The silent feature: 1910–27

The silent feature: 1910–27

Pre-World War I U.S. cinema
Multiple-reel films had appeared in the United States as early as 1907, when Adolph Zukor distributed Pathé's three-reel Passion Play; but when Vitagraph produced the five-reel The Life of Moses in 1909, the Patents Company forced it to be released in serial fashion at the rate of one reel a week. The multiple-reel film—which came to be called a “feature,” in the vaudevillian sense of a headline attraction—achieved general acceptance with the smashing success of Louis Mercanton's three-and-one-half-reel Les Amours de la Reine Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), which starred Sarah Bernhardt and was imported by Adolph Zukor (who founded the independent Famous Players production company with its profits). In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni's nine-reel Italian super-spectacle Quo Vadis? was road-shown in legitimate theatres across the nation at a top admission price of one dollar, and the feature craze was on.

At first, there were difficulties in distributing features, because the exchanges associated with both the Patents Company and the independents were geared toward cheaply made one-reel shorts. Owing to their more elaborate production values, features had relatively higher negative costs. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot. By 1914, however, several national feature-distribution alliances that correlated pricing with a film's negative cost and box-office receipts were organized. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over shorts. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single title packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. As for manufacturing, producers found that the higher expenditure for features was readily amortized by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. The whole industry soon reorganized itself around the economics of the multiple-reel film, and the effects of this restructuring did much to give motion pictures their characteristic modern form.

Feature films, for example, made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format that was analogous to that of the legitimate theatre and was suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. This new audience had more demanding standards than the older lower-class one, and producers readily increased their budgets to provide high technical quality and elaborate productions. The new viewers also had a more refined sense of comfort, which exhibitors quickly accommodated by replacing their storefronts with large, elegantly appointed new theatres in the major urban centres (one of the first was Mitchell L. Marks's 3,300-seat Strand, which opened in the Broadway district of Manhattan in 1914). Known as “dream palaces” because of the fantastic luxuriance of their interiors, these houses had to show features rather than a program of shorts to attract large audiences at premium prices. By 1916 there were more than 21,000 movie palaces in the United States. Their advent marked the end of the nickelodeon era and foretold the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which dominated urban exhibition from the 1920s to the 1950s. Before the new studio-based monopoly could be established, however, the patents-based monopoly of the MPPC had to expire, and this it did as a result of its own basic assumptions in about 1914.

As conceived by Edison, the basic operating principle of the Trust was to control the industry through patents pooling and licensing, an idea logical enough in theory but difficult to practice in the context of a dynamically changing marketplace. Specifically, the Trust's failure to anticipate the independents' widespread and aggressive resistance to its policies cost it a fortune in patent-infringement litigation. Furthermore, the Trust badly underestimated the importance of the feature film, permitting the independents to claim this popular new product as entirely their own. Another issue that the MPPC misjudged was the power of the marketing strategy known as the “star system.” Borrowed from the theatre industry, this system involves the creation and management of publicity about key performers, or stars, to stimulate demand for their films. Trust company producers used this kind of publicity after 1910, when Carl Laemmle of Independent Motion Pictures (IMP) promoted Florence Lawrence into national stardom through a series of media stunts in St. Louis, Mo., but they never exploited the technique as forcefully or as imaginatively as the independents. Finally, and most decisively, in August 1912 the U.S. Justice Department brought suit against the MPPC for “restraint of trade” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Delayed by countersuits and by World War I, the government's case was finally won and the MPPC formally dissolved in 1918, although it had been functionally inoperative since 1914.

The rise and fall of the Patents Company was concurrent with the industry's move to southern California. As a result of the nickelodeon boom, exhibitors had begun to require as many as 20 to 30 new films per week, and it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule. Because most films were still shot outdoors in available light, such schedules could not be maintained in the vicinity of New York City or Chicago, where the industry had originally located itself in order to take advantage of trained theatrical labour pools. As early as 1907, production companies, such as Selig Polyscope, began to dispatch production units to warmer climates during winter. It was soon clear that what producers required was a new industrial centre—one with warm weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and other qualities (such as access to acting talent) essential to their highly unconventional form of manufacturing.

Various companies experimented with location shooting in Jacksonville, Fla., in San Antonio, Texas, in Santa Fe, N.M., and even in Cuba, but the ultimate site of the American film industry was a Los Angeles suburb (originally a small industrial town) called Hollywood. It is generally thought that Hollywood's distance from the MPPC's headquarters in New York City made it attractive to the independents, but Patents Company members such as Selig, Kalem, Biograph, and Essanay had also established facilities there by 1911 in response to a number of the region's attractions. These included the temperate climate required for year-round production (the U.S. Weather Bureau estimated that an average of 320 days per year were sunny and/or clear); a wide range of topography within a 50-mile radius of Hollywood, including mountains, valleys, forests, lakes, islands, seacoast, and desert; the status of Los Angeles as a professional theatrical centre; the existence of a low tax base; and the presence of cheap and plentiful labour and land. This latter factor enabled the newly arrived production companies to buy up tens of thousands of acres of prime real estate on which to locate their studios, standing sets, and backlots.

By 1915 approximately 15,000 workers were employed by the motion-picture industry in Hollywood, and more than 60 percent of American production was centred there. In that same year, the trade journal Variety reported that capital investment in American motion pictures—the business of artisanal craftsmen and fairground operators only a decade before—had exceeded $500,000,000. The most powerful companies in the new film capital were the independents, who were flush with cash from their conversion to feature production. These included the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (later Paramount Pictures, c. 1927), which was formed by a merger of Adolph Zukor's Famous Players Company, Jesse L. Lasky's Feature Play Company, and the Paramount distribution exchange in 1916; Universal Pictures, founded by Carl Laemmle in 1912 by merging IMP with Powers, Rex, Nestor, Champion, and Bison; Goldwyn Picture Corporation, founded in 1916 by Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn) and Edgar Selwyn; Metro Picture Corporation and Louis B. Mayer Pictures, founded by Louis B. Mayer in 1915 and 1917, respectively; and the Fox Film Corporation (later 20th Century-Fox, 1935), founded by William Fox in 1915. After World War I, these companies were joined by Loew's, Inc. (parent corporation of MGM, by merger of Metro, Goldwyn, and Mayer companies cited above, 1924), a national exhibition chain organized by Marcus Loew and Nicholas Schenck in 1919; First National Pictures, Inc., a circuit of independent exhibitors who established their own production facilities at Burbank, Calif., in 1922; Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc., founded by Harry, Albert, Samuel, and Jack Warner in 1923; and Columbia Pictures, Inc., incorporated in 1924 by Harry and Jack Cohn.

These organizations became the backbone of the Hollywood studio system, and the men who controlled them shared several important traits. They were all independent exhibitors and distributors who had outwitted the Trust and earned their success by manipulating finances in the post-nickelodeon feature boom, merging production companies, organizing national distribution networks, and ultimately acquiring vast theatre chains. They saw their business as basically a retailing operation modeled on the practice of chain stores such as Woolworth's and Sears. Not incidentally, these men were all first- or second-generation Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, most of them with little formal education, while the audience they served was 90 percent Protestant and Catholic. This circumstance would become an issue during the 1920s, when the movies became a mass medium that was part of the life of every American citizen and when Hollywood became the chief purveyor of American culture to the world.

Pre-World War I European cinema
Before World War I European cinema was dominated by France and Italy. At Pathé Frères, director-general Ferdinand Zecca perfected the course comique, a uniquely Gallic version of the chase film, which inspired Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops, while the immensely popular Max Linder created a comic persona that would deeply influence the work of Charlie Chaplin. The episodic crime film was pioneered by Victorin Jasset in the “Nick Carter” series, produced for the small Éclair Company, but it remained for Gaumont's Louis Feuillade to bring the genre to aesthetic perfection in the extremely successful serials Fantômas (1913–14), Les Vampires (1915–16), and Judex (1916).

Another influential phenomenon to appear from prewar France was the film d'art movement. It began with L'Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), directed by Charles Le Bargy and André Calmettes of the Comédie Française for the Société Film d'Art, which was formed for the express purpose of transferring prestigious stage plays starring famous performers to the screen. L'Assassinat's success inspired other companies to make similar films, which came to be known as films d'art. These films were long on intellectual pedigree and short on narrative sophistication. The directors simply filmed theatrical productions in toto, without adaptation. Their brief popularity nevertheless created a context for the lengthy treatment of serious material in motion pictures and was directly instrumental in the rise of the feature.

No country, however, was more responsible for the popularity of the feature than Italy. The Italian cinema's lavishly produced costume spectacles brought it international prominence in the years before the war. The prototypes of the genre, by virtue of their epic material and lengths, were the Cines company's six-reel Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompei), directed by Luigi Maggi in 1908, and its 10-reel remake, directed by Ernesto Pasquali in 1913; but it was Cines' nine-reel Quo vadis? (1912), with its huge three-dimensional sets of ancient Rome and 5,000 extras, that established the standard for the super-spectacle and briefly conquered the world market for Italian motion pictures. Its successor, the Italia company's 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its historical reconstruction of the Second Punic War, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing the Alps and the sack of Carthage. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such important directors as Cecil B. deMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith.

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray was India's first internationally recognized film-maker and, several years after his death, still remains the most well-known Indian director on the world stage. Ray has written that he became captivated by the cinema as a young college student, and he was self-taught, his film education consisting largely of repeated viewings of film classics by de Sica, Fellini, John Ford, Orson Welles, and other eminent directors. With the release in 1955 of his first film Pather Panchali ("Song of the Road"), whose financing presented Ray with immense monetary problems, compelling him even to pawn his wife’s jewelry, he brought the neo-realist movement in film to India. Little could anyone have imagined that this first film would launch Ray on one of the most brilliant careers in the history of cinema, leading eventually not only to dozens of international awards, India’s highest honor, and a lifetime achievement Oscar from Hollywood, but the unusual accolade of being voted by members of the British Film Institute as one of the three greatest directors in world cinema.

Satyajit Ray was born into an illustrious family in Calcutta in 1921. His grandfather, Upendra Kishore Ray-Chaudhary, was a publisher, musician and the creator of children’s literature in Bengali. His father, Sukumar Ray, was a noted satirist and India's first writer of nonsense rhymes, akin to the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Later in life, Satyajit Ray made a documentary of his father's life. His film, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, was based on a story published by his grandfather in 1914, but even other films, such as Hirok Rajah Deshe, "The Kingdom of Diamonds", clearly drew upon his interest in children’s poetry and nonsense rhymes.

Pather Panchali, based on a novel by Bibhutibhusan Banerji [Bandopadhyay], documents a family's struggle for existence in the face of a famine and the growth of the boy Apu. Ray later wrote, "I chose Pather Panchali for the qualities that made it a great book; its humanism; its lyricism; and its ring of truth . . . . The script had to retain some of the rambling quality of the novel because that in itself contained a clue to the feel of authenticity; life in a poor Bengali village does ramble." Ray went on to make two more movies on Apu (Aparajito in 1957, followed by Apur Sansar in 1960) to complete his famous Apu trilogy, though he had no thoughts of a trilogy when he embarked on the first film. The latter two movies trace the life of a young man [Apu] in Calcutta, his early marriage to a village girl, his conflict with his father, and their final reconciliation. Contemporaneous with these films were two staggering films, Devi ("The Goddess") and Jalsaghar ("The Music Room"), on the ways of the landed aristocracy in Bengal and its decline. In Devi, an elderly man has a vision that his young daughter-in-law is a goddess, and she is compelled to bear the burden of divinity; when her husband returns home from a trip, he finds his wife installed as a deity. The zeal with which a zamindar pursued his passion for music, though his estate lay crumbling around him, was the subject of Jalsaghar.

Ray's later films treated more contemporary themes like the new urban culture (Nayak in 1966, Pratidwandi in 1970, Seemabaddha in 1971, Jana Aranya in 1975). With his film Shatranj Ke Khiladi ("The Chess Players", 1977), based on a short story by the famous Hindi writer Premchand, Ray broke new ground. Here he ventured into the terrain of mid-nineteenth century India, the expansion of British rule, and what (to use a cliché) might be termed the ‘clash of cultures’. This film made brilliant use of color, animation, and narration; it was also Ray’s maiden attempt at making a non-Bengali feature film. (His only other film in Hindi was Sadgati, produced for Indian television.) To a small extent, Shatranj Ke Khiladi drew him to the attention of the mainstream Indian film-going audience. After Shatranj Ke Khiladi, he returned to themes set in his native state of Bengal, though in Ghare Bhaire ("The Home and the World"), inspired by Tagore’s novel of the same name, Ray returned in part to the theme of British colonial rule. Ray's films were characterized by a low budget, outdoor or locating shooting, authentic settings, detailed historical research, and a superb cast of actors and actresses who rose to eminent distinction under Ray’s direction. The greatest names in Bengali cinema worked for Ray, and Soumitra Chatterji, who appeared in half of Ray’s films, has himself recently been the subject of a long documentary film. Few of his films were commercially successful, and the greater majority were never screened outside Bengal, except at international festivals, in film clubs, and in Bangladesh. The movie he created for children, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne, was his first market success and soon gained a cult following in Bengal. Ray himself never showed much interest in the popular Hindi cinema.

Satyajit Ray remained a strong presence on the Bengali cultural scene all throughout his life. In 1947 he had founded the Calcutta Film Society with Chidananda Das Gupta. Though in the West he is known only as a film-maker, his reputation in his native Bengal extends to a great many other spheres. Ray was a prolific short story writer, with over a dozen volumes to his credit; and he contributed regularly to the children's journal "Sandesh", which he also edited. The exploits of his fictional character Feluda, first introduced in a series of detective stories, were avidly followed by the public, and the much-beloved Feluda was later featured in a couple of his movies. Ray, who had first worked in the advertising industry, was a major graphic designer, and designed hundreds of book jackets; he also illustrated his own books, besides those of many others. He virtually pioneered, in the Indian context, the genre of science fiction stories, and it is alleged that the script for Steven Speilberg’s immensely successful E.T. was based, though unacknowledged by Speilberg, on a script that Ray had sent to him many years ago. Ray wrote a number of essays on film, some of them collected in a volume entitled Our Films, Their Films, and his films were based on the most meticulous research. He can, not unreasonably, be considered as having chronicled phases of Bengal's history from the late nineteenth century onwards, the life of urban Calcutta, and the rural landscapes of Bengal. It is also remarkable that Ray did much of the work for his own films – the screenplays were almost invariably his own, and he personally supervised, though assisted by an extraordinary crew, virtually every detail of lighting, art direction, and so on. He scored the music for some of his films (though the music for the Apu Trilogy was composed by Ravi Shankar, and for Jalsaghar by the incomparable Vilayat Khan). Not surprisingly, then, his fellow Bengalis at least thought of him as a "Renaissance Man", and he was hailed as the successor of Rabindranath Tagore.

As Ray moved from one critical success to another, championed by film critics overseas, and showered with awards at Venice, Cannes, Locarno, and Berlin, it became habitual to look upon him as the great hope of Indian cinema. His films were closely studied in film schools, and watched repeatedly by hopeful film-makers. Prominent Indian directors such as Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and Shyam Benegal clearly showed the influence of Ray in their work. Yet he was the subject of some intense criticism. In Bengal, particularly in Calcutta, where no respectable intellectual could be other than a Marxist, Ray was charged with being a supreme representative of bourgeois culture. He had himself likened his films to the symphonies of Mozart. It is not merely the case that he had, as some people thought, a disdain for popular culture, since the Marxist aficionados of cinema were themselves not particularly fond of commercial cinema. Their hero was, and remains, Ritwik Ghatak, who made a handful of films, and was the cinematic poet of the partition; and similarly in the work of Mrinal Sen they found a director who was thought to be politically more sensitive. The 1960s and 1970s were a period of great political turmoil, and Ray was accused, as his friend Chidananda Dasgupta has written, of not showing a greater concern for the "Calcutta of the burning trains, communal riots, refugees, unemployment, rising prices and food shortages". No one would have known from Ray’s films that Bengal was the seat of an armed insurrectionary movement. On the other hand, films such as Jalsaghar, with its seemingly loving portrait of a zamindar who was the last specimen of a noble class of people who lived for music and displayed a refined aesthetic sensibility, seemed utterly reactionary.

Some of the earlier criticisms of Ray’s films, however, now seem misplaced and premature. It is now easier to recognize his films as politically nuanced, and Ray never made the mistake of embracing unabashedly the nationalist interpretation of Indian history. Ray tackled the difficult subject of the Bengal famine of 1943, for instance, with great sensitivity, and no one who has viewed Mahanagar or Pratidwandi can describe him as indifferent to the problems and even parodies of urban existence in modern India. But his films lend themselves to another sort of criticism. Ray’s limitations were the limitations, so to speak, of the trajectory of Bengali modernity which he rather unreflectively accepted. He had a tendency, evident as much in an early film like Devi (1960) as in Ganashatru ("An Enemy of the People", after Ibsen’s play of the same title), completed nearly thirty years later, to oppose modernity to tradition, rationality to superstition, and science to faith – and all this in an embarrassingly simplistic fashion, at least on occasion. Ray was unequivocally clear that he stood for science and modernity, and consequently he was incapable, as Ganashatru amply showed, of showing tradition as anything but superstition. Ray belongs to the great tradition of humanism, doubtless ennobling but, in some respects, acutely shortsighted.

Partial Filmography:
Pather Panchali ("Song of the Road", 1955)
Aparijito ("The Unvanquished", 1956)
Paras Pathar ("The Philosopher’s Stone", 1957)
Jalsaghar ("The Music Room", 1958)
Apur Sansar ("The World of Apu", 1960)
Devi ("The Goddess", 1960)
Rabindranath Tagore (documentary, 1961)
Teen Kanya ("Three Daughters", 1961)
Kanchenjunga (1962)
Abhijan
Mahanagar ("The Big City", 1963)
Charulata (1964)
Kapurush-0-Mahapurush ("The Coward and the Holy Man", 1965)
Nayak ("The Hero", 1966)
Chiriakhana (1967)
Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (1968)
Aranyer Din Ratri ("Days and Nights in the Forest", 1969)
Pratidwandi ("The Adversary", 1970)
Sonar Kela (1975)
Shatranj Ke Khiladi ("The Chess Players", 1977)
Shakha Proshakha (1990)
Agantuk ("The Stranger", 1991)

Further Reading:
Dasgupta, Chidananda. The Cinema of Satyajit Ray. New Delhi: Vikas, 1980.

Hannan, David. "Patriarchal Discourse in some early films of Satyajit Ray." Deep Focus 3, no. 1 (1990):30-57.

Lal, Vinay. "Masculinity and Femininity in The Chess Players: Sexual Moves, Colonial Manoeuvres, and an Indian Game", in Manushi: A Journal of Women and Society, nos. 92-93 (Jan.-April 1996):41-50.

Nandy, Ashis. "Satyajit Ray’s Secret Guide to Exquisite Murders: Creativity, Social Criticism, and the Partitioning of the Self", in his The Savage Frued and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 237-266.

Ray, Satyajit. The Apu Trilogy: Pather Panchali, Aparajito, Apur Sansar. [Film scripts] Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1985.

Seton, Marie. Portrait of a Director: Satyajit Ray. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971.

Wood, Robin. The Apu Trilogy. New York: Praeger, 1971.

Montage

Montage

In motion pictures, the editing technique of assembling separate pieces of thematically related film and putting them together into a sequence. With montage, portions of motion pictures can be carefully built up piece by piece by the director, film editor, and visual and sound technicians, who cut and fit each part with the others.

Visual montage may combine shots to tell a story chronologically or may juxtapose images to produce an impression or to illustrate an association of ideas. An example of the latter occurs in Strike (1924), by the Russian director Sergey Eisenstein, when the scene of workers being cut down by cavalry is followed by a shot of cattle being slaughtered.

Montage may also be applied to the combination of sounds for artistic expression. Dialogue, music, and sound effects may be combined in complex patterns, as in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail (1929), in which the word knife is repeated in the thoughts of a frightened girl who believes she has committed murder.

Montage technique developed early in cinema, primarily through the work of the American directors Edwin S. Porter (1870–1941) and D.W. Griffith (1875–1948). It is, however, most commonly associated with the Russian editing techniques, particularly as introduced to American audiences through the montage sequences of Slavko Verkapich in films in the 1930s.

The Firsts of Indian Cinema

The Firsts of Indian Cinema
Milestones from 1896-2000

Though film production commenced in India in 1913, it is necessary to record the progress of the film business from 1896, the historical year when Lumiere Bros' films were exhibited at Watson Hotel in Mumbai. This was the forerunner of the film industry in India; as it held many future technicians spellbound, and went on to encourage the making of the motion picture in India.
1896

First Cinema Show
The first Cinema show in India was arranged by the agents of two French brothers, Louis and August Lumiere, pioneers of the Cinematography in France, at the Watson Hotel in Bombay on July 7, 1896 and the show was Marvel of the Century.

First Cinema Advertisement
The first cinema advertisement in India appeared in the Times of India, Bombay on July 7, 1896, which carried details of the “Living Photographic pictures in life-size reproductions by Messrs Lumiere Brotheres.

1897
First Indian to handle a cine camera
Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar alias Save Dada was the first Indian to import a Cine-camera from London at a price of 21 guineas and made a topical in 1897. He filmed a wrestling bout between Pundalik and Krishna Nhavi, which was specially arranged at the Hanging Gardens in Bombay.

1898
First Bioscope
Prof. Stevenson brings “first Bioscope” to Calcutta at the Star Theatre. “Panorama of Calcutta”- an early Indian coverage by foreign cameramen.

1899
Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar ( Save Dada), a photo goods dealer, turns exhibitor and film maker.

1901
First Indian Film
“Return of Wrangler Paranjapee”- first Indian Actually Film shot by Bhatvadekar. Haralal Sen stars working in Bengal by filming extracts from stage-plays.

1902
J.F. Madan (1856-1926) launches his bioscope show in a tent at Calcutta Maidan.

1904
First Cinema show on regular basis
Manek D Sethna, who owned a cinema project, started a touring cinema with the screening of the first film “ Life of Christ” on a regular basis in Bombay in 1904. Abdulally Essofally, enterprising showman, makes the masses movie-conscious, takes up exhibition as a regular business proposition.

1907
First Cinema
The First Cinema hall in India as built by J.F. Madan in Calcutta in 1907 and it was named Elphinstone Picture Palace.

1911
First Mini Feature Film
After filming the Imperial Darbar of 1911, three business partners S.N. Patankar Anantram Parshuram Karandikar and V.P. Divekar who had earlier purchased the cine camera from Save Dada, produced the first mini-feature film (about 1,000 feet) “Savitri” in 1912. Narmada Mande, a young lady from Ahmedabad, K G Gokhale and divekar himself featured in the leading roles of the film, which could not see the screen due to several technical reasons and flaws.

First Theatrical film
Shreepad Sangit Mandali, a professional theatre group of Bombay, was performing a theatre play “pundalik” during 1911 in Bombay. Narayan Govind Chitre alias Nana Bhai Chita of India Press, Bombay sought help from R.P. Tipnis, Manager of Corontion Cinematograph, and decided to picturise the stageplay Pundalik. They took R.G. Torney alias Dada Saheb Torney, along with them to direct the proposed film. M/s Bourne and Shepherd, a British concern, took keen interest in the venture and joined hands with the promoters by providing them a cameraman, Johnson to shoot the film at Mangaldas Wadi in Bombay. The film also named “PUNDALIK” was exhibited on May 18, 1912 at Coronation Cinematography, Bombay.

1912
First Foreign-Returned Indian Cine-Technician
Dadasaheb Phalke was the first foreign returned Indian cine- technician who learned filmcraft from Cecil Hepworth, a prominent producer at Walton in England, for about a week in February 1912, March 1912.

First City of Film Production
Bombay was the first city in India where film production started in 1912

1913
First Indian feature film
RAJA HARISHCHANDRA was the first Indian feature film produced by an Indian, with out any foreign collaboration, Dadasaheb Phalke in 1912. The film was however released on May 3, 1913 at Coronation Cinematograph, Bombay.

First Producer
Dadasaheb Phalke, who released his first film RAJA HARISHCHANDRA ON May 3, 1913, was the first film producer of India.

First “Heroine” of Indian Film
The first heroine for Indian film was not a female but a young boy. Salunke, who acted as Taramati in India's first feature film “Raja Harishchandra”.

First Female Heroine
Kamala, a Maharashtrian lady, was the first female heroine in an Indian film with her lead role in Dadasaheb Phalke's second film “Bhasmasur Mohini” produced in 1913. Kamala's mother Durgabai also featured in the film.

First Hero
Dattatraya Damodar Dabke was the first hero of an Indian film. He acted as Harishchandra in “Raja Harishchandra” in 1913.

First Artiste playing as both hero & heroine
Salunke, acted as both Ram and Seeta, In Phalke's fifth film” Lanka Dahan” produced in 1917.

First Technician
Dadasaheb Phalke was not only the film producer but also the first director, writer, cameraman, make-up man, editor, art director and cine-laboratorian, with his first film “Raja Harishchandra”.

1914
First Indian feature film shown Abroad
“Raja Harishcnadra” was the first Indian Film which was shown on percentage basis in London in 1914.

1917
First feature film from Bengal
J.F. Madan produced Bengal first, feature film “Nal Damyanti” in 1917. This film had two Italians, namely, Signor and Signora Manelli in the leading roles. A new actress Patience Cooper was also introduced in the film. The film was photographed by cameraman Jyotish Sarkar.

1918
First Act to regulate cinema
The first Act which regulated and controlled the Indian film industry was enacted in 1918 and it was known as Indian Cinematograph Act 1918.

First Indian Serial
S. N. Patankar's “Exile of Shri Rama” was the first Indian Serial.

First Hollywood-trained Indian
Suchet Singh was the first Hollywood-trained Indian who had taken training in cinema technique in America and had worked as an associated under Charlie Chaplin in 1918. He returned by the end of 1918 and formed the Oriental Film Manufacturing Company Ltd. which produced its maiden film “shakuntala” in 1920.

1919
First silent feature film from South India
R. Nataraja Mudaliar of Madras made “ Keechaka Vadham” the first silent feature film from South India.

First Female Child Star
Manadakini, daughter of Dadasaheb Phalke, was the first female child star, who featured as the child Krishna in Phalke's “Kaliya Mardan” produced by Hindustan cinema Film Company in 1919.

First Indian Made Cine-Camera
Anandrao Painter of Kolhapur was the first Indian to make a cine-camera with the help of an old cine-projector and he shot a comic film around 1918. After his death, his brother Baburao Painter produced his first film “Sairandhiri” under the banner of Maharashtra Film Company in 1919 with the help of this Indian camera.

First Film Distributor
Dadasaheb Phalke was distributing his films himself. But this business was first handled in a proper manner by R. G. Torney in 1919 under the name and style of M/s Western Movies.

First title bestowed upon any film personality
Baburao Painter was the first film personality who was bestowed with the title of Cinema Kesari by Lokmanya Tilak in 1919 after seeing his silent film “Sairandhri” produced by Maharashtra Film Company.

1920
First Cinema Poster
Baburao Painter was the first man to advertise his film “Vatsala Haran” through cinema posters as a publicity campaign in 1920.

First Film Censor Board
For the first time Boards of Film Censors were set up in Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Rangoon in 1920 and later on at Lahore in 1927.

1921
First feature film from South
The first feature film produced in South India was “Bhishma Pratigna” produced by R. Venkiah and R. Prakash of Stars of the East Film Company, Madras in 1921.

First Social Satire
Dhiren Ganguly made “ England Returned”, the first social satire on an Indian obsessed with Western ideas, “Vali Thirumanam” made in Madras by Whittakar, is critically ac claimed and is also a box-office success.

First Artificial Lights
Baburao Painter was the first man in India to use artifical lights while making his film “Sinhagad” in 1921.

1922
First Levy of Entertainment Tax
The first levy of Entertainment Tax was o,[psed om Nemga; om 1922 and later on in Bombay in 1923 at 12 -1/2 percent.

1926
First Lady Director
The first lady director in India was Begum Fatima Sultana (wife of the Nawab of Sachien State), mother of Princess, Zubeida, star of “Alam Ara”. Begum Fatima not only acted but produced and directed several silent films including “Bulbule Paristan” “Goddess of Luck”, “Chandravati” and Milan Dinar”

First Cinema Trade Organisation
The Bombay Cinema and Theatres Trade Association, formed around 1926, was the first cinema trade organization in India. After sometime the Indian Motion Picture Association was also formed in Bombay. The Madras Cinema and Theatre League was formed in Madras in 1929. However, actual trade activities started only after the formation of the Motion Picture Society of India in Bombay in June 1932

1927
First Independent Film Processing Laboratory
The first Independent Film Processing laboratory was setup by Narayanrao Alias Dhanjibhai K. Desai in Bombay in October 1927. It was known as Atmanand Labortory.

First Indian Cinematograph Enquiry Committee
The Govt. of India appointed the first Indian Cinematograph Enquiry Committee on 6 th October 1927. The Indian Cinematograph Committee, set up under the Chairmanship of Dewan Bahudar T. Rangachariar; J.C. Daniel makes first Malayalam film “Vigada Kumaran” “Exceptional Young Man”.

First Double Role
Master Vithal was the first actor who portrayed a double role in a feature film “Prisoner of Love” produced by Sharda Film Company in 1927. The company owned by Nanubhai Desai and Bhogilal K.M. Dave, was founded in 1925.

1929
First Talkies Short Production in India
J.F. Madan and J.J. Madan of Madan Theates Ltd., Calcutta had received their sound equipment from America and they started producing as well as exhibiting sound films in India. They released a two reeler sound film in their talkies cinema, Elphinstone Picture Palace, Calcutta, in 1929.

First Talkie Feature Film Shown in India
The first Talkie Feature film shown in India was Universal's “Melody of Love” in English, which celebrated its premiere at Elphinstone Picture Palace in Calcutta in 1929.

1931
First Talkie Shorts released in Bombay
Some talkie shorts produced by Madan Theatres Ltd. , Calcutta and Krishan Film Company, Bombay; were released for the first time in the Lamingrone and Empress Cinemas in Bombay on February 4, 1931.

First Indian Talkie feature film
The first full length talkie feature film produced in India was “ ALAMARA ” Light of the World in Hindustani, produced by Ardeshir M. Irani of Imperial Film Company, Bombay. It was released at the Majestic Cinema, Bombay, on March 14, 1931.

First Talkie from Bengal
The first talkie film from Bengal was “ JAMAI SASTHI ” in Bengali produced by Madan Theatres Ltd. in 1931.

First Tamil Talkie
Sagar Movietone's “ KALIDASS ” was the first Tamil feature film starring T.P. Rajalakshmi and directed by H.M. Reddi. The film with Tamil dialogue and Telugu songs was released in Madras on October 31, 1931.

First Talkie Film Distributor
Talkie film distribution came into existence with the advent of talkie film in 1931. Sagar Movietone, founded by Chimanlal Desai, stated the business of distribution by taking the distribution of India's first Talkies “ALAM ARA ” in 1931.

First Song
“De de khuda ke naam par” was the first song recorded for “Alam Ara” in 1931. it was sung by W.M. Khan under the music direction of Phiroz Shah.

First Music Director
Phiroz Shah Mistry was the first music director of the talkie film “Alam Ara”.

First Advertising Film Company
Niranjan Pal of Publicity/Drammatic Film Co. (1931) was the first Indian to introduce the advertising film production and business in India in 1931.

1932
First Talkie film from Punjab
“ HEER RANJAH ” in Hindi was the first talkie feature film from Punjab. It was produced by Hakim Ram Prasad on Play Art Photophone Company in 1932. This talkie film was censored by the Punjab Board.

First Marathi Film
Prabhat Film Company's “AYODHECHA RAJA” Directed by V.Shantaram in 1932 was the first Marathi film which starred Durga Khote.

First Double Version talkie
“AYODHYECHA RAJA” in Marathi and “Ayodhya Ka Raja” in Hindi were the first double version talkie films produced by Prabhat Film Company in 1932.

First Talkie which celebrated Silver Jubliee
“SHYAMSUNDER” in Marathi, produced by Dadasaheb Torne of Saraswati Cinetone and directed by Bhal G. Pendarkar was the first Indian talkie which celebrated silver jubilee by running for 27 weeks at the West End Cinema in Bombay in 1932.

First Talkie Film on Fidelytone Sound System
Eastern Film's “Shikari” in Hindi was the first talkie film with sound recorded on the Fidelytone Sound System brought into India by a foreign film unit in1932.

First Film With Maximum Songs
Madan Theatres “Indra Sabha” in 1932 is the only film produced so far with a record number of 71 songs. Madan's other three films “ CHATRABAKAVALI ”, “Guru Zarina” and “Bilwamangal” Produced in 1932 had 41, 37 songs respectively, Meenakshi Cinetone's “Pavalakkodi”, produced in 1934, had 50 songs while Angle Film's Tamil hit “Sri Hrishna Leela” in 1934 had 62 songs.

First Film With Background Music
New Theatre's “Chandidas” in Bengali was the first talkie film in which “Background” music was scored by music director R.C. Boral in 1932. Prabhat Film Company's “Amrit Manthan” released at almost the same time also had imaginative background music scored by music director Keshavrao Bhole.

1933
First Air-Conditioned Cinema
First air-conditioned cinema Regal started in Bombay.

First Colour Film
Prabhat Film Company's “Sairandhri” was the first talkie film produced in Multicolour in 1933. However, as the colour quality was not satisfactory Imperial Film Company's “KISAN KANYA ” produced in 1937 is considered as the first colour film. Minerva Movietone's “Jhansi Ki Rani” was the first technically perfect Technicolour film directly shot on 35mm in 1953.

First Film shot in Ellora Caves
Gandharva Cinetone was, the first film company to utilize the famous Ellora Caves in their talkie film “Sati Mahananda” in 1933, written and directed by Baburao Patel.

First Talkie released in England
“Karma” (Fate) in which Devika Rani co-starred with Himansu Rai was an Anglo-Indian co-production and had a premiere of its English version in London in May 1933. The Hindi version of the film was premiered at Bombay on January 27, 1934.

1934
First Talkie shown at Venice Film Festival
The Bengali talkie film “Seeta”, directed by Debaki Bose, was the first Indian talkie film shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1934

First Talkie Produced in South
“Srinivas Kalyanam” in Tamil was the first talkie produced in the South by Srinivas Cinetone and directed by A.Narayanan in Madras in 1934. It featured R.B. Lakshmi Devi in the main role.

First Telugu Film from South
The first Telugu talkie produced by South Indian Technicians entirely in the South, in Madras, was “Seetha Kalyanam” produced by P.V. Das at the Vel Pictures Studio. Starring Rama Tilakam in the main role in 1934.

First Cartoon Film
For the first time a cartoon short was made by Messrs. Ketkar and Raosaheb Oak in 1933. Prabhat Film Company also announced a cartoon film “Jambu Kaka” but on hearing this news R.C. Boral of New Theatres started his own Cartoon film “ON A MOONLIGHT NIGHT” and completed it within one month and released it even before the completion of “Jambu Kaka”. However, “Jambu Kaka” was released at the Majestic Cinema, Bombay, on November 15, 1934 along with “Amrit Manthan”.

First Hindi Talkie to celebrate Silver Jubilee
Prabhat Film company's “Amirt Manthan” was the first talkie in Hindi which celebrated Silver Jubilee at Krishna Talkies, Bombay, by running for 29 weeks at a stretch in 1934.

1935
First Playback
Playback's was introduced in the talkie “ Bhagya Chakra” (Dhoop Chaon) produced by New Theatres in 1935 and Bombay talkie ‘Milan' B/W. Music Director R.C. Boralhad composed the music for the film.

First All India Motion Picture Convention
The first All India Motion Picture convention was held in Bombay on February 20, 1935 under the auspices of the Motion Picture Society of India headed by Mr. B.V. Jadhav.

The Parsi Panchayat took strong objection to Parsi Music Director Saraswati Devi and Chandraprabha (known as Homi Sisters) who acted in JAWANI KI HAWA . Morchas were taken out to prevent the release of the film which finally opened at Imperial Cinema under Police Protection. Parsi members of Bombay Talkies, Board of Directors including Sir Phirozshah Mehta, Sir Cavasji Jehangir & F.E. Dinshaw refused to resign. Thereafter the agitation died down. Bombay Talkies arranged a special show for Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru to see their film ACHHUT KANYA .

1937
First Kannada-Tamil Double Version Film
The first talkie film produced simultaneously in two versions, in Kannada and Tamil, was “PURANDARDAS” by Devi Films in 1937.

First Film without Any Song
Wadia Movietone's “ Naujawan” was the first talkie without any song produced in 1937.

First Colour Film Laboratory
K.B. Ardeshir M Irani of Imperial Film Company established a colour film laboratory for the first time in India in 1937. Imperia's “Kisan Kanya” was the first cine colour film from this laboratory.

IMPPA Formed
Formation of Indian Motion Picture Producers” Association in Bombay

“CHITAMANI” (Tamil), directed by Y.V. Rao and starring M.K. Thilagaraja Bhagavathar and K. Aswathama (13 th March), creates a record for continuous run for more than one year in one cinema house alone.

Debaki Bose gives lyrical and philosophical treatment to the life of a Vaishnative poet in New Theatres ‘ VIDYAPATI'.

1938
First Malayalam Talkie
The first talkie film in Malayalee was “Balan” produced by Modern Theatres Ltd. Salem in 1938. It was directed by Notani.


Formation of South Indian Film Chamber of Commerce in Madras and Indian Motion Picture Distributor's Association in Bombay.

First Camera Crane
Wadia Movietone used the camera crane for the first time in India while producing their films in 1938. The crane was built in their own workshop under the expert care of B.M. Tara.

1939
Silver Jubilee celebrations of the Indian Cinema in Bombay (in May)

First Hindi Talkie from South
“Prem Sagar” produced and directed by K. Subramanyam in 1939 was the first Hindi Talkie produced in the south.

1942
First Film Society
Bombay Film Society was the first film society in India formed in Bombay in 1942.

First Govt. Control over length & Distribution of Raw Film
The Govt. of India restricted the footage of the feature films to 11,000 feet and that of trailers to 400 feet, from May 16, 1942. Further, distribution of raw film was also controlled for the first time from 17 th July 1943 to 15 th Dec. 1945.

1943
Government Control on the distribution of raw film; The Information Films of India and Indian News Parade, set up by Government to produce documentaries and newsreels; Exhibition of Government “approved” films made compulsory under D.I.R. 44 A.

1944
First Talkie Produced in English Language
Wadia Movietone's “The Court Dancer” was the first Indian Talkie which had English dialogue. It was released in USA in 1944. Dadasaheb Phalke, father of Indian Cinema, passes away on 16 th Feb. 1944.

1947
Bombay Talkies ‘KISMAT', made in 1943, creates an all time record for the longest continuous run of more than three and a half years at a single cinema ROXY in Calcutta.

1948
First Ballet Film
Screen and Stage Production Madras “Kalpana” directed by Uday Shankar in 1948 was the first ballet film in India. It had dialogue by Amrit Lal Nagar and Lyrics by Sumitra Nandan Pant.

1949
First 16mm colour feature film
Bhavnani Productions ‘Rangeen Zamana” produced and directed by M. Bhavnani in 1948 (released as “Ajit” in 1949) was the first colour feature film produced on Kodachrome and blown up to 35mm.

First Time “A” and “U” Classification
The Indian Cinematograph Act 1918 was amended in December 1949 by which time censorship was made a Central subject for the first time and two types of categories “A” and “U” were prescribed for certification of films.

1950
First Film With “A” certificate
Akash Chitra's “Hanste Aansu” was the first Hindi feature film in 1950 which was is sued an “A” Certificate (Film suitable for exhibition to Adults only) in India.

1951
• Formation of Central Board of Film Censors with B.N. Sircar on the Board.
• Launching of Film Federation of India under the presidentship of Chandulal J
Shah.
• Formation of SIMPSA in Madras and CCCA in Bhusaval.
• “Aan” produced by Mehboob in colour 16mm and blown up to 35mm.
• Weekly Magazine SCREEN started by Indian Express.

1952
First International Film Festival
The Films Division of the Government of India sponsored and organized the First International Film Festival of India in Bombay on January 24, 1952, which continued for a fortnight.

1953
First President's Gold Medal
P.K. Atre's “SHYAMCHI AYEE” in Marathi was the first film to get the President's Gold Medal, considered as the best film of 1953.

India's first Technicolour film ‘ JHANSI KI RANI' was produced by Sohrab Modi for Minerva Movietone with foreign technicians.

The film magazine Filmfare introduced Awards, the Award for the best film going to ‘ DO BIGHA ZAMIN'

1954
Film Producers Guild is formed

First National Awards
The annual State Awards for film were introduced for the first time by Government in 1954.

1955
First film seminar
The first film seminar was convened by Sangeet Nataka Akademi and inaugurated by Prime Minister Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru.

1956
First Film Exempted from Entertainment Tax
Rajkamal Kalamandir's JHANAK JHANAK PAYAL BAJE was the first film to be exempted from entertainment tax in 1956. Dr V Shantaram was a founder member of the Film Producers Guild

1957
K. A. Abbas made the first Indo-Russian Co-production “PARDESI” in Hindi and Russian.

1960
First Excise Duty on release prints
Excise Duty was levied by the Government on release prints for the first time in India on April 1, 1960.

1961
First Cinemascope film
Guru Dutt's “Kagaz Ke Phool” in 1959 was the first Cinemascope film shot in black and white. Later in 1961 Anupam Chitra produced “Pyar Ki Pyas' in Cinemascope and colour. Guru Dutt was a member of the Guild.

First Talkie film without Dialogue
Taru Mukerji Production, Calcutta's “Ingeet” in 1961 was the first film of the talkie era which had no dialogue at all.

1964
First Film with only one actor
Sunil Dutt's “Yaadein” in 1964 was the first film in India which had only one actor in the fim.

1967
First 70mm Technicolour film
Pachhis “ Around The World” was the first Indian Film in 70mm and Technicolour with Stereophonic Sound in 1967.

Western

Western

The Western is an American genre in literature and film. Westerns are art works – films, literature, sculpture, television and radio shows, and paintings – devoted to telling stories set in the American West, often portraying it in a romanticized light.

While the Western has been popular throughout the history of movies, it has begun to diminish in importance as the United States progresses farther away from the period depicted.

Definition
Westerns, by definition, are set in the American West, almost always in the 19th century, generally between the Antebellum period and the turn of the century. Many incorporate the Civil War into the plot, or into the background, although the west was not touched by the war to the extent the east was. However, their setting may extend further back to the time of the American colonial period or forward to the mid-twentieth century. They may also range geographically from Mexico to Canada.

Many westerns involve semi-nomadic characters who wander from town to town, their sole possessions consisting of clothing, a gun, and (optionally) a horse. The high technology of the era – such as the telegraph, printing press, and railroad – may appear, occasionally as a development just arriving, and usually symbolizing the impending end of the frontier lifestyle which will soon give way to the march of civilization.

The Western takes these simple elements and uses them to tell morality tales, usually setting them against spectacular American landscapes. In some movies, scenery becomes almost the star of the movie. Westerns often stress the harshness of the wilderness and frequently set the action in a desert-like landscape for example in The Searchers (1956) and Open Range (2003). However, this desert landscape is not as evident in High Noon (1952), which is set in a gritty, dirty western town and shows a juxtaposition between the dirty town and the beautiful landscape.

Specific settings include lonely isolated forts, ranch houses, the isolated homestead, the saloon or the jail. Other iconic elements in westerns include Stetsons and Spurs, Colt .45s, prostitutes and the faithful steed.

Common themes
The western film genre often portrays the conquest of the wilderness and the subordination of nature, in the name of civilization or the confiscation of the territorial rights of the original inhabitants of the frontier.

The Western depicts a society organized around codes of honor, rather than the law, in which persons have no social order larger than their immediate peers, family, or perhaps themselves alone. Here, one must cultivate a reputation by acts of violence; or they can be generous, because generosity creates a dependency relationship in the social hierarchy.

These themes unite the Western, the gangster movie, and the revenge movie in a single vision. In the Western, these themes are forefronted, to the extent that the arrival of law and "civilization" is often portrayed as regrettable, if inevitable.

Origins of the "Western idea"
The idealized version of the "Wild West" can be traced at least as far back as Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows which began in 1883. In literature, Owen Wister's The Virginian, published in 1902, was an American start (though not the first Western published in the United States); but the German writer Karl May was writing Wild West stories as early as 1876. His books were a major influence on the founder of Universal Pictures, the German immigrant Carl Laemmle; and May himself traced ideas at least to the American writer James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote Last of the Mohicans in 1826.

Thus, the "western idea" has a long history. The western was a distinct literary genre before the rise of motion pictures; other important writers were Zane Grey, Louis L'Amour and Elmore Leonard.

It has been said that there are four principal elements which contributed to the form of the western genre:
• A structure drawn from 19th century melodramatic literature, involving a virtuous
hero and a wicked villain who menaces a virginal heroine.
• An action story, composed of violence, chases and crimes appropriate to a place
like the American West in the 19th century.
• The introduction of the history of the migration westwards and the opening of the
frontier signalled in such films as The Covered Wagon (1924) and The Iron Horse
(1924).
• The revenge structure, which was present by the time of Billy The Kid in 1930.

These have been claimed for the 'premise' from which westerns were developed and from which all subsequent westerns have emerged.

Western literature
Western fiction got its start in the "penny dreadfuls" and later the "dime novels" that first began to be published in the mid-nineteenth century. These cheaply made books were published to capitalize on the many fanciful yet supposedly true stories that were being told about the mountain men, outlaws, settlers and lawmen who were taming the western frontier. By 1900, the new medium of pulp magazines also helped to relate these adventures to easterners. Meanwhile, non-American authors like the German Karl May picked up the genre, went to full novel length, and made it hugely popular and successful in continental Europe from about 1880 on, though they were generally dismissed as trivial by the literary critics of the day.

The western in American Literature began to emerge with the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. although arguably it did not begin to be a separate genre until the publication of The Virginian by Owen Wister in 1902. Popularity grew with the publication of Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage in 1912. When pulp magazines exploded in popularity in the 1920s, western fiction greatly benefited (as did the author Max Brand, who excelled at the western short story). The simultaneous popularity of Western movies in the 1920s also helped the genre. In the 1940s several seminal westerns were published including The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter van Tilburg Clark, The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949) by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., and Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer. Many other western authors gained readership in the 1950s, such as Luke Short, Ray Hogan, and Louis L'Amour. The genre peaked around the early 1960s, largely due to the tremendous number of westerns on television (though television did help hasten the demise of western short fiction pulp magazines in the early 1950s). The burnout of the American public on television westerns in the late 1960s seemed to have an affect on the literature as well, and interest in western literature began to wane. In the 1970s, the work of Louis L'Amour began to catch hold of most western readers and he has tended to dominate the western reader lists ever since. Readership as a whole began to drop off in the mid- to late '70s and has reached a new low today, so much so that most bookstores, outside of a few western states, only carry a small number of Western fiction books in comparison to other genres. Western authors have an organization that represents them called the Western Writers of America, who present the annual Golden Spur Awards.

Western films
A genre in which description and dialogue are lean, and the landscape spectacular, is well suited to a visual medium. Early Westerns were mostly filmed in the studio like other early Hollywood movies, but when locations shooting became more common, producers of Westerns used desolate corners of California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Colorado or Wyoming, often making the landscape not just a vivid backdrop, but a character in the movie.

The Western genre itself has sub-genres, such as the epic Western, the shoot 'em up, singing cowboy Westerns, and a few comedy Westerns. The Western re-invented itself in the revisionist Western.

Cowboys and Gunslingers play prominent roles in Western movies. Often fights with Indians are depicted, although "revisionist" Westerns give the natives sympathetic treatment. Other recurring themes of westerns include western treks, and groups of bandits terrorizing small towns such as in The Magnificent Seven.

The Classical Western film
The Great Train Robbery, the first narrative film produced in the United States, was a Western

The western film traces its roots back to The Great Train Robbery, a silent film directed by Edwin S. Porter and starring Broncho Billy Anderson. Released in 1903, the film's popularity opened the door for Anderson to become the screen's first cowboy star, making several hundred Western movie shorts. So popular was the genre that he soon had competition in the form of William S. Hart.

In the United States, the western has had an extremely rich history that spans many genres (comedy, drama, tragedy, parody, musical, etc.). The golden age of the western film is epitomised by the work of two directors: John Ford (who often used John Wayne for lead roles) and Howard Hawks. Ford's 1939 epic, Stagecoach is considered one of the best westerns ever made.

Spaghetti Westerns
During the 1960s and 1970s, a revival of the Western emerged in Italy with the "Spaghetti Westerns" or "Italo-Westerns". Many of these films are low-budget affairs, shot in locations chosen for their cheapness and for the similarity of their landscapes to those of the Southwestern United States (southern Spain was the most popular choice). Spaghetti Westerns were characterised by the presence of more action and violence than the Hollywood westerns.

But the best of the genre, notably the films directed by Sergio Leone, have a parodic dimension (the strange opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West being a reversal of Fred Zinnemann's High Noon opening scene) which gave them a different tone to the Hollywood westerns. Clint Eastwood became famous by starring in Spaghetti Westerns, although they were also to provide a showcase for other such considerable talents as Lee van Cleef, James Coburn, Klaus Kinski and Henry Fonda.

Revisionist Westerns
Beginning in the 1960s, in part due to the impact of the Spaghetti Westerns, many American filmmakers began to question many traditional themes of westerns. Aside from the portrayal of the Native American as a "savage", such as Major Dundee and Ulzana's Raid, audiences began to question the simple hero versus villain dualism, and the use of violence to test one's character or to prove oneself right. Examples of "revisionist westerns" include Jeremiah Johnson, Little Big Man, Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven. Some "modern" Westerns give women more powerful roles, such as Comes a Horseman, Open Range and The Missing. In 1969, Claudia Cardinale had a starring lead in Once Upon a Time in the West.

Genre studies and Westerns
In the 1960s academic and critical attention to cinema as a legitimate art form emerged. With the increased attention, film theory was developed to attempt to understand the significance of film. From this environment emerged (in conjunction with the literary movement) a enclave of critical studies called genre studies. This was primarily a semantic and structuralist approach to understanding how similar films convey meaning. Long derided for its simplistic morality, the western film genre became to be seen instead as a series of conventions and codes that acted as a short-hand communication methods with the audience. For example, a white hat represents the good guy, a black hat represents the bad guy; two people facing each other on a deserted street leads to the expectation of a showdown; cattlemen are loners, townsfolk are family and community minded; and so forth. All western films can be read as a series of codes and the variations on those codes. Since the 1970s, the western genre has been unraveled through a series of films that used the codes but primarily as a way of undermining them (Little Big Man and Maverick did this through comedy). Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves actually resurrects all the original codes and conventions but reverses the polarities (the Native Americans are good, the U.S. Cavalry is bad). Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven uses every one of the original conventions, only reverses the outcomes (instead of dying bravely or stoicly, characters whine, cry, and beg; instead of a good guy saving the day, unredeemable characters execute revenge; etc.)

One of the results of genre studies is that some have argued that "Westerns" need not take place in the American West or even in the 19th Century, as the codes can be found in other types of movie. Hud, starring Paul Newman, and Akira Kurosawa's Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai), are possible examples of these. Likewise, it has been pointed out that films set in the old American West, may not necessarily be considered "Westerns."

Influences on and of the Western
During the late 1950s, the Western movie became a template for the Bills, a Congolese youth subculture.

Many westerns after 1960 were heavily influenced by the Japanese samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. For instance The Magnificent Seven was a remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and both A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing were remakes of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, which itself was reputably inspired by Red Harvest, an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammett. It should also be noted that Kurosawa himself was heavily influenced from American Westerns, especially the works of John Ford. Senses of Cinema

Despite the Cold War, the western was a strong influence on Eastern Bloc cinema, which had its own take on the genre, the so called 'Red Western' or Ostern. Generally these took two forms: either straight westerns shot in the Eastern Bloc, or action films involving the Russian Revolution and civil war and the Basmachi rebellion in which Turkic peoples play a similar role to Mexicans in traditional westerns.

An offshoot of the western genre is the "post-apocalyptic" western, in which a future society, struggling to rebuild after a major catastrophe, is portrayed in a manner very similar to the 19th century frontier. Examples include The Postman and the "Mad Max" series, and the computer game Fallout.

Many elements of space travel series and films borrow extensively from the conventions of the western genre. Peter Hyams' Outland transferred the plot of High Noon to interstellar space. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek series, once described his vision for the show as "Wagon Train to the stars". More recently, the space opera series Firefly used an explicitly western theme for its portrayal of frontier worlds.

Elements of western movies can be found also in some movies belonging essentially to other genres. For example, Kelly's Heroes is a war movie, but action and characters are western-like. The British film Zulu set during the Anglo-Zulu War has sometimes been compared to a Western, even though it is set in South Africa.

In addition, the superhero fantasy genre has been described as having been derived from the cowboy hero, only powered up to omnipotence in a primarily urban setting.

The western genre has been parodied on a number of occasions, famous examples being Support Your Local Sheriff, Cat Ballou, and Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.

George Lucas's Star Wars films use many elements of a western, and indeed, Lucas has said he intended for Star Wars to revitalize cinematic mythology, a part the western once held. The Jedi, who take their name from Jidaigeki, are modeled after samurai, showing the influence of Kurosawa. The character Han Solo dressed like an archetypal gunslinger, and the Mos Eisley Cantina is much like an old west saloon.

Television Westerns
The Saturday Afternoon Movie was a pre-TV phenomenon in the US which often featured western series. Audie Murphy, Tom Mix, and Johnny Mack Brown became major idols of a young audience, plus "Singing cowboys" such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Rex Allen. Each had a co-starring horse such as Rogers' Golden Palomino, Trigger, who became a star in his own right. Other B-movie series were Lash La Rue and the Durango Kid. Herbert Jeffreys, as Bob Blake with his horse Stardust, appeared in a number of movies made for African American audiences in the days of segregated movie theaters. Bill Pickett, an African American rodeo performer, also appeared in early western films for the same audience.

When the popularity of television exploded in the late 1940s and 1950s, westerns quickly became a staple of small-screen entertainment. A great many B-movie Westerns were aired on TV as time fillers, while a number of long-running TV Westerns became classics in their own right. Notable TV Westerns include Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, The Rifleman, Have Gun, Will Travel, Bonanza, The Big Valley, Maverick, The High Chaparral and many others. The peak year for television westerns was 1959, with 26 such shows airing during prime-time.

The 1970s saw a revision of the western, with the incorporation of many new elements. McCloud, which premiered in 1970, was essentially a fusion of the sheriff-oriented western with the modern big-city crime drama. Hec Ramsey was a western who-dunnit mystery series. Little House on the Prairie was set on the frontier in the time period of the western, but was essentially a family drama. Kung Fu was in the tradition of the itinerant gunfighter westerns, but the main character was a Chinese monk who fought only with his formidable martial art skill. The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams was a family adventure show about a gentle mountain man with an uncanny connection to wildlife who helps others who visit his wilderness refuge.

The 1990s saw the networks getting into filming Western movies on their own. Like Louis L'Amour ‘s Conagher, Tony Hillerman’s The Dark Wind, The Last Outlaw, The Jack Bull etc. A few new comedies like The Cisco Kid, The Cherokee Kid, and the gritty TV series Lonesome Dove: The Outlaw Years.

This century started off with Louis L'Amour’s Crossfire Trail, Monte Walsh, and Hillerman’s Coyote Waits, & A Thief of Time. DVDs offer a second life to TV series like Peacemakers, and HBO’s Deadwood.

Also, in 2002 a show called Firefly (created by Joss Whedon) mixed in a perfect and original way the identity of both western genre with science-fiction. Now, it became a critically successful saga which closure took place in the acclaimed movie Serenity.

It is clear that the Western is not dead, but have moved smoothly from the first color TV series The Cisco Kid, through the half hour, shoot-um-ups, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Have Gun — Will Travel, " of the 1950’s. Later hour long adult westerns, to the slickly packaged made for TV westerns of today.

Spaghetti Western
Spaghetti Westerns is a nickname for a broad sub-genre of Western film that emerged in the mid-1960s, so named because most of them were produced by Italian studios. Originally they had in common the Italian language, low budgets, and a recognizable highly fluid, violent, minimalist cinematography that eschewed (some said "demythologized") many of the conventions of earlier Westerns - partly intentionally, partly as a result of the work being done in a different cultural background and with limited funds. The term was originally used disparagingly, but by the 1980s many of these films came to be held in high regard.

The best-known and perhaps archetypal spaghetti Westerns were the so-called Man With No Name trilogy (or Dollars Trilogy) directed by Sergio Leone, starring American actor Clint Eastwood and with musical scores composed by Ennio Morricone (all of whom are now synonymous with the genre): A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The last is one of the most famed Westerns of all time (although, atypically for the genre, it had a relatively high budget in excess of 1 million USD).

Many of the films were shot in the Spanish desert region of Almería, which greatly resembles the landscape of California. (A few were shot in Sardinia.) Because of the desert setting and the readily available southern Spanish extras, a usual theme in Spaghetti Westerns is the Mexican Revolution, Mexican bandits and the border zone between Mexico and the USA.

Spaghetti westerns are known as "macaroni western" in Japan.

Other "Food Westerns"
The name led to various other non-US westerns being associated with food and drink.

Sometimes the names chorizo/paella Western are used for similar films financed by Spanish capital, although Leone's earlier films were actually shot in Andalucia. Publicity for the Japanese comedy film Tampopo coined the phrase "Noodle Western" to describe the parody made about a noodle restaurant. Robert Rodriguez's Westerns have been called "Burrito Westerns." Sometimes Hrafn Gunnlaugsson's Viking movies are called "Cod Westerns". The German Westerns of the 1960s, which were successful in Europe before the Italian Westerns, were made after novels by Karl May and mostly filmed in former Yugoslavia. German Westerns are often called "Kraut Western". The Red Dwarf episode Gunmen Of The Apocalypse has been described as the world's only "Roast Beef Western". John Woo's Western movies were described by Roger Ebert as Dim Sum Western. The Red Western or Ostern is the Soviet and eastern bloc's take on the genre. (Time magazine dubbed the animated TV series Samurai Jack, which combined elements of—among others—anime and the Sergio Leone films, a "sashimi Western.")

War Film

War film

Films of the war film genre deal primarily with actual warfare, usually featuring sea, air, or land battles and their combatants, or on daily military or civilian life in the midst of battle or the threat of battle. Their stories may be fiction, historical re-enactment, docudrama or documentary in nature.

World War I
Films made in the years following World War I tended to emphasise the horror or futility of modern warfare, as in All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and La Grande Illusion (1937); or concentrated on the drama of the new form of aerial combat in films like Wings (1927), Hell's Angels (1930), and The Dawn Patrol (1930 and 1938 versions).


World War II
During this period, these films really came into their own. Many of the dramatic war films in the early 1940s in the United States were designed to create consensus at the expense of "the enemy". In fact, one of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was that of a cross-section of the American people which comes together as a crack unit for the good of the country.

British films tended to follow a similar pattern, depicting ordinary people joining forces for the good of the war effort. In Which We Serve (1942), Millions Like Us (1943), The Way Ahead (1944) and The Way to the Stars (1945) are among the most celebrated British films of the war years. The British industry continued to produce war dramas throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Many of these were based on true stories, like The Dam Busters (1954), Dunkirk (1958), Reach for the Sky (1956) and Sink the Bismarck! (1960). Films based on real life commando missions like The Gift Horse (1952) and Ill Met by Moonlight (1956) would inspire a series of fictional adventure films popular in the 1960s, such as The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Where Eagles Dare (1968).

Hollywood films in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice in films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), Halls of Montezuma (1950) or D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). They also tended to have a number of cliches associated with them: often a small group of men would tend to be fairly diverse ethnically, but most of the characters would not be developed much beyond their ethnicity; the senior officer would often be unreasonable and unyielding; almost anyone sharing personal information--especially plans for after returning home--would die shortly thereafter; and anyone acting in a cowardly or unpatriotic manner would convert to heroism or die (or both, in quick succession).

A popular sub-genre of war films in the 1950s and '60s was the prisoner of war film. This was a form popularised in Britain, and usually recounted stories of real-life escapes from (usually German) P.O.W. camps in World War II. Examples include The Wooden Horse (1950), Albert R.N. (1953) and The Colditz Story (1955). Hollywood also made its own contribution to the genre with The Great Escape (1963) and the fictional Stalag 17 (1953). Other fictional P.O.W. films include The Captive Heart (1947), Danger Within (1958) and The Mackenzie Break (1970). Unusually, the latter is about German prisoners attempting to escape from a British camp. A more recent example is Hart's War from 2002.

The late 1950s and 1960s brought some more thoughtful big-scale war films like David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as well as a fashion for all-star epics based on real battles, and often quasi-documentary in style. This trend was started by Darryl F. Zanuck's production The Longest Day in 1962, based on the first day of the 1944 D-Day landings. Other examples included Battle of the Bulge (1965), Battle of Britain (1969), Waterloo (1970), Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (based on the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Midway (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). A more recent example is the American Civil War film Gettysburg, which was based on actual events during the battle, including the defense of Little Round Top by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain.

Other Modern Genres
War films produced during and just after the Vietnam War era tended to reflect the disillusionment of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than movies made before it. (This is not to say that there were no such films before the Vietnam War; Paths of Glory is a notable critique of war from 1957, the very beginning of the Vietnam War.) The last film of what can be called the pre-Vietnam style is The Green Berets. Examples of post-Vietnam style films include Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, which deal with Vietnam itself, and Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, which do not.

Many war films have been produced with the cooperation of a nation's military forces. The United States Navy has been very cooperative since World War II in providing ships and technical guidance with Top Gun being a famous example. Sometimes the military demands some editorial control in exchange for their cooperation, which can bias the final result. Another downside, if filmed during a war: the German Ministry of Propaganda, in making the epic war film Kolberg in January 1945, used several divisions of soldiers as extras. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels believed the impact of the film would offset the tactical disadvantages of the missing soldiers.

If they do not cooperate, then another country's military may assist. Many 1950s and 1960s war movies, and the Oscar-winning film Patton were shot in Spain, which had large supplies of both Allied and Axis equipment. The Napoleonic epic Waterloo was shot in Ukraine, using Soviet soldiers (and incidentally, helped scholars learn why Napoleon preferred the tactics of attacking in column). Saving Private Ryan was shot with the cooperation of the Irish army.

Other War Film Genres
Trojan War
• Helen of Troy (1956)
• Troy (2004)

Greco-Persian Wars
• The 300 Spartans (1962)

Crusades
• Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

Wars of Scottish Independence
• Braveheart (1995)

French and Indian War
• The Last of the Mohicans (1920) & (1936) & (1992)

American Revolutionary War
• The Battle of Bunker Hill (1911)
• Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)
• The Patriot (2000)
• Revolution (1985)
• Valley Forge (1975) made for TV
• Johnny Tremain 1957

Napoleonic Wars
• Captain Horatio Hornblower (1951)
• Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
• Napoléon (1927)
• War and Peace (1956 and 1967)
• Waterloo (1970)

Crimean War
• The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936 and 1968)

Texas War of Independence
• The Alamo (1936)
• The Alamo (1960)
• The Alamo (2004)
• The Alamo: Thirteen Days to Glory (1987)

American Civil War
• Andersonville (1996) made for TV
• Battle of Gettysburg (1913)
• Battle of Gettysburg (1956)
• Birth of a Nation (1915), first epic film
• Cold Mountain (2003)

Indian Wars
• Buffalo Soldiers (1997) (TV)
• The Court-Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1977) (TV)
• Crazy Horse (1996)
• Custer of the West (1967)

Spanish-American War
• Tearing Down the Spanish Flag - first war movie ever made, in 1898.

Anglo-Zulu War
• Shaka Zulu (1986) (TV)
• Zulu (1964)
• Zulu Dawn (1979)

Anglo-Boer War
• Ohm Kruger (1942)
• Breaker Morant (1980)

World War I
• The African Queen (1951)
• All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
• The Blue Max (1966)
• Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

Spanish Civil War
• For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943)
• Land and Freedom (1995)

Thriller

Thriller

The thriller is a genre of fiction in which tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary heroes are pitted against villains determined to destroy them, their country, or the stability of the free world. The hero of a typical thriller faces danger alone or in the company of a small band of companions. The protagonist may be a law enforcement agent, a journalist, or a soldier, but typically he or she is cut off from the resources of "their" organization. More often the hero is an ordinary citizen drawn into danger and intrigue by circumstances beyond their control. Thrillers are typically novels or movies, though television series such as Alias, 24, The Sandbaggers and Spooks also fall into this genre, along with such non-fiction bestsellers as Holy Blood, Holy Grail and even Fermat's Enigma, Simon Singh's account of the conquest of Fermat's Last Theorem. While thrillers constitute a distinct genre, they often incorporate elements of other genres such as adventure, detective fiction, and espionage. A thriller includes suspense as an indispensable ingredient.

Novelists closely associated with the genre include: Eric Ambler, Desmond Bagley, John Buchan, Frederick Forsyth, Jack Higgins, Christopher Hyde, Duncan Kyle, Alistair MacLean, Dan Brown and Robert Ludlum.

Notable movie thrillers include: The Thirty-Nine Steps, The Lady Vanishes, North by Northwest, The Day of the Jackal, Duel, The Parallax View, In the Line of Fire, The Fugitive, Manhunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, Red Dragon, and Marathon Man.

Gangster film
Gangster film is a film genre which features gangster characters, such as members of the Mafia and inner city street gangs.

Giallo
Giallo (pronounced jee-AH-loh) is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film. It is closely related to the French fantastique genre, crime fiction, horror fiction and eroticism. The term is also used to mean an example of the genre, in which case it can take the Italian plural gialli. The word giallo is Italian for "yellow" (see Wiktionary: giallo) and stems from the genre's origin in paperback novels with yellow covers.

Literature
The term giallo was originally coined to describe a series of mystery/crime pulp novels first published by the Mondadori publishing house in 1929, which continued to be published until the 1960s. Their yellow covers contained whodunits, much like their American counterparts of the 1920s and 1930s, and this link with English language pulp fiction was reinforced with the Italian authors always taking on English pen names. Many of the earliest gialliwere in fact English-language novels translated into Italian.

Published as cheap paperbacks, the success of the giallo novels soon began attracting the attention of other publishing houses, who began releasing their own versions (not forgetting to keep the by-now traditional yellow cover). The novels were so popular that even the works of established foreign mystery and crime writers, such as Agatha Christie and Georges Simenon, were labelled gialliwhen first published in Italy.

Film
The film genre that emerged from these novels in the 1960s began as literal adaptations of the books, but soon began taking advantage of modern cinematic techniques to create a unique genre.

Characteristics
Giallo films are characterized by extended murder sequences featuring excessive bloodletting, stylish camerawork and unusual musical arrangements. The literary whodunit element is retained, but combined with modern slasher horror, while being filtered through Italy's longstanding tradition of opera and staged grand guignol drama.

They typically introduce strong psychological themes of madness, alienation, and paranoia and include liberal amounts of nudity and sex. Sergio Martino's Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (a.k.a. Eye of the Black Cat) was explicitly based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat."

They remain notable in part for their expressive use of music, most notably by Dario Argento's collaborations with Ennio Morricone and his musical director Bruno Nicolai, and later with the band Goblin.

Development
As well as the literary giallo tradition, the films were also initially influenced by the German "Krimi" phenomenon - originally black and white films of the 1960s that were based on Edgar Wallace stories.


The first film that created the giallo as a cinema genre is La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) (1963), from Mario Bava. Its title referred to Alfred Hitchcock's famous The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), again establishing strong links with Anglo-American culture. In Mario Bava's 1964 film, Blood and Black Lace, the emblematic element of the giallo was introduced: the masked murderer with a shiny weapon in his black leather gloved hand.

Soon the giallo became a genre of its own, with its own rules and with a typical Italian flavour: adding additional layers of intense colour and style. The term giallo finally became synonymous with a heavy, theatrical, and stylised visual element.

The genre had its heyday in the 1970s, with dozens of Italian giallo films released. The most notable directors who worked in the genre were Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, Aldo Lado, Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi, and Pupi Avati.

Heist film
A heist film is a movie that has an intricate plot woven around a group of people trying to steal something. Comic versions are often called caper movies. They could be described as the analogues of caper stories in film history. Typically there are many plot twists, and film focuses on the characters' attempts to formulate a plan, carry it out, and escape with the goods. There is often a nemesis that must be thwarted, who is either a figure of authority, or a former partner who turned on the group or one of its members.

Etymology
The noun caper, according to the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary means a frolicsome leap, a capricious escapade or an illegal or questionable act.

The archetypal plot
Usually a heist film will contain a three act plot. The first act usually consists of the preparations for the heist: gathering conspirators, learning about the layout of the location to be robbed, learning about the alarm system, revealing innovative technologies to be used, and most importantly: setting up the plot twists in the final act.

The second act is the heist itself. With rare exception, the heist will be successful, though some number of unexpected events will occur.

The third act is the unravelling of the plot. The characters involved in the heist will be turned against one another, or one of the characters will have made arrangements with some outside party, who will interfere. Normally most or all of the characters involved in the heist will end up dead, captured by the law, or without any of the loot.

Variations on the plot
As an established archetype it became common, starting in the fifties, to excise one or two of the acts in the story, relying on the viewers' familiarity with the archetype to fill in the missing elements. Touchez pas au grisbi and Reservoir Dogs, for example, both take place entirely after the heist has occurred.

Some heist films take place non-linearly: The Killing, Reservoir Dogs.

Related film archetypes
The "heist film" is the most well-known of a number of closely related archetypal storylines. All involving collaborative efforts that require elaborate preparation and dramatic fallout, there is also: the prison-break film, the assassination film, and the hostage film (usually shown from the opposite perspective: that of the hostages and the rescuers). A number of spy films also have heist-like plots.

Additionally, it is common for films to have sections that are modelled after the heist film archetype. National Treasure, etc.

History
From the origins...
A "caper movie" generally shows the ingenious planning and realization of a heist. Even though it has come to be regarded as as classic American genre, in Europe it is Jules Dassins Du rififi chez les hommes of 1955 that served as the founding father of this particular type of film.

The classical Film noir period of the 40s and 50s brought the genre to fame: during these decades, several such gangster's films have been shot that to this day remain second to none. John Huston's Asphalt Jungle of 1950 or Stanley Kubrick's The Killing of 1956 are examples. The sombre atmosphere of the unavoidable failure which occurs during the film and which should become a sort of brand name for Film noir intertwines in these films with the viewers delight in watching the unfolding of a near-perfect crime.

Since that time Big caper movies have been shot in many variations, often introducing innovative ways of craftsmanship, such as Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs. Even to contemporary Hollywood, the genre still remains promising, as the 2001 and 2003 remakes of Ocean's Eleven and The Italian Job show.

Spy film
The spy film film genre deals with the subject of fictional espionage, either in a realistic way or as a basis for fantasy. Many novels in the spy fiction genre have been adapted as films, although in many cases (such as James Bond) the overall tone is changed.

Alfred Hitchcock did much to popularise the spy film in the 1930s with his influential thrillers The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1935), Sabotage (1937) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). These often involved innocent civilians being caught up in international conspiracies. Some, however, dealt with professional spies as in Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936), based on W. Somerset Maugham's Ashenden stories.

In the 1940s and early 1950s there were several films made about the exploits of Allied agents in occupied Europe, which could probably be considered as a sub-genre. 13 Rue Madeleine and O.S.S. were fictional stories about American agents in German-occupied France, and there were a number of films based on the stories of real-life British S.O.E. agents, including Odette and Carve Her Name With Pride. A more recent fictional example is Charlotte Gray, based on the novel by Sebastian Faulks.

The peak of popularity of the spy film is often considered to be the 1960s when Cold War fears meshed with a desire by audiences to see exciting and suspenseful films. The espionage film developed in two directions at this time. On the one hand, the realistic spy novels of Len Deighton and John Le Carre were adapted into relatively serious Cold War thrillers which dealt with some of the realities of the espionage world. Some of these films included The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965), The Deadly Affair (1966), and the Harry Palmer series, based on the novels of Len Deighton.

At the same time, the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming were adapted into an increasingly fantastical series of tongue-in-cheek adventure films by producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, with Sean Connery as the star. The phenomenal success of the Bond series lead to a deluge of imitators, especially from America. Among the best known examples were the two 'Derek Flint' films starring James Coburn, and the Matt Helm series with Dean Martin. Television also got into the act with series like The Man from U.N.C.L.E and I Spy in the U.S., and Danger Man and The Avengers in Britain. Spies have remained popular on TV to the present day with series such as Callan, Alias and Spooks.

Spy films also enjoyed something of a revival in the late 1990s, although these were often action films with espionage elements, or comedies like Austin Powers.

Sports Film

Sports film

Sports film is a film genre that uses sport as the theme of a film.

Baseball movie
A baseball movie refers to a sports film belonging to a genre where the game of baseball features prominently in the plot.

If movies are often referred to as an American art form, then the baseball movie must be the most American of all. The inherent conflict present in sports very often makes for intriguing subject matter for motion pictures. Throughout movie history, filmmakers have often turned to baseball.

Many baseball films are true stories which follow a particular team or player. Many of the greatest players in the game's history (Lou Gehrig, Babe Ruth, etc.) have had their life stories turned into film.

Other baseball films are pure fiction, using baseball as a backdrop for humor (The Bad News Bears) or even mythology (The Natural).

Science Fiction Film

Science fiction film

Science fiction has been a film genre since the earliest days of cinema. Science fiction films have explored a great range of subjects and themes, including many that can not be readily presented in other genre. Science fiction films have been used to explore sensitive social and political issues, while often providing an entertaining story for the more casual viewer. Today, science fiction films are in the forefront of new special effects technology, and the audience has become accustomed to displays of realistic alien life forms, spectacular space battles, energy weapons, faster than light travel, and distant worlds.

There are many memorable of films, and an even greater number that are mediocre or even among the worst examples of film production. It took many decades, and the efforts of talented teams of film producers, for the science fiction film to be taken seriously as an art form. There is much genre cross-over with science fiction, particularly with horror films (such as Alien (1979)).

History
Movies that could be categorized as belonging to the science fiction genre first appeared during the silent film era. However these were generally singular efforts that were based on the works of notable authors. It was only in the 1950s that the genre came into its own, reflecting the growing output of science fiction pulp magazines and books. But it took Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey before the genre was taken seriously.

Since that time science fiction movies have become one of the dominant box office staples, pulling in large audiences for blockbuster movies such as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and The Day After Tomorrow. Science fiction films have been in the forefront of special effects technology, and have been used as a vehicle for biting social commentary for which this genre is ideally suited.

Definition
Defining precisely which movies belong to the science fiction genre can be as difficult with films as it is with literature.
Science fiction film is "a film genre which emphasizes actual, extrapolative, or
speculative science and the empirical method, interacting in a social context with
the lesser emphasized, but still present, transcendentalism of magic and religion,
in an attempt to reconcile man with the unknown" (Sobchack 63).

This definition assumes that a continuum exists between (real-world) empiricism and (supernatural) transcendentalism, with science fiction film on the side of empiricism and horror film and fantasy film on the side of transcendentalism. However, there are numerous well-known examples of science fiction horror films, epitomized by Frankenstein and Alien.

The visual style of science fiction film can be characterized by a clash between alien and familiar images. This clash is implemented in the following ways:
1. Alien images become familiar
o In A Clockwork Orange, the repetitions of the Korova Milkbar make the alien decor
seem more familiar.
2. Familiar images become alien
o In Dr. Strangelove, the distortion of the humans make the familiar images seem
more alien.
3. Alien and familiar images are juxtaposed
o In The Deadly Mantis, the giant praying mantis is shown climbing the Washington
Monument.

Cultural theorist Scott Bukatman has proposed that science fiction film is the main area in which it is possible in contemporary culture to witness an expression of the sublime be it through exaggerated scale (the Death Star in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope), apocalypse (Independence Day) or transcendence (2001: A Space Odyssey).

Themes
A science fiction film will be speculative in nature, and often includes key supporting elements of science and technology. However, as often as not the "science" in a Hollywood sci-fi movie can be considered pseudo-science, relying primarily on atmosphere and quasi-scientific artistic fancy than facts and conventional scientific theory. The definition can also vary depending on the viewpoint of the observer. What may seem a science fiction film to one viewer can be considered fantasy to another.

Many science fiction films include elements of mysticism, occult, magic, or the supernatural, considered by some to be more properly elements of fantasy or the occult (or religious) film. This transform the movie genre into a science fantasy with a religious or quasi-religious philosophy serving as the driving motivation. The movie Forbidden Planet employs many common science fiction elements, but the nemesis is a powerful creature with a resemblance to an occult demonic spirit. The Star Wars series employed a magic-like philosophy and ability known as the "Force". Chronicles of Riddick (2004) included quasi-magical elements resembling necromancy and elementalism.

Some films blur the line between the genres, such as movies where the protagonist gains the extraordinary powers of the superhero. These films usually employ a quasi-plausible reason for the hero gaining these powers. Yet in many respects the film more closely resembles fantasy than sci-fi.

Not all science fiction themes are equally suitable for movies. In addition to science fiction horror, space opera is most common. Often enough, these films could just as well pass as westerns or WWII movies if the science fiction props were removed. Common themes also include voyages and expeditions to other planets, and dystopias, while utopias are rare.

Special effects in science fiction movies range from laughable to groundbreaking. Milestones in this respect include Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Star Wars films, and, more recently, The Matrix.

Imagery
As was illustrated by Vivian Sobchack, one sense in which the science fiction film differs from the fantasy film is that the former seeks to achieve our belief in the images we are viewing while fantasy instead attempts to suspend our belief. The science fiction film displays the unfamiliar and alien in the context of the familiar, thereby making the images appear almost ordinary and even commonplace.

Despite the alien nature of the scenes and science fictional elements of the setting, the imagery of the film is related back to mankind and how we relate to our surroundings. While the of film strives to push the boundaries of the human experience, they remain bound to the conditions and understanding of the audience and thereby contain prosaic aspects, rather than being completely alien or abstract.

Genre films such as westerns or war movies are bound to a particular area or time period. This is not true of the science fiction film. However there are several common visual elements that are evocative of the genre. These include the spacecraft or space station, alien worlds or creatures, robots, and futuristic gadgets. More subtle visual clues can appear with changes the human form through modifications in appearance, size, or behavior, or by means a known environment turned eerily alien, such as an empty city.

Scientific elements
While science is a major element of this genre, many movie studios take significant liberties with what is considered conventional scientific knowledge. Such liberties can be most readily observed in films that show spacecraft maneuvering in outer space. The vacuum should preclude the transmission of sound or maneuvers employing wings, yet the sound track is filled with inappropriate flying noises and changes in flight path resembling an aircraft banking. The filmmakers assume that the audience will be unfamiliar with the specifics of space travel, and focus is instead placed on providing acoustical atmosphere and the more familiar maneuvers of the aircraft.

Similar instances of ignoring science in favor of art can be seen when movies present environmental effects. Entire planets are destroyed in titanic explosions requiring mere seconds, whereas an actual event of this nature would likely take many hours. A star rises over the horizon of a comet or a Mercury-like world and the temperature suddenly soars many hundreds of degrees, causing the entire surface to turn into a furnace. In reality the energy is initially reaching the ground at a very oblique angle, and the temperature is likely to rise more gradually.

The role of the scientist has varied considerably in the science fiction film genre, depending on the public perception of science and advanced technology. Starting with Dr. Frankenstein, the mad scientist became a stock character who posed a dire threat to society and perhaps even civilization. In the monster movies of the 1950s, the scientist often played a heroic role as the only person who could provide a technological fix for some impending doom. Reflecting the distrust of government that began in the 1960s in the US, the brilliant but rebellious scientist became a common theme, often serving a Cassandra-like role during an impending disaster.

Disaster films
A frequent theme among sci-fi films is that of impending or actual disaster on an epic scale. These often address a particular concern of the writer by serving as a vehicle of warning against a type of activity, including technological research. In the case of alien invasion films, the creatures can provide as a stand-in for a feared foreign power.

Disaster films typically fall into the following general categories:
• Alien invasion — hostile extraterrestrials arrive and seek to supplant humanity.
They are either overwhelmingly powerful or very insidious.
• Environmental disaster — such a major climate change, or an asteroid or comet
strike.
• Man supplanted by technology — typically in the form of an all-powerful computer,
advanced robots or cyborgs, or else genetically-modified humans or animals.
• Nuclear war — usually in the form of a dystopic, post-holocaust tale of grim
survival.
• Pandemic — a highly lethal disease, often one created by man, wipes out most of
humanity in a massive plague.

Time travel movies can also exploit the potential for disaster as a motivation for the plot, or they can be the root cause of a disaster by wiping out recorded history and creating a new future.

Mind and identity
The core mental aspects of what makes us human has been a staple of science fiction films, particularly since the 1980s. Blade Runner examined what made a organic-creation a human, while the RoboCop series saw a android mechanism fitted with the brain and reprogrammed mind of a human. The idea of brain transfer was not entirely new to science fiction film, as the concept of the "mad scientist" transferring the human mind to another body is as old as Frankenstein.

In the 1990s, Total Recall began a thread of films that explored the concept of reprogramming the human mind. This was reminiscient of the brainwashing fears of the 1950s that appeared in such films as A Clockwork Orange. The cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic used the reprogramming concept for a commercial purpose as the human became a data transfer vessel. Voluntary erasure of memory is further explored as themes of the films Paycheck and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In Dark City, human memory and the fabric of reality itself is reprogrammed wholesale. Serial Experiments Lain also explores the idea of reprogrammable reality and memory.

The idea that a human could be entirely represented as a program in a computer was a core element of the film Tron. This would be further explored in The Lawnmower Man, and the idea reversed in Virtuosity as a computer program sought to become a real person. In the Matrix series, the virtual reality world became a real world prison for humanity, managed by intelligent machines. In eXistenZ, the nature of reality and virtual reality become intermixed with no clear distinguishing boundary. Likewise The Cell intermixed dreams and virtual reality, creating a fantasy realm with no boundaries.

Time travel
The concept of time travel, or travelling backwards and forwards through time, has always been a popular staple of science fiction film, as well as in various sci-fi television series. This usually involves the use of some type of advanced technology, such as H. G. Wells' classic The Time Machine, or the Back to the Future trilogy. Other movies have employed Special Relativity to explain travel far into the future, including the Planet of the Apes series.

More conventional time travel movies use technology to bring the past to life in the present (or a present that lies in our future). The movie Iceman (1984) dealt with the reanimation of a frozen Neanderthal (smiliair to the 1950 Christopher Lee film Horror Express), a concept later spoofed in the comedy Encino Man (1992). The Jurassic Park series portrayed cloned life forms grown from DNA ingested by insects that were frozen in amber. The movie Freejack (1992) has victims of horrible deaths being pulled forward in time just a split-second before their demise, and then used for spare body parts.

A common theme in time travel movies is dealing with the paradoxical nature of travelling to the past. The movie 12 Monkeys (1995) has a self-fulfilling quality as the main character as a child witnesses the death of his future self. In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) the main character jumps backwards and forwards across his life, and ultimately accepts the inevitability of his final fate.

The Back to the Future series goes one step further and explores the result of altering the past, while in Star Trek: First Contact (1996) the crew must rescue the Earth from having its past altered by time-travelling aliens. The Terminator series employs self-aware machines instead of aliens, which travel to the past in order to gain victory in a future war.

Film versus literature
When compared to literary works, such films are an expression of the genre that often rely less on the human imagination and more upon the visual uniqueness and fanciful imagery provided through special effects and the creativity of artists. The special effect has long been a staple of science fiction films, and, especially since the 1960s and 1970s, the audience has come to expect a high standard of visual rendition in the product. A substantial portion of the budget allocated to a sci-fi film can be spent on special effects, and not a few rely almost exclusively on these effects to draw an audience to the theater (rather than employing a substantial plot and engaging drama).

Science fiction literature often relies upon story development, reader knowledge, and the portrayal of elements that are not readily displayed in the film medium. In contrast, science fiction films usually must depend on action and suspense to entertain the audience, thus favoring battle scenes and threatening creatures over the more subtle plot elements of a drama, for example. There are, of course, exceptions to this trend, and some of the most critically-acclaimed sci-fi movies have relied primarily on a well-developed story and unusual ideas, instead of physical conflict and peril. Nevertheless, few science fiction books have been made into movies, and even fewer successfully.

Science fiction as social commentary
This film genre has long served as a vehicle for thinly-disguised and often thoughtful social commentary. Presentation of issues that are difficult or disturbing for an audience can be made more acceptable when they are explored in a future setting or on a different, earth-like world. The altered context can allow for deeper examination and reflection of the ideas presented, with the perspective of a viewer watching remote events.

The type of commentary presented in a science fiction film often an illustrated the particular concerns of the period in which they were produced. Early sci-fi films expressed fears about automation replacing workers and the dehumanization of society through science and technology. Later films explored the fears of environmental catastrophe or technology-created disasters, and how they would impact society and individuals.

The monster movies of the 1950s served as stand-ins for fears of nuclear war, communism and views on the cold war. In the 1970s, science fiction films also became an effective way of satirizing contemporary social mores with Silent Running and Dark Star presenting hippies in space as a reposte to the militaristic types that had dominated earlier films, A Clockwork Orange presenting a horrific vision of youth culture, Logan's Run depicting a futuristic swingers society and The Stepford Wives anticipating a reaction to the women's liberation movement.

Enemy Mine demonstrated that the foes we have come to hate are often just like us, even if they appear alien. Movies like 2001, Jurassic Park, Blade Runner, and Tron examined the dangers of advanced technology, while RoboCop, 1984, and the Star Wars films illustrate the dangers of extreme political control. Both Planet of the Apes and Stepford Wives commented on the politics and culture of contemporary society.

Influence of classic sci-fi authors
Jules Verne was the first major science fiction author to be adapted for the screen with Melies Voyage Dans La Lune of 1902 and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea of 1907 but these only use Verne's basic scenarios as a framework for fantastic visuals. By the time Verne's work fell out of copyright in 1950 the adaptations were treated as period pieces. His works have been treated in a number of film releases since then, including 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in 1954, From the Earth to the Moon in 1958, and Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1959.

H. G. Wells has had better success with The Invisible Man, Things to Come and The Island of Doctor Moreau all being adapted during his lifetime with good results while War of the Worlds was updated in 1953 and another update has been released in 2005. The Time Machine has had two film versions (1961 and 2002) while Sleeper in part is a pastiche of Wells' 'The Sleeper Awakes'.

With the drop off in interest in science fiction films in 1940s and 1950s few of the 'golden age' sci-fi authors made it to the screen. A novella by John W. Campbell provided the basis for The Thing From Another World. Robert A. Heinlein contributed to the screenplay for Destination Moon (1950), but it was not until The Puppet Masters (1994) and Starship Troopers (1997) that one of his major works was adapted and L. Ron Hubbard had to wait to 2000 for the disastrous flop Battlefield Earth. Isaac Asimov can rightly be cited as an influence on the Star Wars and Star Trek films but it was not until 2004 that a version of I, Robot made it to film.

The most successful adaptation of a sci-fi author was Arthur C. Clarke with 2001 and its sequel. Reflecting the times, two earlier science fiction works by Ray Bradbury were adapted for cinema in the 1960s with Fahrenheit 451 and the Illustrated Man. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter-house Five was filmed in 1971 and Breakfast of Champions was filmed in 1998.

More recently Phillip K. Dick has become the most influential of sci-fi authors on science fiction film. His work manages to evoke the paranoia that has been a central feature of the genre without invoking alien influences. Films based on Dick's works include Blade Runner (1982), Total Recall (1990), Minority Report (2002), and Paycheck (2003). These film versions are often only loose adaptations of the original story, being converted into an action-adventure film in the process.