5. Cinema and the outer world

The world in which cinema grew up was one of constant change, not always for the better. There was technological change, of which the cinema itself was part. There were wars and revolutions, leading to changes in the world order. There was social and demographic change as more and more people across the world entered into the orbit of global capitalism. ‘Cinema and the outer world’ explains how cinema recorded and reflected these changes, but how it also changed or was forced to change in response to them. The cinema also played a major role in shaping the world, or at least what we imagine the world to be.

3. Industry

The cinema is an industry, but it did not become an industry overnight, nor did it do so as an automatic consequence of its technological base. What set cinema on the road to becoming an industry in the early years were the needs of commerce, as the new medium spread rapidly across the globe. ‘Industry’ describes the development of the Hollywood studio system and how that practice was imitated in Europe and Asia. It goes on to outline how the structure of world cinema changed through trade liberalization and mass migration. Despite numerous changes, the world’s film industries continue to follow the template set down nearly a century ago, in the 1920s.

2. Technology

‘Technology’ considers a range of technological developments that were important in the evolution of cinema: making images move, the introduction and synchronization of sound, colour film, widescreen and stereo sound, animation and special effects, and the digital revolution, which has affected the cinema at every level. But do these developments represent progress? Gains in one quarter are often losses in another. Industrial and artistic factors intervene, as do changes in audience tastes. Many of these major innovations were also costly to introduce and were pioneered and exploited by the big studios, giving them a head start over independent producers and exhibitors who could not afford the expenditure.

1. Introduction

What is cinema? What is history? And what is the history of cinema? Cinema is a complex of things: a technology, an industry, an art form, a way or ways of rendering the world as images and sounds, and as a component of the imaginary world each of us keeps inside our head. These different parts stand in constantly changing relationships with each other and with aspects of the world outside its immediate boundaries. The Introduction explains how there is no single template for how cinema history is to be written, but this VSI provides an idea of what it took for cinema to become the major art of the 20th century.

4. Cinema as art form

In the years before World War I there were few people who thought that cinema was or might become an art form. From about 1910, however, signs emerged that cinema was on the road to acquiring some sort of legitimacy. These signs initially pointed in different directions, but eventually a cluster of forms developed, which were to become the cinema as we know it today. ‘Cinema as art form’ considers how cinema has developed through the evolution of editing and narrative techniques and sound synchronization, and then discusses different types of film genre, the neo-realism movement, and the diverse varieties of modern cinema.

6. Conclusion: seven epochs of cinema

The cinema has not developed in a straight line, nor has it simply progressed to greater and greater achievements. Instead, it developed in different ways in different places at different times, under conflicting pressures and serving changing needs. The Conclusion brings the separate threads discussed throughout this VSI together—technology, industry, artistic forms, and interaction with the outside world—and divides the history of the cinema to date into seven epochs, each of approximately fifteen years’ duration: 1900–14, from cinematograph to cinema; 1915–29, the heyday of the silent; 1930–44, the talkies; 1945–59, after World War II; 1960–74, the new waves; 1975–89; and 1990 to the present.