NATIONAL CINEMA

National Cinema

National Cinema

Introduction

This refers to the technologies and institutionalized practices through which films, and especially fictional narrative films, are produced, distributed, exhibited and consumed. Although techniques for producing the illusion of moving images have long been known, cinema as such only just predates the twentieth century. Thomas Edison took out patents on the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope in 1891, (Desai 2003 54) and it was in the mid-1890s that companies like Mutoscope in the USA and Lumière Brothers in France began to put on film shows for audiences in vaudeville theatres and other public spaces.

Discussion

In the early years of the new century, cinema began to emerge as a mass medium in the USA as storefront exhibition theatres - the nickelodeons - provided cheap entertainment for a proletarian, urban, and largely immigrant audience. In 1908, ten leading film producers and manufacturers of cameras and projectors formed a cartel, the Motion Picture Patents Company, to milk the young industry for profit by exploiting their patents on the technologies of cameras, printers and projectors. They succeeded in convincing bankers to invest in cinema, and in creating a nationwide distribution market. Nevertheless, they failed to withstand the challenge of independent producers who, far from the Trust's New York base, were making films around Los Angeles, especially in Hollywood (Robert 1999 99).

These producers, the architects of the studio system, exploited the advantages of the West Coast: cheap land, a temperate climate, varied landscapes for use as locations, and non-unionized labour. Rather than selling film by the metre, they offered for rent longer narratives featuring familiar fictional figures and then, increasingly, named star performers. They also gained control of film distribution domestically and - thanks to the devastation of the European industry by World War I - globally.

It was also during the second decade of the century that the norms of the classical Hollywood style were established. Techniques were developed to reproduce the conventions of character motivation and narrative development familiar from existing popular forms. Editing, lighting, the framing of shots and use of close-ups were all used to produce a coherent and plausible story for the spectator, an illusion of actions unfolding within a unified space over continuous time.

This style of film-making lent itself to industrial efficiency, with one producer overseeing the most economic deployment of labour, sets and equipment across several films simultaneously. This Taylorized system was little affected by the coming of recorded sound and dialogue in the late 1920s. By then, the five major Hollywood studios (Angela 2001 31) had achieved a remarkable degree of vertical integration across production, distribution and exhibition. This was only broken, partially at least, by the combined impact of antitrust legislation and the arrival of television after World War II. From then on, Hollywood has been in a state of economic flux.

To compete with Hollywood's global hegemony, other cinema industries have had either to ape its output or to offer alternative genres and styles. The Expressionism of directors like Fritz Lang, Georg Wilhelm Pabst and Friedrich Murnau ...