Movie History

Муниципальное автономное общеобразовательное учреждение «Лицей № 1»

г.Балаково Саратовской области

V муниципальная научно-исследовательская конференция

 «Мир без границ»

для обучающихся 8 -11 классов

Английский язык

Номинация «Искусство»

M O V I E       H I S T O R Y

Работу выполнила Кабанова Ксения

Ученица 10 А класса

МАОУ Лицей № 1

Руководитель Жигунова Наталья Владимировна

г. Балаково

2013 год

Contents

Preface

Art is an important part of our life. Every day we listen to music, watch movies. Art is one way of knowing as in the natural sciences as in the religious picture's representation of the world. The nature of art and related concepts such as creativity and interpretation are explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.

One of the most popular forms of art is a film. I think  there’s no person who doesn’t know it. But not everyone knows where it came from. Here’s the purposes of my work:

1) learn more facts about the origin of such art as cinema;

2) find some of the best works, which were created in the period from the late 18th century to the present day.

So I can identify the following tasks:

1) tell about the evolution of film;

2) identify the main genres of films;

3) tell about some interesting films;

4) conduct a diagnostic study of how people refer to the movie.

The concept of art is extremely wide.  It can manifest itself as highly developed skills in a particular area. For a long time it was considered that an art form of cultural activity meets a person's love for the beauty. But I would like to quote the words of Serik Booxsikov, the contemporary artist:"Art in the first place should reflect the real life of the people, not to suggest that all is well."

1. History of film
1.1. The birth of film

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, chief engineer with the Edison Laboratories, is credited with the invention of a practicable form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. Celluloid blocks were thinly sliced, the slice marks were then removed with heated pressure plates. In 1893 at the Chicago World Fair Thomas Edison introduced to the public two pioneering inventions based on this innovation: the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope. Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets photographed by Dickson, in Edison's "Black Maria" studio. These sequences recorded mundane events (such as Fred Ott's Sneeze, 1894) as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations.

Kinetoscope parlors soon spread successfully to Europe. Edison, however, never attempted to patent these instruments on the other side of the Atlantic, since they relied so greatly on previous experiments and innovations from Britain and Europe.

Paul had the idea of displaying moving pictures for group audiences, rather than just to individual viewers, and invented a film projector, giving his first public showing in 1895. In late 1895 in Paris, father Antoine Lumière began exhibitions of projected films before the paying public, beginning the general conversion of the medium to projection (Cook, 1990). They quickly became Europe's main producers with their actualités like Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and comic vignettes like The Sprinkler Sprinkled (both 1895). Even Edison, initially dismissive of projection, joined the trend with the Vitascope within less than six months. The first public motion-picture film presentation in Europe, though, belongs to Max and Emil Skladanowsky of Berlin, who projected with their apparatus "Bioscop", a flickerfree duplex construction, November 1 through 31, 1895.

Still older, May, 1895, was Lauste in the U. S. A. with an Eidoloscope which he devised for the Latham family. The first public screening of film ever is due to Jean Aimé "Acme" Le Roy, a French photographer. On February 5, 1894, his 40th birthday, he presented his "Marvellous Cinematograph" to a group of around twenty show business men in New York City.

1.2. The Silent Era and Rise of future film and film as art

Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles.

The standard length of a film remained one reel, or about ten to fifteen minutes, through the first decade of the century, partly based on producers' assumptions about the attention spans of their still largely working class audiences.
In 1906 Dan Barry and Charles Tait of Melbourne produced and directed 'The Story of the Kelly Gang.' It wasn’t until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia.

Soon Europe created multiple-reel period extravaganzas that were even longer. With international box office successes like Queen Elizabeth (France, 1912), Quo Vadis (Italy, 1913) and Cabiria (Italy, 1914), the feature film began to replace the short as the cinema's central form.

Leading this trend in America was director D.W. Griffith with his historical epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). In France brothers Lafitte in 1907 created so-called Films d'art. They were supposed to draw the higher classes of society into movie theaters. The more educated classes thought that film was just for uneducated people and preferred traditional theater.

1.3. The Sound Era

Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the "Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. It was a great success, as were follow-ups like Warners' The Lights of New York (1928), the first all-synchronized-sound feature. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies," were the future.

1.4. 1970’s: The new Hollywood or Post-Classical Films.

'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling of the "New Hollywood" producers. The new methods of drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during the classical/Golden Age period: story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling "twist endings", main characters may behave in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred. The beginnings of post-classical storytelling may be seen in 1940s and 1950s film noir movies, in films such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's Psycho.

During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Brian de Palma. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial successes, like Coppola's The Godfather films, Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas's Star Wars. The financial disaster of Heaven's Gate marking the end of the visionary "auteur" directors of the "New Hollywood", who had unrestrained creative and financial freedom to develop films. The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern "blockbuster". Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns. This trend had already been foreshadowed by the commercial success of disaster films.

1.5. 1980’s: Sequels, Blockbusters and Videotape.

During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching movies on their home VCRs.

The Lucas-Spielberg combine would dominate "Hollywood" cinema for much of the 1980s, and lead to much imitation. Two follow-ups to Star Wars, three to Jaws, and three Indiana Jones films helped to make sequels of successful films more of an expectation than ever before. Lucas also launched THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm in 1982, while Spielberg enjoyed one of the decade's greatest successes in E.T. the same year. American independent cinema struggled more during the decade, although Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985), and The King of Comedy (1983) helped to establish him as one of the most critically acclaimed American film makers of the era. Also during 1983 Scarface was released, was very profitable and resulted in even greater fame for its leading actor Al Pacino. Probably the most successful film commercially was vended during 1989: Tim Burton's version of Bob Kane's creation, Batman, exceeded box-office records. Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the demented Joker earned him $60,000,000 (the most money an actor has ever made from one film) and it brought Tim Burton and Michael Keaton great fame.

British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of David Puttnam's company Goldcrest Films. The films Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields and A Room with a View appealed to a "middlebrow" audience which was increasingly being ignored by the major Hollywood studios. While the films of the 1970s had helped to define modern blockbuster motion pictures, the way "Hollywood" released its films would now change.

1.6. 1990’s: New special effects, Independent Films and DVDS

The major studios began to create their own "independent" production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino's runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994. The same year marked the beginning of film and video distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. During 1995 the first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, Disney returned to traditional animation and made three more popular films: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, Hercules in 1997, and Mulan in 1998. In 1999, Disney released Tarzan, which employed the use of a CGI rendering technique called Deep Canvas. During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

1.7. 2000s

The documentary film also rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. A new genre was created with Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, when 150 inexpensive DV cameras were distributed across Iraq, transforming ordinary people into collaborative filmmakers. The success of Gladiator lead to a revival of interest in epic cinema. Home theatre systems became increasingly sophisticated, as did some of the special edition DVDs designed to be shown on them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released on DVD in both the theatrical version and in a special extended version intended only for home cinema audiences.

Future: Problems of digital distribution to be overcome -- higher compression, cheaper technology.

2. Main movie genres

Comedy; drama; tragicomedy; melodrama; narrative; western; detective; Disaster film; thriller; historical film; musical.

3.Some interesting films

1. “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” (App.1)

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" is a documentary short film in 1896, one of the first films made and publicly displayed the Lumiere brothers. In Russian sources, the film is also referred to as "Arrival of a Train" and "Check mail train", the most famous film of the Lumiere brothers.

3.2. “City Lights” (App.2)

City Lights is a 1931 American romantic comedy film written by, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a friendship with a millionaire (Harry Myers).

3.3. “Some like it hot” (App.2)

The film is a remake by Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond of a 1935 French movie, Fanfare d'Amour, from a story by Robert Thoeren and Michael Logan, which was also remade in 1951 by German director Kurt Hoffmann as Fanfaren der Liebe. However, the plots of the French and German films did not include the gangster motif, which is an integral part of the drama in Some Like It Hot.

3.4. “Titanic” (App.2)

Titanic is a 1997 American epic romantic disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as members of different social classes who fall in love aboard the ship during its ill-fated maiden voyage.

3.6. “A walk to remember” (App.2)

A Walk to Remember is a 2002 American coming-of-age teen romantic drama film based on the 1999 romance novel of the same name by Nicholas Sparks. The film stars Shane West and Mandy Moore, was directed by Adam Shankman, and produced by Denise Di Novi and Hunt Lowry for Warner Bros. The novel is set in the 1950s while the film is set in 1998. 

3.7. “Remember me” (App.2)

Remember Me is a 2010 American romantic coming of age drama film directed by Allen Coulter, and screenplay by Will Fetters. It stars Robert Pattinson, Emilie de Ravin, Chris Cooper, Lena Olin, and Pierce Brosnan.

3. The  diagnostic study.

In my research, I chose the method of questioning and asked adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 three questions:

1) What is your attitude to movie?
2) How often do you go to the cinema?
3) What genre do you prefer?

So, we can see that 100% of teenagers love movies; 70% of teenagers go to the cinema several times a month, 20% - go to the  cinema several times a year and 10% - go to the cinema once a month; 40% of teenagers prefer comedy, 30% - prefer thriller and 30% - prefer drama.

Conclusion

So, we found out that the film is the most popular art form today. A film is created by photographing actual scenes with a motion picture camera; by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques; by means of CGI and computer animation; or by a combination of some or all of these techniques and other visual effects. Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores.

Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Owing to the lack of any technology for doing so, the moving images and sounds could not be recorded for replaying as with film.

The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a story with film.

References

1.http://www.filmbug.com/dictionary/moviehistory.php
2.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art
3.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film 
4.http://vk.com/kinopoisk 

Application 1
Some film posters.

“Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station”

Application 2