Topic: movie

A film – also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture or photoplay – is a work of visual art that
simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or
atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more
rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to
filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.

Recording and transmission of film

The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by
photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and
computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects.

Before the introduction of digital production, series of still images were recorded on a strip of chemically
sensitized celluloid (photographic film stock), usually at the rate of 24 frames per second. The images are
transmitted through a movie projector at the same rate as they were recorded, with a Geneva drive ensuring
that each frame remains still during its short projection time. A rotating shutter causes stroboscopic intervals of
darkness, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions due to flicker fusion. The apparent motion on the
screen is the result of the fact that the visual sense cannot discern the individual images at high speeds, so the
impressions of the images blend with the dark intervals and are thus linked together to produce the illusion of
one moving image. An analogous optical soundtrack (a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other
sounds) runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and was not projected.

Contemporary films are usually fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and
exhibition.

Etymology

The name "film" originally referred to the thin layer of photochemical emulsion on the celluloid strip that used
to be the actual medium for recording and displaying motion pictures.

Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture,
photoplay, and flick. The most common term in the United States is movie, while in Europe film is preferred.
Archaic terms include "animated pictures" and "animated photography".

Common terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the movies, and cinema; the
last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays. In early years, the
word sheet was sometimes used instead of screen.

History

Precursors

The art of film has drawn on several earlier traditions in fields such as oral storytelling, literature, theatre and
visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving and/or projected images include:

shadowgraphy, probably used since prehistoric times

camera obscura, a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times

shadow puppetry, possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India, Indonesia or China

The magic lantern, developed in the 1650s. The multi-media phantasmagoria shows that utilized magic lanterns
were popular from 1790 throughout the first half of the 19th century and could feature mechanical slides, rear
projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolving views, live actors, smoke (sometimes to project
images upon), odors, sounds and even electric shocks.

Before celluloid

The stroboscopic animation principle was introduced in 1833 with the stroboscopic disc (better known as the
phénakisticope) and later applied in the zoetrope (since 1866), the flip book (since 1868), and the praxinoscope
(since 1877), before it became the basic principle for cinematography.

Experiments with early phénakisticope-based animation projectors were made at least as early as 1843 and
publicly screened in 1847. Jules Duboscq marketed phénakisticope projection systems in France from circa
1853 until the 1890s.

Photography was introduced in 1839, but initially photographic emulsions needed such long exposures that the
recording of moving subjects seemed impossible. At least as early as 1844, photographic series of subjects
posed in different positions have been created to either suggest a motion sequence or to document a range of
different viewing angles. The advent of stereoscopic photography, with early experiments in the 1840s and
commercial success since the early 1850s, raised interest in completing the photographic medium with the
addition of means to capture colour and motion. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published about the idea to combine
his invention of the phénakisticope with the stereoscope, as suggested to him by stereoscope inventor Charles
Wheatstone, and to use photographs of plaster sculptures in different positions to be animated in the
combined device. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented such an instrument as the "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou
Bïoscope", but he only marketed it very briefly, without success. One Bïoscope disc with stereoscopic
photographs of a machine is in the Plateau collection of the Ghent University, but no instruments or other discs
have yet been found.

By the late 1850s the first examples of instantaneous photography came about and provided hope that motion
photography would soon be possible, but it took a few decades before it was successfully combined with a
method to record series of sequential images in real-time. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge eventually managed
to take a series of photographs of a running horse with a battery of cameras in a line along the track and
published the results as The Horse in Motion on cabinet cards. Muybridge, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey,
Ottomar Anschütz and many others would create many more chronophotography studies. Muybridge had the
contours of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with his
zoopraxiscope in his lectures from 1880 to 1895. Anschütz developed his own Electrotachyscope in 1887 to
project 24 diapositive photographic images on glass disks as moving images, looped as long as deemed
interesting for the audience.

Émile Reynaud already mentioned the possibility of projecting the images of the Praxinoscope in his 1877
patent application . He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société française de photographie on
4 June 1880, but did not market his praxinoscope a projection before 1882. He then further developed the
device into the Théâtre Optique which could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, patented in
1888. He created several movies for the machine by painting images on hundreds of gelatin plates that were
mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. From 28 October 1892 to March 1900 Reynaud
gave over 12,800 shows to a total of over 500,000 visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris.

First motion pictures

By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion
picture cameras, which could photograph a rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed action to be
captured and stored on a single compact reel of film.

Movies were initially shown publicly to one person at a time through "peep show" devices such as the
Electrotachyscope, Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope. Not much later, exhibitors managed to project films on
large screens for theatre audiences.
The first public screenings of films at which admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American
Woodville Latham and his sons, using films produced by their Eidoloscope company, and by the – arguably
better known – French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière with ten of their own productions. Private
screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the Lumière brothers'.

Early evolution

The earliest films were simply one static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic
techniques. Typical films showed employees leaving a factory gate, people walking in the street, the view from
the front of a trolly as it traveled a city’s Main Street. According to legend, when a film showed a locomotive at
high speed approaching the audience, the audience panicked and ran from the theater. Around the turn of the
20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. (The filmmakers who first put
several shots or scenes discovered that, when one shot follows another, that act establishes a relationship
between the content in the separate shots in the minds of the viewer. It this relationship that makes all film
storytelling possible. In a simple example, if a person is shown looking out a window, whatever the next shot
shows, it will be regarded as the view the person was seeing.) Each scene was a single stationary shot with the
action occurring before it. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different
distances and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a
story with film. Until sound film became commercially practical in the late 1920s, motion pictures were a purely
visual art, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Rather than leave
audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist
or, in large urban theaters, a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By
the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose, and complete
film scores were composed for major productions.

The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, while the film industry in the
United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood, typified most prominently by the innovative work of D. W.
Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). However, in the 1920s, European filmmakers
such as Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, in many ways inspired by the meteoric wartime progress of
film through Griffith, along with the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, quickly caught
up with American film-making and continued to further advance the medium.

Sound

In the 1920s, the development of electronic sound recording technologies made it practical to incorporate a
soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. The resulting sound
films were initially distinguished from the usual silent "moving pictures" or "movies" by calling them "talking
pictures" or "talkies." The revolution they wrought was swift. By 1930, silent film was practically extinct in the
US and already being referred to as "the old medium."
Color

Another major technological development was the introduction of "natural color," which meant color that was
photographically recorded from nature rather than added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-
coloring or other arbitrary procedures, although the earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far
from "natural" in appearance. While the advent of sound films quickly made silent films and theater musicians
obsolete, color replaced black-and-white much more gradually. The pivotal innovation was the introduction of
the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, first used for animated cartoons in 1932, then also for live-
action short films and isolated sequences in a few feature films, then for an entire feature film, Becky Sharp, in
1935. The expense of the process was daunting, but favorable public response in the form of increased box
office receipts usually justified the added cost. The number of films made in color slowly increased year after
year.

1950s: growing influence of television

In the early 1950s, the proliferation of black-and-white television started seriously depressing North American
theater attendance. In an attempt to lure audiences back into theaters, bigger screens were installed,
widescreen processes, polarized 3D projection, and stereophonic sound were introduced, and more films were
made in color, which soon became the rule rather than the exception. Some important mainstream Hollywood
films were still being made in black-and-white as late as the mid-1960s, but they marked the end of an era.
Color television receivers had been available in the US since the mid-1950s, but at first, they were very
expensive and few broadcasts were in color. During the 1960s, prices gradually came down, color broadcasts
became common, and sales boomed. The overwhelming public verdict in favor of color was clear. After the
final flurry of black-and-white films had been released in mid-decade, all Hollywood studio productions were
filmed in color, with the usual exceptions made only at the insistence of "star" filmmakers such as Peter
Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese.

1960s and later

The decades following the decline of the studio system in the 1960s saw changes in the production and style of
film. Various New Wave movements (including the French New Wave, Indian New Wave, Japanese New Wave,
New Hollywood, and Egyptian New Wave) and the rise of film-school-educated independent filmmakers
contributed to the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology
has been the driving force for change throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Digital 3D projection largely
replaced earlier problem-prone 3D film systems and has become popular in the early 2010s.

Film theory

"Film theory" seeks to develop concise and systematic concepts that apply to the study of film as art. The
concept of film as an art-form began in 1911 with Ricciotto Canudo's manifest The Birth of the Sixth Art. The
Moscow Film School, the oldest film school in the world, was founded in 1919, in order to teach about and
research film theory. Formalist film theory, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer,
emphasized how film differed from reality and thus could be considered a valid fine art. André Bazin reacted
against this theory by arguing that film's artistic essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, not
in its differences from reality, and this gave rise to realist theory. More recent analysis spurred by Jacques
Lacan's psychoanalysis and Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics among other things has given rise to
psychoanalytic film theory, structuralist film theory, feminist film theory, and others. On the other hand, critics
from the analytical philosophy tradition, influenced by Wittgenstein, try to clarify misconceptions used in
theoretical studies and produce analysis of a film's vocabulary and its link to a form of life.

Language

Film is considered to have its own language. James Monaco wrote a classic text on film theory, titled "How to
Read a Film," that addresses this. Director Ingmar Bergman famously said, "Andrei Tarkovsky for me is the
greatest director, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a
reflection, life as a dream." An example of the language is a sequence of back and forth images of one speaking
actor's left profile, followed by another speaking actor's right profile, then a repetition of this, which is a
language understood by the audience to indicate a conversation. This describes another theory of film, the
180-degree rule, as a visual story-telling device with an ability to place a viewer in a context of being
psychologically present through the use of visual composition and editing. The "Hollywood style" includes this
narrative theory, due to the overwhelming practice of the rule by movie studios based in Hollywood, California,
during film's classical era. Another example of cinematic language is having a shot that zooms in on the
forehead of an actor with an expression of silent reflection that cuts to a shot of a younger actor who vaguely
resembles the first actor, indicating that the first person is remembering a past self, an edit of compositions
that causes a time transition.

Montage

Montage is the technique by which separate pieces of film are selected, edited, and then pieced together to
make a new section of film. A scene could show a man going into battle, with flashbacks to his youth and to his
home-life and with added special effects, placed into the film after filming is complete. As these were all filmed
separately, and perhaps with different actors, the final version is called a montage. Directors developed a
theory of montage, beginning with Eisenstein and the complex juxtaposition of images in his film Battleship
Potemkin. Incorporation of musical and visual counterpoint, and scene development through mise en scene,
editing, and effects has led to more complex techniques comparable to those used in opera and ballet.

Film criticism

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films. In general, these works can be divided into two categories:
academic criticism by film scholars and journalistic film criticism that appears regularly in newspapers and
other media. Film critics working for newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media mainly review new releases.
Normally they only see any given film once and have only a day or two to formulate their opinions. Despite
this, critics have an important impact on the audience response and attendance at films, especially those of
certain genres. Mass marketed action, horror, and comedy films tend not to be greatly affected by a critic's
overall judgment of a film. The plot summary and description of a film and the assessment of the director's and
screenwriters' work that makes up the majority of most film reviews can still have an important impact on
whether people decide to see a film. For prestige films such as most dramas and art films, the influence of
reviews is important. Poor reviews from leading critics at major papers and magazines will often reduce
audience interest and attendance.

The impact of a reviewer on a given film's box office performance is a matter of debate. Some observers claim
that movie marketing in the 2000s is so intense, well-coordinated and well financed that reviewers cannot
prevent a poorly written or filmed blockbuster from attaining market success. However, the cataclysmic failure
of some heavily promoted films which were harshly reviewed, as well as the unexpected success of critically
praised independent films indicates that extreme critical reactions can have considerable influence. Other
observers note that positive film reviews have been shown to spark interest in little-known films. Conversely,
there have been several films in which film companies have so little confidence that they refuse to give
reviewers an advanced viewing to avoid widespread panning of the film. However, this usually backfires, as
reviewers are wise to the tactic and warn the public that the film may not be worth seeing and the films often
do poorly as a result. Journalist film critics are sometimes called film reviewers. Critics who take a more
academic approach to films, through publishing in film journals and writing books about films using film theory
or film studies approaches, study how film and filming techniques work, and what effect they have on people.
Rather than having their reviews published in newspapers or appearing on television, their articles are
published in scholarly journals or up-market magazines. They also tend to be affiliated with colleges or
universities as professors or instructors.