History of Film
The history of film began with images drawn on pieces of paper in slightly
different positions and flipped through quickly to create the effect of
movement. Most people remember the paper drawings that create a horse jumping
when flipped quickly. The development of the camera became sophisticated
enough that people were thinking in terms of motion picture. And so, the
history of film was also set in motion.
The early history of film had very short movies which were like wonders
for the people viewing them. An early film of a man getting up from a bench,
walking across the room and sitting down again spellbinded turn of the
20th century audiences, who were watching “movies” merely to
marvel at the media.
The first full length films were silent movies. The history of film coincides
with theatre because of the mood of the first film and the place where
they were shown. Audiences would sit and watch a woman being tied to the
railroad tracks and then impossibly rescued while a live piano player would
improvise background music according to the drama on screen. The subjects
of these early films resembled the Victorian melodrama with villains, heroes
and damsels in distress, much like the style of theatre at that time.
The first talkie was The Jazz Singer and the talkies introduced a new
era in the history of film in which plots could go beyond melodrama and
be more complicated. Soon, scriptwriters had a field day, and the films
began to become more than simply a curiosity. Starletts such as Jean Harlow
would speak in witty, fresh dialogue, although sight gags were still popular,
as were the antic of Laurel and Hardy.
The history of film progressed to include the mega-motion pictures and
large scale epics such as Gone with the Wind. These sentimental sagas were
counterbalanced later with the very realistic Casablanca and the Humphrey
Bogart and Lauren Bacall pictures. Humphrey Bogart was a revolutionary
film hero, because he was a straight-talker and not a sentimental type,
as many of the heroes were in earlier films.
In the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock added his name to the notables in the history
of film by practically inventing the suspense genre in films such as Psycho
and The Birds. These movies explored major and minor quirks in human nature
and the unexpected usually happened.
In the 1970s, Jaws became the first blockbuster, and since then, special
effects and going for maximum sales have been principles of business in
Hollywood.
