film

This page deals with film as a communications revolution.

It covers -

• introduction
• technologies
• impacts
• industry and economy
• the DVD
• more detail

     introduction

Film was arguably the dominant art form and communication medium of last century. The internet has so far not had a comparable impact and is unlikely to do so until it is truly a ubiquitous, invisible presence in our daily lives.

     technologies

For an overview of the technology consult Brian Winston's Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography & Television (London: BFI 1996) and The Cinema Apparatus (New York: St Martins 1980) edited by Teresa De Lauretis & Stephen Heath or the drier A Technological History of Motion Pictures & Television (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1967) edited by Raymond Fielding. Eugene Marlow & and Eugene Secunda collaborated on Shifting Time & Space: the Story of Videotape (New York: Praeger 1991).

John Belton's Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1992) explores a technology that didn't reach takeoff. Donald Crafton's The Talkies: American Cinema's Transition to Sound, 1926-1931 (New York: Scribner's 1997) and Scott Eyman's The Speed of Sound: Hollywood & the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) consider one that did. Carmontelle's Landscape Transparencies: Cinema of the Enlightenment (Los Angeles: Getty 2008) by Laurence de Brancion and Canvas Documentaries Panoramic Entertainments in Nineteenth-century Australia and New Zealand (Carlton: Melbourne Uni Press 2003) by Mimi Colligan consider precursors.

Neil Harris' Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites & Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: Uni of Chicago Press 1990) notes that colour films date from the mid 1890s, with the first color feature film appearing in 1921. By 1920, 80% of Hollywood features were being tinted.

     impacts

There are revisionist views of powerful early impacts in Cinema & the Invention of Modern Life (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1995) edited by Leo Charney & Vanessa Schwartz and Deac Rossell's Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies (Albany: State Uni of New York Press 1998). Questions of film censorship are explored in our censorship guide.

For consumption we recommend Douglas Gomery's Shared Pleasures: A History of Movie Presentation in the United States (Madison: Uni of Wisconsin Press 1992) and David Nasaw's Going Out: The Rise & Fall of Public Amusements (New York: Basic Books 1993).

For film as a shaper and reflection of community attitudes explore Robert Toplin's Hollywood As Mirror (Westport: Greenwood 1993) and History by Hollywood (Urbana: Uni of Illinois Press 1996). Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 1997), edited by Yosefa Loshitzky, is suggestive.

Erik Barnouw's Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1993) and Richard Barsam's Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 1992) are standard studies of that genre. For home/amateur movies see in particular Patricia Zimmermann's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana Uni Press 1995) and Michelle Citron's Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: Uni of Minnesota Press 1999).

Steven Ross' Working-Class Hollywood: Silent Film & the Shaping of Class in America (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1998) and Kevin Brownlow's Behind the Mask of Innocence (New York, Knopf 1990) are more subtle than Sharon Ullman's doctrinaire The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1997). Lawrence Levine's Unpredictable Past (New York: Oxford 1993) is incisive.

Thomas Cripps' Hollywood's High Noon: Moviemaking & Society Before Television (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Uni Press 1997) is a thoughtful study of the 'American moment'.

     industry and economy

On the film industry, past and present, and the information economy we recommend Hollywood & Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-1995 (London: BFI 1998) edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith & Steven Ricci and the two multivolume histories History of the American Cinema (Berkeley: Uni of California Press) and American Screen (New York: Scribners).

Douglas Gomery's superb The Hollywood Studio System (New York: St Martins 1986) offers a wide-ranging analysis of social, economic, and technological factors. Tino Balio edited Hollywood in the Age of Television (Boston: Unwin Hyman 1990) an outstanding revisionist study complementing Janet Wasko's concise Hollywood in the Information Age: Beyond the Silver Screen (Oxford: Polity Press 1994).

Charles Musser's The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (New York: Scribner's 1990) considers the industry during its early stages, a period similar to that of the current web.

Neal Gabler's Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Viking 1993) is engaging but overstated. There's a more cogent analysis in Thomas Schatz' The Genius of the System (New York: Simon & Schuster 1988); for a wider social commentary see Otto Friedrich's entertaining City of Nets (London: Headline 1987). Michael Conant's Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic & Legal Analysis (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1960) examines the fall of the studio system.

     the DVD

Norman Lebrecht commented in 2005 that the DVD means that

in cultural terms ... film now takes its place beside literature, music and visual imagery as an art that can be owned and bookmarked. Where once you had to visit a cinema or spool through half a mile of clunky videotape in order to access a seminal scene in an essential movie, you now zone into it on DVD as quickly as finding a name in the index of an artist biography.

I no longer need to conjure up in the mind's eye the sight of Jean Moreau toppling off a bicycle in Jules et Jim or Liv Ullman playing Chopin in Autumn Sonata. Using the scene selector that is standard on most DVDs, a frozen frame is but a fingertip away and what was once an ethereal impression is resolved by immediate evidence. Did she fall off? Now we know. How did she play? Not badly at all.
Film has become fact on DVD. It has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms. Books and music have always furnished our rooms, but to have film as a point of home reference, like Oxford English Dictionary and the complete works of Shakespeare, signals a revolution in cultural reception and, inevitably, creation.

It will, for instance, make it that much harder for Hollywood to remake its own milestones when half the world has the originals to hand for instant comparison.

... DVD has got the movies bang to rights and gives them equal status with music and printed arts. It is the medium of the Noughties, the remaking of our memories.

     more detail

The complementary Ketupa.net site profiles around 500 major media groups (some 700 pages).




   next page  (sound)