Horizon High School

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Horizon High School

• Film History

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1895 Birth of Cinematography

• Robert W. Paul invented a film projector, giving
  his first public showing in 1895
• Movies were seen mostly via temporary storefront
  spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in
  vaudeville programs.

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1895 Birth of Cinematography

• Films under a minute long and usually presented a
  single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday
  life, a public event, a sporting event or
  slapstick.
• No cinematic technique no editing and usually no
  camera movement, and flat, staged compositions.

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1895 Birth of Cinematography

• Sally Rand, The Fan Dance
• An exotic dancer and actress.
• During the 1920s, she acted on stage and appeared
  in silent films.
• Arrested a few times due to indecent exposure
  while dancing, but the nudity was only an
  illusion.

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Silent Era 1895-1927

• Paris stage magician Georges Méliès did films of
  fantasy and the bizarre, including A Trip to the
  Moon (1902). He pioneered many of the basic
  special effects techniques used in movies for
  most of the twentieth century. He also led the
  way in making multi-scene narratives as long as
  fifteen minutes.

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Silent Era 1895-1927

• Edwin S. Porter, pushed forward the
  sophistication of film editing in works like the
  first movie Western, The Great Train Robbery
  (1903). Porter arguably discovered that the basic
  unit of structure in a film is the shot, rather
  than the scene.

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The Great Train Robbery (1903)

• Western filmed in New Jersey.
• Originally distributed with a note saying that
  the famous shot of the bandit firing his gun at
  the camera could be placed either at the
  beginning or at the end of the film, or both.
  Audiences at the time, for whom moving pictures
  were still very new and unfathomable, would
  usually scream in fear, then laugh in relief.

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Silent Era 1895-1927

• Boom in nickelodeons, the first permanent movie
  theaters.
• 10,000 in the U.S. alone by 1908 (Cook, 1990).
• Standard length of a film remained one reel, or
  about ten to fifteen minutes, partly based on
  producers' assumptions about the attention spans
  of their still largely working class audiences.

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Silent Era 1895-1927

• Leading the trend for longer movies, in America
  was director D.W. Griffith with his historical
  epics The Birth of a Nation (1915 - 190 minutes)
  and Intolerance (1916 197 minutes).

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Birth of a Nation (1915)

• Credited with securing the future of feature
  length films (films over 40 minutes) as well as
  solidifying the language of cinema.
• Pioneered techniques as deep focus, jump-cut, and
  facial close-ups, now integral to conventional
  cinematic style.
• Introduced cinematic innovations, special
  effects, and artistic techniques.

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Birth of a Nation (1915)

• Voted one of the "Top 100 American Films" ( 44)
  by the American Film Institute in 1998.
• In its day, the highest grossing film, taking in
  more than 10 million at the box office
  (equivalent to 300 million in 2006).
• In 1992 the United States Library of Congress
  deemed it "culturally significant" and selected
  it for preservation in the National Film
  Registry.

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Silent Era 1895-1927

• 1920s, U.S. produced an average of 800 feature
  films annually, or 82 of the global total
  (Eyman, 1997).
• The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster
  Keaton, and the Swashbuckling adventures of
  Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow,
  made these performers faces iconic on every
  continent.

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Talking Pictures 1927

• Turning point came in 1927, when Warner Brothers
  Studios released The Jazz Singer, which was
  mostly silent but contained the first
  synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature
  film.

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Golden Age of Hollywood

• 1927-1940s
• American cinema reached its peak of efficiently
  manufactured glamour and global appeal during
  this period.

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Golden Age of Hollywood

• Top actors of the era are now thought of as the
  classic movie stars, such as Clark Gable,
  Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and the number
  one box office draw of the '30s, child performer
  Shirley Temple.

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Golden Era of Radio 1930s

• 1930s
• Affordable for every household
• Brought the world to your living room
• Broadcasts included Opera, Melodrama, Variety
  Shows, game Shows, Comedies and Dramas.

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Golden Era of Film 1940s

• 1940s, started in 1939 with The Wizard of Oz and
  Gone With the Wind.
• US involvement in WWII brought a proliferation of
  movies as both patriotism and propaganda.

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Golden Age of Film 1940s

• Notable American films from the war years include
  Watch on the Rhine (1943) Shadow of a Doubt
  (1943), directed by Alfred Hitchcock Yankee
  Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney, and
  Casablanca (1942), with Humphrey Bogart.

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Golden Era of Film 1940s

• Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and
  1942 including John Huston's The Maltese Falcon
  (1941), one of the first movies now considered a
  classic film noir.

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Golden Era of TV 1950s

• Television introduced to the American public at
  the 1939 NY Worlds Fair
• Regular broadcasts didnt begin until after WWII.
• Prime Time viewing (family hour) 6-8 p.m.

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Golden Era of TV 1950s

• Famous 1950s television shows.
• I Love Lucy 1951-1957
• Invented the three camera technique
• Introduced a live audience
• Filmed her sitcom

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Film History Review

• 1895 Birth of Cinematography
• 1895-1927 Silent Era
• 1927 Talking Pictures Introduced
• 1927-1940s Golden Age of Hollywood
• 1930s Golden Era of Radio
• 1940s Golden Era of Film
• 1950s Golden Era of Television