History of Film

By k_canoy

  • Early to Mid 1830's

    Moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer in Austria, Joseph Plateau in Belgium and William Horner in Britain.

  • 1839

    British inventor, William H. Fox Talbot made paper sensitive to light by bathing it in a solution of salt and silver nitrate.

  • 1867

    The first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures was a device called 'Wheel of Life' or 'Zoopraxiscope'. Patented by William Lincoln, moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit.

  • 1894

    The first commercial exhibition of film took place on April 14 1894 at the first Kinetoscope parlor ever built.

  • 1900's

    1905 - Cooper Hewitt mercury lamps make it practical to shoot films indoors without sunlight.
    1906 - The first animated cartoon is produced.
    1909 - There are about 9,000 movie theaters in the United States. The typical film is only a single reel long, 1-12 minutes in length, and the actors were anonymous.

  • 1910's

    1910 - Actors in American films began to receive screen credit and the way to the creation of film stars was opened.
    1911 - Credits begin to appear at the beginning of the motion pictures.
    1915 - The Bell and Howell 2709 movie camera allows directors to make close-ups without physically moving the camera.

  • 1920's

    1923 - Warner Bros. is established
    1925 - Western Electric and Warner Bros. agree to develop a system for movies with sound.
    1925 - The first in-flight movie is shown. It was a black and white silent film called The Lost World; it is shown in WW1 converted Handley-Page bomber during a 30 minute flight near London.
    1928 - Paramount becomes the first studio to announce that it will only produce 'talkies'.

  • 1930's

    1930 - The motion picture industries adopts the Production Code, a set of guidelines that describes what is acceptable in movies.
    1931 - American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman's The Public Enemy became popular. 1934 - The first drive-in movie theatre opens in New Jersey USA
    1937 - Walt Disney's first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is released.
    1938 - The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the wind is released

  • 1940's

    1940 - The success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs allowed Disney to make more animated features like Pinocchio (1940), Dumbo (1941) and Bambi (1942)
    1945 - 'Post classical cinema' described the changing methods of storytelling of the 'New Hollywood' producers. The new methods of drama and characterisation meant the story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling 'twist endings'.

  • 1950's

    1952 - The Cold War era translated into a type of near-paranoia manifested in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens.
    1953 - Seven year contracts with actors are replaced by single-picture or multi-picture contracts.
    1957 - The cinematic industry was threatened by television and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would become bankrupt and close.

  • 1960's

    1960 - Hitchcock's Psycho was released.
    - The studio system in Hollywood declined as many films were being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in the UK and Cinecitta in Rome.
    1962 - Hollywood films were still largely aimed at family audiences and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced the studios' biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were among the biggest money-makers of the decade.

  • 1970's

    1970 - Filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths.
    - A new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Roman Polanski, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas.
    1972 - Film director's begin to express their personal vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects

  • 1980's

    1980 - Audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCR's

  • 1990's

    Early 1990's - There was development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993) and Titanic (1997), independent films like Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video.

  • 2000's

    2000 - The documentary film began to escalate as a commercial genre for conceivably the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/1.
    2002 - More films began being released simultaneously to IMAX cinema, the first was Disney animation Treasure Planet.
    2005 - The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology.

  • 2009

    2009 - James Cameron's 3D film Avatar became the highest-grossing film of all time.
    2010 - Onward 3D films gained increasing popularity with many other films being released in 3D. The best critical and financial success was the feature film animation of Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar's Toy Story 3.
    2012 - Titanic was re-released in a special 3D version to celebrate the 100th Anniversary