The History of Early Cinema — IELTS General Training Reading

The History of Early Cinema

The history of cinema in its first thirty years is one of major and, to this day, unparalleled expansion and growth. Beginning as something unusual in a handful of big cities — New York, London, Paris and Berlin — the new medium quickly found its way across the world. As audiences grew, so did the places where films were shown, finishing up with the 'great picture palaces' of the 1920s. Meanwhile, films themselves developed from short 'attractions' only a couple of minutes long into the full-length feature that has dominated screens ever since.

Although French, German, American and British pioneers have all been credited with the invention of cinema, the British and Germans played a relatively small role in its worldwide exploitation. It was above all the French, followed closely by the Americans, who were the most passionate exporters of the new invention, helping to start cinema in China, Japan, Latin America and Russia. In terms of artistic development, it was again the French and the Americans who took the lead, though before the First World War Italy, Denmark and Russia also played a part.

In the end, it was the United States that became, and remained, the largest single market for films. By protecting their own market and pursuing a vigorous export policy, the Americans achieved a dominant position on the world market by the start of the First World War. The centre of film-making had moved westwards to Hollywood, and it was films from the new Hollywood studios that flooded the world's film markets after the war. Faced with total Hollywood domination, few film industries proved competitive. The Italian industry, which had pioneered the feature film with spectacular works like Quo Vadis? (1913) and Cabiria (1914), almost collapsed. In Scandinavia the Swedish cinema had a brief period of glory. Even the French cinema found itself in a difficult position. In Europe, only Germany proved industrially capable, while in the new Soviet Union and in Japan cinema developed in conditions of commercial isolation.

Hollywood took the lead artistically as well as industrially. Hollywood films appealed because they had better-constructed narratives, their special effects were more impressive, and the star system added a new dimension to screen acting. If Hollywood did not have enough of its own resources, it had a great deal of money to buy up artists and technical innovations from Europe to ensure its continued dominance over present or future competition.

The rest of the world survived partly by learning from Hollywood and partly because audiences continued to exist for a product which corresponded to needs Hollywood could not supply. As well as popular audiences, there were also increasing audiences for films that were artistically more adventurous.

None of this would have happened without technology, and cinema is unique as an art form. Early cinema programmes were a mixture of items, combining comic sketches, free-standing narratives, serial episodes and the occasional trick or animated film. With the arrival of the feature-length narrative as the main attraction, other types of film became less important. The making of cartoons became a separate branch of film-making, generally practised outside the major studios, and the same was true of serials. Together with newsreels, they tended to be shown as short items leading to the feature.

From early cinema, it was only American slapstick comedy that successfully developed in both short and feature format. However, during this 'Silent Film' era, animation, comedy, serials and dramatic features continued to thrive, along with factual films or documentaries. It was also at this time that the avant-garde film first achieved commercial success, thanks almost exclusively to the French and the occasional German film.

Of the countries which developed and maintained distinctive national cinemas in the silent period, the most important were France, Germany and the Soviet Union. The French displayed the most continuity despite war and post-war economic uncertainties. The German cinema, relatively insignificant in the pre-war years, exploded onto the world scene after 1919, though both France and Germany were influenced by the Soviets after the 1917 Revolution. Other countries whose cinemas changed dramatically include Britain, Italy, the Scandinavian countries — particularly Denmark — and Japan, where a cinema developed based primarily on traditional theatrical forms.