, and a machine for watching movies, called a kinetoscope. the first movies were “peep shows” which only allowed one person at a time to watch. With the development of the projecting kinetoscope, though, audiences of several people could enjoy silent movies. Of course, no one was making movies at the time, so Edison also set up a studio on the laboratory grounds. Covered in black tar paper, it was nicknamed the “Black Maria,” slang for the police wagons of the day. The Black Maria had a roof that opened to the sun to let in daylight (the electric lights of the time weren’t strong enough for motion photography) and was set on a turntable so the entire building could be rotated to follow the sun.
- #14 First kiss on film—May Irwin and John C. Rice staged the first kiss ever seen on film for Thomas Edison in the film studio called the “Black Maria” in Menlo Park, New Jersey in 1896. Edison’s short subjects were played on hand-cranked personal projectors in Nickelodeon halls. (Library of Congress)
- #15 This is not a high-class place. Notice the stain on the floor, the poor wallpaper and lighting.
- #16 Film by Thierry Fremaux of the Institut Lumiere and the Archives du Film du Centre National de la Cinematographie
- #17 Claude-Antoine Lumière ran a photography equipment company in Lyons, France , in the 1880s that was the French equivalent of Kodak. Around 1894, Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the cinématographe system and began showing films in theaters.
- #18 March 22, 1895, the first screening of a set of short Lumiere productions.
- #19 It took Edison a year to catch up, but on April 23, 1896, Edison premiered the “Vitascope” in New York City.
- #20 Among her Gaumont films were The Cabbage Fairy 1896 and the 1906 Life of Christ, a major production for the era. Her Solax studios produced hundreds of films, including Falling Leaves, based on a popular O. Henry short story, about a sick woman who thinks she will die when the last leaf falls from a tree. Later, when she is cured, she learns that the leaves had been re-attached to the tree by her sister. She also directed Matrimony’s Speed Limit, which concerned a wealthy woman’s attempt to allay her poor boyfriends fears before their marriage. And she directed Algie the Miner about a gay man coping with life on the frontier.
- #21 Soon theaters sprang up everywhere, large and small, some only storefronts like this “Nickelodeon” on Yonge St. in Toronto,
- #24 Mclellan said movies “profit from the corruption of the minds of children.” Mayors in other cities quickly followed suit. The theater owners got an injunction and the judge agreed – but the question of censorship was open. See New York Times, December 29, 1908 Comic cinema postcard, circa 1910, Image from University of Exeter's Bill Douglas Centre archive, item BDCEXE 87654.
- #25 Historian Robert Niemi called it an “exceedingly ugly episode in the appalling annals of American racial bigotry” (Niemi, 2006).
- #26 George Eastman (left) – Kodak camera and films founder -- and Thomas Edison pose behind a World War I-era movie camera. (Library of Congress) Around this time, Thomas Edison, a social conservative who owned many US patents for film cameras and projectors, attempted to control both the business and its cultural impacts by forming the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908. Like other monopolies at the time, the MPPC was known as a “trust.” The MPPC “Edison Trust” included US filmmakers like Biograph and Vitagraph, and French filmmakers like Méliès and Pathé. But it did not include independent US film makers. The MPPC tried to stabilize a chaotic industry by setting standards and sharing patents, but as a monopoly, they were also able to keep independents from exhibiting in theaters or using their equipment. At the same time, the MPPC also formed a national censorship board to exclude anything that seemed immoral, leading the crusade for “moral purification” of movies. The Edison Trust’s attempt to control the business failed. The independents, especially the founders of Universal, Paramount and Twentieth Century Fox studios, moved away from the East coast to California, where mild weather and distance from the Edison company allowed feature film expansion. Then too, the dominance of European films from Méliès and Pathé ended abruptly with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. But more importantly, the emerging film industry once again went to the courts for protection. In 1915, independent producers, contending that Edison’s MPPC was an illegal monopoly, won a Supreme Court decision in United States v. Motion Picture Patents Company. That same year, the court also eased the fears of social conservatives in a related case, Mutual Film v. Industrial Commission of Ohio, ruling that films are not protected by the First Amendment. States were then free to set standards and film censorship boards of their own, and many did.
- #28 Mutual was finally overturned by Joseph Burstyn, Inc v. Wilson in 1952
- #30 The most famous icon of the silent era was Charlie Chaplin, whose “tramp” character delighted audiences worldwide. He created the character for film producer Mack Sennett when he was asked to put on a comic costume for a 1914 film. “I had no idea what makeup to put on . . . However, on the way to the wardrobe I thought I would dress in baggy pants, big shoes, a cane and a derby hat. I wanted everything to be a contradiction . . . I had no idea of the character. But the moment I was dressed, the clothes and the makeup made me feel the person he was. I began to know him, and by the time I walked on stage, he was fully born” (Chaplin, 1964, p. 154).
- #31 The most innovative and controversial film of the silent era was D. W. Griffith’s 1915 Birth of a Nation, a film that told the story of families torn apart in the aftermath of the US Civil War. It depicted Reconstruction-era African Americans in the worst possible light, as drunkards, rapists and murderers, who were only thwarted when a heroic white vigilante group, the Ku Klux Klan, rode out to oppose them. Critics said it was “unfair and vicious” (Outlook, 1915). Riots broke out at theaters in major cities (The Washington Post, April 18, 1915). Performances were shut down in eight states, and many others were picketed by the emerging National Association for Colored People.
- #32 Protests met many showings of Birth of a Nation.
- #33 The film glorified an early episode in the Russian Revolution and was among the first to use montage, which is a compilation of shots, including extreme closeups and details, to convey a strong impression. Eisenstein and other directors found that film had its own language and logic, and that apparently unrelated film cuts could be related in many ways. For example, Eisenstein would continue the motion of different objects from one shot into the next, or punctuate the visual impression of a shot with music written specifically to accompany the Montage.
- #34 Note: This photo is actually from a WWI war bond drive, taken in Washington DC in 1917 (Library of Congress). The point is that the political parties were defining themselves in relation to the film star, not the other way around. “Chaplin’s trip to Berlin . . . highlights not only the vital importance of the media to social and cultural life in the 1930s, but also their political impact, the challenge they posed to traditional values, their transcendence of social and national boundaries, and the complex relationship between cultural producers and their audiences” (Ross, 2008).
- #35 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a dark film about an insane doctor, was one of many post-World War I German films fromthe Expressionist era.
- #36 Hollywood was already at the top of its game by the mid-1920s, and few saw any reason to change things. When Jack Warner agreed to spend $10,000 to build a sound stage in 1927, he changed his mind a few hours later—only to find the stage already under construction. Warner Brothers used Vitaphone equipment, developed over the previous years by AT&T, and despite low box office expectations, The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, turned out to be a major hit. Although Jolson’s blackface act is offensive by modern standards, it was meant to be clownish and sentimental at the time, and had little of the virulent racism embedded in Birth of a Nation.
- #39 From Harpo Speaks by Harpo Marx with Rowland Barber, New York: Freeway Press, 1974. (Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation)
- #40 Fearing a patchwork of state-level censorship, and reacting to a series of Hollywood scandals fanned by Hearst newspapers, the film industry formed the Motion Pictures Production Association in 1922. Headed by Will H. Hayes, the MPAA fought both federal proposals for film censorship and critics within the movie industry who charged that it was a way to establish “complete monopoly” of major film producers over independent theater owners (“Theater Owners Open War on Hays,” New York Times, May 12, 1925). This fight over control of theaters began an antitrust lawsuit that was finally settled in the United States v. Paramount case two decades later. The MPAA code said: “No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it.” Under the code, criminals could never win, and partial nudity, steamy sex scenes and homosexuality were all strictly banned. The code survived numerous court challenges until the 1960s, then changed to a rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R and NC-17) that is still administered by the MPAA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%A9ro_de_conduite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecstasy_%28movie%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_banned_in_the_United_States
- #41 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiS-E-u9M6A
- #43 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GYuuLZaSIo -- Greatest speech ever made
- #45 Prelude to War was the first film of famed Hollywood film director Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series. It was originally intended to explain the war to the troops, but after President Roosevelt saw it, the film was released to the public and shown in theaters across the country in 1942. The propaganda techniques were rather obvious, but that was seen as one of the film’s virtues — that it was taking a direct approach. Disney collaborated on the animations.
- #49 Some actors courageously stood up to the HUAC investigations. These included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Danny Kaye and director John Huston who organized the Committee for the First Amendment to protest the hearings. Bogart had to back down, a little, in an article entitled “I’m No Communist” in the March, 1948 issue of Photoplay. But as Bogart reminded readers, “liberal minded folks are pure Americans . . . devoted to our democracy” (Bogart, 1948). It’s important to remember that many of those blacklisted were simply liberals and young people of the 1930s who were not Communists but saw the Communist movement reflecting idealism. Russian Communists were US and British allies during World War II, and were lionized in Hollywood productions like Days of Glory. The 1940s and 50s hunt for Communists in Hollywood is seen today as an excuse to victimize innocent people in order to gain political power.
- #51 One of the most important stories about Hollywood takes place not in a single film or production company, but over a span of decades in hundreds of films. It’s the story of how African Americans came to be treated as equals on and off the screen. It’s not an unalloyed success.
- #54 Pink Panther, Easy Rider, Kelly’s Heroes.
- #63 http://www.unmuseum.org/dyna.htm / Harryhausen’s dynamation technique didn’t require full miniaturization. It allowed moving foreground and background to sandwich the stop-motion animation.
- #64 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-life/7593616/Nick-Parks-tribute-to-Ray-Harryhausen-Wallace-and-Gromit-stop-motion-animation.html
- #66 Now everything is digital https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYmlKAq1SU0
- #67 4096 pixels × 2160 lines (8.8 megapixels, aspect ratio ~17:9) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution#Digital_cinema
- #69 India overtook the US and Europe as the world’s largest film producer in the 1970s. The Indian film industry is centered in Mumbai, and is informally called “Bollywood.” Like film industries everywhere, Bollywood caters primarily to mass audiences. Productions range from crime and action dramas to family-oriented comedies and musicals. However, an alternative to commercial Bollywood is the socially realistic Parallel Cinema movement. Bollywood actor Salman Khan with actresses (from left) Kareena Kapoor, Rani Mukerji, Preity Zinta, Katrina Kaif, Karisma Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra, in Mumbai, 2010. (Wikipedia)