FILMMAKING

Filmmaking And Its Impact On Views Of History, Gender, Violence And Politics

Filmmaking And Its Impact On Views Of History, Gender, Violence And Politics

Introduction

Film and television are now finally regarded in academic circles as the defining arts of the twentieth century. However, it took time before scholars adopted the media as a legitimate area of study. In the earliest days when audiences flocked to the picture palaces the only publications to take notice were newspapers interested in the new technology and alarmed decency censors bemoaning the state of society. In time filmmakers stopped relying exclusively on vaudeville traditions and adaptations of literary works for their source material and began producing original works that took full advantage of the new medium of film. In the USA the early producers moved to California and began to develop the studio and star systems. As war dampened the once-thriving European film industries Hollywood prospered, pioneering sound, colour, and new genres. People attended the cinema in record numbers, and newspapers and magazines began to write reviews instead of relying on publicity from the studios.

Television had a later start, but followed a similar pattern. As the number of broadcasting companies and channels expanded and television became pervasive in households, newspapers and popular magazines were the first to take notice. Then scholars began to write articles, chapters and books about television. Because of the more ephemeral nature of broadcasting libraries and archives were slower to collect television shows. Film and television scholarship is now a mature field. Scholars use film and television to understand the world in which we live, looking at narrative, form, directing and acting techniques and the entire range of themes and genres. When academics are not asking their students to make films they are most likely asking them to examine a single film or filmmaker or to analyse a national cinema, genre, theme, movement, or time period in the context of one of these theoretical frameworks or approaches.

Impact of Films on History

By the late 1920s, the business of filmmaking also changed as it began to move into the structure that flourished during the 1930s and 1940s, wherein the bulk of films made were produced among a small number of large studios. Consolidations of companies increased from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s, with new corporations such as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Twentieth Century-Fox becoming powerful entities that outshined longer established studios such as Paramount and Universal. In addition to the corporate structure, the geography of motion picture production had also changed. While early filmmaking was centered in Eastern cities such as New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, by the early 1930s, commercial filmmaking was virtually non-existent on the East Coast with the center of the industry firmly rooted in southern California.

Undoubtedly the greatest change in motion picture production, though, was precipitated by the end of the silent era in the late 1920s. Although The Jazz Singer (1927) is popularly considered to be the first talking picture, it was only a partial "talkie" and was not the first ...