Timeline: Film History

1890

Motion Pictures

Evolution of Narrative / George Meliés

1908

Development of Narrative Form

D.W.Griffith: Birth of a Nation / Intolerance

Period: 1917 to 1930

Soviet Silent Cinema & Theory of Montage

Dzigo Vertov: The Kino-Eye
Eisenstein: "The Battleship Potemkin" (Theory of Dialectical Montage) "October" (A laboratory for Intellectual Montage)

Period: 1919 to 1929

The Prewar German Cinema "Weimar Period"

Fritz Lang: "Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari" The Flowering of Expressionism
G.W.Pabst and Street Realism

Period: 1926 to 1935

The Coming of Sound and Color

The first sound on film: "The Jazz Singer"
The first color on film: "The Phantom of The Opera"
American Studio System and New Genres: MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-Fox
Joseph von Sternberg
John Ford
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
George Cukor, William Wyler, Frank Capra

1930

Hollywood in the Twenties

Charlie Chaplin
Buster Keaton

Period: 1940 to 1951

Wartime & Postwar Italy, United States

Italian Neorealism
Filmnoir

1941

The Modern Sound Film

Orson Welles: "Citizen Kane"

Period: 1952 to 1965

Hollywood

Wide-screen and 3-D
Depth
Fifties Genres: Musical, Comedy, Western, Gangster films, Science fiction.
Independent Production and the decline of studio system

1954

Wind From The East

Rashomon
Kurosawa
Yasujiro Ozu
Off-Screen Space

1959

European Renaissance

Italian Auteurs: Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci
Scandinavian Cinema: Ingmar Bergman
Spain: Luis Bunuel
Germany: Volker Schlondorff, Fassbinder, Herzog, Wim Wenders