In 2020, Parasite became the first international film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2001, the Harry Potter film series began, and by its end in 2011, it had become the highest-grossing film franchise of all time until the Marvel Cinematic Universe passed it in 2015. If a movie can illuminate the lives of other people who share this planet with us and show us not only how different they are but, how even so, they share the same dreams and hurts, then it deserves to be called great. These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘film.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors.

Soviet Montage Theory begged http://imovietube.net/makers to arrange, deconstruct, and rearrange film clips to better communicate emotional associations to audiences. The legacy of Soviet Montage Theory lives on in the form of the Kuleshov effect and contemporary montages. Muybridge’s job wasn’t done after taking the photographs though; he still had to produce a projection machine to display them. So, Muybridge built a device called the zoopraxiscope, which was regarded as a breakthrough device for motion picture projecting. In the late 1940s, in Britain, Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including Whisky Galore! David Lean was also rapidly becoming a force in world cinema with Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes.

Rather than leave audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist or, in large urban theaters, a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose, and complete film scores were composed for major productions. Film stock consists of transparent celluloid, acetate, or polyester base coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive chemicals. Cellulose nitrate was the first type of film base used to record motion pictures, but due to its flammability was eventually replaced by safer materials. Stock widths and the film format for images on the reel have had a rich history, though most large commercial films are still shot on (and distributed to theaters) as 35 mm prints. The soundtrack can be recorded separately from shooting the film, but for live-action pictures, many parts of the soundtrack are usually recorded simultaneously.

In the 19th century, Chaplin made his theatrical debut at the age of eight, in 1897, in a clog dancing troupe, The Eight Lancaster Lads. In the 21st century, Bloom is still enjoying a full and productive career, having appeared in dozens of films and television series produced up to and including 2022. In the U.S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early activism of the civil rights movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), On the Waterfront (1954), Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty and Reginald Rose’s 12 Angry Men (1957). Disney continued making animated films, notably; Cinderella (1950), Peter Pan (1953), Lady and the Tramp (1955), and Sleeping Beauty (1959).

Technicolor was initially used mainly for musicals like “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), in costume films such as “The Adventures of Robin Hood”, and in animation. Not long after television became prevalent in the early 1950s, colour became more or less standard for theatrical movies. By the 1920s, the United States reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually,[97] or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow, to cite just a few examples, made these performers’ faces well known on every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical continuity editing was developed and exported – although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan. The first films to move from single shots to successive scenes began around the turn of the 20th century.

Writers like Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol knew what they were doing long before they released their great works. As Lee suggests, it’s important to acknowledge the technical achievement of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind without condoning their horrid subject matter. To escape Edison’s legal monopoly, filmmakers ventured west, all the way to Southern California. Battleship Potemkin was the most noteworthy film to come out of the Soviet Montage Theory movement.

• Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).
• In its short history, the art of motion pictures has frequently undergone changes that seemed fundamental, such as those resulting from the introduction of sound.
• We’ll get to why that year is important for film history in a bit, but first let’s review pre-Code Hollywood with a couple of selected scenes from Kevin Wentink on YouTube.
• Italian companies also had a strong line in slapstick comedy, with actors like André Deed, known locally as “Cretinetti”, and elsewhere as “Foolshead” and “Gribouille”, achieving worldwide fame with his almost surrealistic gags.
• The legacy of Italian Neorealism lives on in the independent filmmaking of directors like Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, and Sean Baker.

American propaganda films included Desperate Journey (1942), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Forever and a Day (1943) and Objective, Burma! Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and 1942 including John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the first films now considered a classic film noir. It would set the stage for the modern motion picture, as it revolutionized film story telling.

Science fiction stories take the social, cultural, political, and technological issues that we’re facing today and project them into a fictional future, where we can get a good look at them. Fear, awe, excitement, and hope are all hallmarks of the science fiction genre, which does a great job of showing its audiences what they aren’t noticing about their lives right now. Because genres are easier to recognize than to define, academics agree they cannot be identified in a rigid way.[33] Furthermore, different countries and cultures define genres in different ways.

“Cinema” either broadly encompasses both films and movies, or it is roughly synonymous with film and theatrical exhibition, and both are capitalized when referring to a category of art. The “silver screen” refers to the projection screen used to exhibit films and, by extension, is also used as a metonym for the entire film industry. The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Typical films showed employees leaving a factory gate, people walking in the street, and the view from the front of a trolley as it traveled a city’s Main Street. According to legend, when a film showed a locomotive at high speed approaching the audience, the audience panicked and ran from the theater. Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story.