GEORGES MLIS b Paris France December d January
Famed for his elaborately staged fantasy films and whimsical trick films, Georges M li s has often been described as the antithesis of the Lumi re brothers, his fictional flights of fancy viewed as the inverse of their slice-of-life actualites. Nonetheless, one can overstate M li s's contribution to the development of film narrative for example, his famed substitution splice'' operates according to the logic of trickery rather than continuity and demonstrates how his early career as a magician...
MARLENE DIETRICH b Maria Magdalene von Losch Berlin Germany December d May
Appearing in over a dozen films by such renowned directors of the day as Maurice Tourneur, Curtis Bernhardt, and Alexander Korda, Marlene Dietrich achieved international stardom when, as the dance-hall girl Lola Lola, she stole Der Blaue Engel The Blue Angel, 1930 from star Emil Jannings. In the film's final scene she scans the cabaret audience with a knowing smile and a provocative stance that established the outline of the iconic star she was to play all her life. In 1930 she followed Josef...
JAMES CAGNEY b James Francis Cagney Yonkers New York July d March
The toughest, most likable, and most endlessly imitated of all American film gangsters, Cagney was a paradoxical figure. His screen persona was a diamond in the rough, but he was also gifted at farce Boy Meets Girl, 1938 , physical comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1935 , and song and dance, winning an Academy Award for his role as George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy 1942 . Cagney's ruthless gangsters Tom Powers in The Public Enemy 1931 , Eddie Bartlett in The Roaring Twenties 1939 , and...
b Eleanora Derenkowsky Kiev Russia April d October
One of the most important women in American experimental cinema, Maya Deren emigrated with her parents in 1922 to the United States, where Eleanora developed a keen interest in the arts that launched her into a varied early career, including a stint touring with Katherine Dunham's dance company. In 1941, while with the company in Los Angeles, she met and married filmmaker Alexander Hammid. In 1943 Deren adopted the first name Maya Hindu for illusion and made Meshes of the Afternoon, a...
SERGEI EISENSTEIN b Riga Russian Empire now Latvia January d February
Sergei Eisenstein is a wholly unique figure in cinema history. He was a filmmaker and a theoretician of cinema who made films and wrote voluminously about their structure and the nature of cinema. Both his filmmaking and his writing which fills several volumes have been tremendously influential. Frustrated by the creative limitations of his work in the theater, Eisenstein turned to cinema and in 1925 completed his first feature, Stachka Strike , which depicted the plight of oppressed workers....
Experimental Film
Experimental films are very different from feature-length Hollywood fiction films. In Mothlight 1963 , Stan Brakhage 1933-2003 completely avoids normal filmmaking he doesn't even use a camera by sprinkling seeds, grass, dead moths, and bee parts directly onto the film stock the result is a three-minute rhythmic dance between nature and the projector mechanism. There are many types of experimental film, but despite their diversity, it is possible to pin down tendencies that help make...
National Identity And Dialectical Cinema
Many notable fiction films, too, were completed during the exciting first decade under the ICAIC, forming the basis for a ''Nuevo Cine Cubano,'' or ''New Cuban Cinema.'' Among these were Alea's La Muerte de un bur crata Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966 and Memorias del subdesarrollo Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968 . Death ofa Bureaucrat firmly established the Cuban audience's penchant for social satire. Outsiders are often surprised to see the extent to which state-sponsored films such as Death...
ANDREW SARRIS b New York New York October
Eminently sensible and perennially graceful in the articulation of his views, Andrew Sarris has been one of the most important of American film critics. His influence upon the shaping of the late-twentieth-century critical landscape is inestimable both for his hand in developing an intellectually rigorous academic film culture and for bringing the proselytizing auteur theory to popular attention. The acumen and resolve of his writing set a benchmark for the scrupulous and cogent close analysis...
MARCUS LOEW b New York New York May d September
Marcus Loew, the creator of MGM and one of the most successful figures in the motion picture industry during the silent era, was, first and foremost, an exhibitor. I don't sell tickets to movies,'' he is said to have declared, I sell tickets to theaters.'' Born to immigrant parents on New York's Lower East Side, Loew moved into commercial entertainment after working in the garment industry. In 1904, he co-founded the People's Vaudeville Company, which soon expanded its holdings to include...
b Denis Abramovich Kaufman Bialystok Poland January d February
Dziga Vertov was instrumental in using the cinema for the purposes of social education after the Russian Revolution. He not only chronicled the revolution as it happened, but approached the production of newsreels in terms of interaction with the proletariat. His brother Mikhail also became an important documentary filmmaker, while a third brother, Boris, became an important cinematographer for Jean Vigo and others. At the outbreak of World War I, the Kaufmans, an educated Jewish family, moved...
Das Kabinett Des Dr. Caligari
One of the most famous German film actors, Emil Jannings is the one most closely associated with German expressionist acting, although he was never connected to expressionist theater. He became a household name in Hollywood in the late 1920s, and was a key figure in the Nazi cinema. Jannings's breakthrough role was in Ernst Lubitsch's Madame Dubarry 1919 , in which he played Pola Negri's doomed lover, Louis XV. Overweight and hardly an image of beauty, Jannings nevertheless conveyed a strong...
WONG KAR WEI b Shanghai China
Among the Hong Kong New Wave filmmakers, Wong Kar Wei is perhaps the most celebrated by critics. He is a winner of many awards, including a best director award at the Cannes Film Festival for Chun guang zha xie Happy Together, 1997 . Wong's films are usually narrated by characters' internal monologues, which creates a seemingly haphazard, fragmented postmodern style. They reflect modern living, urban alienation, lost opportunities, transient love relationships, and acute melancholy. At the age...
German Expressionism
According to Rudolf Kurtz 1884-1960 , one of the earliest historical commentators on the movement called expressionism, the semantic instability of Expressionismus was already inherent in its first usage by a group of visual artists in imperial Germany prior to World War I. Those painters, associated with the German modern art groups Der blaue Reiter ''the Blue Rider,'' Munich and Die Brucke ''the Bridge,'' Berlin Dresden , coined the term in opposition to French impressionism, rejecting the...
Hong Kong Newwave
The Hong Kong New Wave burst onto the international film scene in 1979. During the late 1970s the film industry in Hong Kong suffered a serious decline in audience numbers, largely due to the popularization of television. Most studios were desperate to find solutions Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wei's international hit, Hua yang nain hua In the Mood for Love, 2000 . everett collection. reproduced by permission. Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in Wong Kar Wei's international hit, Hua...
Conclusion
The historical film emerged as a strong genre form very early in cinema history and has renewed itself many times over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Although the world of the past is its subject, the genre is often in the vanguard in terms of visual style and cinematic technique. The dramatic, compelling portraits of the past that are brought to life in the historical film have made it one of the most prestigious as well as one of the most controversial genres...
b Steven Jay Rechnitz Brooklyn New York September d December
Regarded in the industry as a consummate deal maker, Steven J. Ross's greatest coup was orchestrating the merger of his company Warner Communications with Time, Inc., in 1989 to create Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment company. Anticipating the need to strengthen Warner Communications' distribution capabilities as Hollywood entered an era of globalization, Ross brokered a 14 billion deal that combined his company's record labels, book division, cable television systems,...
STANLEY KUBRICK b New York New York July d March
Renowned for the icy, near-clinical elegance with which he represents human folly, obsession, and perversion, Stanley Kubrick produced thirteen feature films spanning most of the major genres, many of which are regarded as canonical. His work exhibits a near-metaphysical preoccupation with geometrical design that often finds expression within narrative situations featuring passionate characters who flail and crash against the boundaries of a rigorously formal ized world. With little patience...
Dubbing And Subtitling
Dubbing and subtitling are two major types of screen translation, the two most used in the global distribution and consumption of filmic media. Since their arrival with the introduction of sound to cinema, both have been seen as compromised methods of translating dialogue because they interfere in different ways with the original text, sound track, or image. Since the early 1930s, most countries have tended to favor either one mode or the other. While there are many forms of language versioning...
The Special Period And After
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba entered what was termed the ''Special Period,'' characterized by economic hardship, shortages, and a crisis of identity as Cuba's economic and political future was called into question. One of the outstanding films of 1991, the highly controversial black comedy Alicia en el Pueblo de Maravillas Alice in Wondertown by Daniel Diaz Torres b. 1948 , explored the tensions of the period using a surrealistic fantasy world as a backdrop, and taking the Cuban...
Pressing Issues For Hollywood Unions And Guilds
Some of the biggest headaches facing Hollywood unions and guilds are the proliferation of nonunion production, the relocation of production sites all over the country and the world runaway production , and the growing strength of the entertainment conglomerates that own the Hollywood majors. The issue of nonunion production begins in the film capital itself. While film and television production around Los Angeles seems to ebb and flow depending upon a number of different factors, there has been...
THE s
The 1960s deserves its own subsection primarily because of Andy Warhol, who began making 16mm long-take, quotidian extravaganzas in 1963, and whose popularity throughout the decade brought visibility to experimental films as a whole. In addition, the rise of a leftist counterculture during the decade and the increased distribution of nonmainstream movies led to an exponential increase in the number of artists who made avant-garde films during this time. Among the most important filmmakers of...
RUDOLPH VALENTINO b Rodolpho Alfonzo Raffaelo Pierre Filibert Gugliemi di
In his short career as a leading man, Rudolph Valentino was one of the great idols of the silent era and also one of its most controversial, splitting the audience along gender lines between women who adored him and men who loathed him. After stints of begging, dishwashing, and taxi dancing, Valentino went to Hollywood, where he got his big break in 1921 when he was cast as the lead in Rex Ingram's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the box-office hit that made him a star. At screenings of The...
Classical Exploitation Movies
From the late teens through the late 1950s classical exploitation films operated in the shadow of the classical Hollywood cinema. The men that made and distributed exploitation films were sometimes called the Forty Thieves,'' and several came from carnival backgrounds. Some companies were fly-by-night outfits that produced a film or two and then disappeared. However, many individuals and companies were around for years Samuel Cummins 1895-1967 operated as Public Welfare Pictures and Jewel...
GIORGIO ARMANI b Piacenza Italy July
The Italian designer Giorgio Armani, known for his classic designs, neutral tones, and unstructured suits, has made a significant intervention into film history. Armani is arguably best known for the Hollywood stars he has dressed for the Academy Awards for example, Jodie Foster and Michelle Pfeiffer . However, his costumes for Richard Gere's character Julian in American Gigolo 1980 helped to alter the way in which mainstream cinema perceived and represented masculinity. The most cited scene in...
Promotion
Early promotional efforts included colorful posters and banners that added to the already striking effect of what by the mid-1910s had become a standard feature of the movie theater, the electrically illuminated marquee, which announced the current show. To complement newspaper advertising, exhibitors relied on a range of ballyhoo, all designed to attract attention to the program and, more generally, to the theater itself trucks with promotional displays, billboards, signs on streetcars, poster...
Hollywood Today
The rise of New Queer Cinema did not go unnoticed by Hollywood, and they briefly tried unsuccessfully to market a few films that explored more open parameters of sexuality, such as Three of Hearts 1993 and Threesome 1994 . For the most part, when dealing with queer characters which it still rarely does , Hollywood still prefers its previously succesful formulas and comfortable stereotypes. Queer gender-bending traits are still used to signify villainy even in Disney films like The Lion King...
The Contemporary Scene
According to many critics, the experimental film world went through a period of flagging energy and diminished creativity during the 1980s. Among the reasons, according to Paul Arthur, were the skyrocketing costs of 16mm processing, cutbacks in government and private-foundation funding, and the economic and aesthetic challenges posed by video. By the 1990s, however, it was clear that the movement had undergone a resurgence. Older figures such as Brakhage, Mekas, and Jacobs remained active, and...
The Sound Film
Gustav Machaty 1901-1963 was the most ambitious art director of the period, and attracted attention with his Expressionist-influenced adaptation of Tolstoy's Kreutzerova sonata The Kreutzer Sonata, 1926 . He enjoyed a big success with Erotikon 1929 , which was consolidated by his first two sound films, Ze soboty na nedSeli From Saturday to Sunday, 1931 and, especially, Extase Ecstasy, 1932 , winner of the Best Direction Prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1934, which introduced Hedy Kiesler...
FRED ASTAIRE and GINGER ROGERS Fred Astaire b Frederick Austerlitz Omaha
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers epitomized exhibition ballroom dance in film and beyond. Both dancers had stage careers before their first film pairing. Astaire and his sister Adele began in vaudeville as children, reaching Broadway as specialty dancers in Over the Top 1917 . Their reputations grew in New York and London with roles in the Gerhswins' Lady, Be Good 1925 and Funny Face 1927 , The Bandwagon 1931 , and many other musicals and revues. Adele retired in 1932. Rogers reached Broadway via...
New Queer Cinema
The production of foreign, experimental, and documentary films that centered on queer issues eventually helped spark the production of gay and lesbian independent feature film production in America. The first batch of these films, including Buddies 1985 , Parting Glances 1986 , and Desert Hearts 1985 , used realistic storytelling conventions to explore coming out, romance, and AIDS. Then, in 1991, a new crop of gay and lesbian films made waves at several international festivals. These films...
B Movies And Trash
Perhaps the first movies to develop cult followings were B movies those quickly made, cheaply produced films that had their heyday in Hollywood's ''Golden Age.'' B movies began to proliferate in the mid-1930s, when distributors felt that ''double features'' might stand a chance of luring increasingly frugal Depression audiences back to the theaters. Their strategy worked audiences of devoted moviegoers thrilled to cheap B movie fare like The Mummy's Hand 1940 , The Face Behind the Mask 1941 ,...
MICHAEL POWELL and EMERIC PRESSBURGER Michael Powell b Bekesbourne Kent England
As Britain's most famous producing-directing team, Powell and Pressburger divided critical opinion between those who demanded social realism within cinema and those who supported an auteurist vision. With the rise of auteur theory in journals such as the UK-based Movie, the work of Powell and Pressburger received a more positive critical reevaluation. At the box office, the duo's fantastical, mystical tales enjoyed great success. A pair of propaganda films, 49th Parallel 1941 and One of Our...
TODD HAYNES b Los Angeles California January
One of the most successful writer-directors of the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes was raised in California and studied semiotics and other aspects of cultural theory at Brown University, where he began to make short films. Haynes's work, like most New Queer Cinema, explores the cinematic representation of queer desires by foregrounding both history and film form. The first Haynes film to garner widespread attention was Superstar The Karen Carpenter Story 1987 , a 45-minute biopic that explored...
Three Types Of Experimental Film
In the late 1960s experimental film headed in a new aesthetic direction. In an article published in Film Culture in 1969, critic P. Adams Sitney defined the structuralist film as a ''tight nexus of content, a shape designed to explore the facets of the material'' Film Culture Reader, p. 327 , which becomes clear when these films are compared with previous avant-garde traditions. In the films of lyricists such as Brakhage and Baillie, rhythm is dependent on what is being photographed, or on the...
The Silent Era 1
An estimated 460 films were made in Hungary during the silent period, almost all considered lost. Recent rediscoveries and restorations, however, have brought a few representative works to light. Hungarian film exhibition began with screenings of films by Louis Lumi re and Georges M li s in Budapest cafes. The Urania Scientific Society is credited with the first Hungarian-made film, A Tancz The Dance , in 1901. The National Association of Hungarian Cinematographers had been formed by 1909, and...
John Grierson And The Documentary Movement
Parallel to the developments in feature filmmaking, another influential response to American dominance of British cinema emerged. The British documentary movement, led by the Scot, John Grierson 1898-1972 , offered a distinctive riposte to Hollywood by focusing on fact and public information. While studying in the United States under a Rockefeller fellowship from 1923 to 1927, Grierson developed his interest in mass communication, in which he perceived the potential to educate the public and...
ROGER CORMAN b Roger William Corman Detroit Michigan April
Roger Corman has been a major force in exploitation filmmaking for half a century. His career spans an era from the earliest days of American International Pictures AIP in the mid-1950s through the exploitation golden age to the rise of home video. While in his teens Corman moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he developed an interest in the motion picture industry. Following a stint in the Navy, he completed his engineering degree at Stanford, then broke into the film business by...
Gauge And Speed
Film stock is available in a number of gauges, or widths. Wider gauges project a sharper image, while smaller gauges tend to be grainier. A number of experimental widths have been used in filmmaking throughout the history of cinema, but the most common gauges still in use today are 35 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm, Super 8 mm, and 70 mm. Thirty-five mm, the gauge used in Edison's Kinetograph, quickly became the common width for filmmakers around the world. The Lumi re Brothers Auguste 1862-1954 and Louis...
The Metahistorical Film
Certain films can be called metahistorical because they offer embedded or explicit critiques of the way history is conventionally represented. Courage Under Fire, for example, employs multiple flashbacks from different points of view to piece together a disputed account of a female air force officer's death. Walker Alex Cox, 1987 brings present-day objects from consumer culture into its collage-like narrative of the nineteenth-century adventurer William Walker, who declared himself emperor of...
Recent Holocaust Films
With all the controversy surrounding Holocaust dramas, it is no wonder that a Holocaust comedy whose second half is set in a concentration camp, Roberto Benigni's b. 1952 La Vita e bella Life is Beautiful, 1997 , evoked bitter criticism. The film has been likened to the satire in Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator 1940 , although the context through which Chaplin's deflation of Hitler earned its acclaim differs. A scene early in the film in which the hero, Guido Benigni , comically disrupts a...
Observational Documentary
Inspired by the powerful immediacy of actual combat footage and the emergence of Italian neorealism toward the end of the war, Hollywood feature films began absorbing the influence of documentary. Both The Naked City Jules Dassin, 1948 and On the Waterfront Elia Kazan, 1954 , for example, used actual locations in New York City to enhance their dramatic realism, and independent filmmakers such as Morris Engel 19182005 with Little Fugitive 1953 and Weddings and Babies 1958 , and John Cassavetes,...
The Classical Hollywood Baseline
Classical and pre-classical Hollywood films those produced between the 1910s and the 1950s had little interest in dramatizing homosexual lives or homosexual issues. The very structure of Hollywood narrative form was and is heterosexist it almost always contains a male-female romance, regardless of story line or genre. If and when homosexual characters appeared in Hollywood films prior to the sexual revolution, they were almost always relegated to walk-on parts or small supporting roles. One...
MIKLOS JANCSO b Vacs Hungary September
Jancso grew up in the Hungarian countryside and developed there an interest in folk art that exercised a strong influence on his films. He studied law and ethnography at the University of Kolozsvar and, after a period as a Soviet prisoner-of-war toward the end of World War II, he graduated from the Academy of Theater and Film Art in 1950. His earliest films were documentaries that conformed to the official requirements of the period, and this was also largely true of his first two features....
b Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe Bielefeld Germany December d March
Murnau took his professional name from a town in southern Bavaria favored by noted artists in the early part of the twentieth century. He earned a reputation as a creative genius who contributed to the German film industry's international ascendancy, but also as a director unable to manage the shift to Hollywood and all that such a move entailed. After World War I, he became an apprentice to the theater director Max Reinhardt in Berlin. He directed his first film, Der Knabe in Blau The Boy in...
Expressionism
The term expressionism has been abused by previous generations of film scholars to such a point that the word has become virtually meaningless. Expressionism in its most narrowly defined meaning has referred to a specific group of six or seven modernist art films produced in Weimar Germany between 1920 and 1924, while in its broadest sense it has been utilized as a catchall term to define any film or style in the history of cinema opposed to realism or attempting to convey strong emotions....
Midnight Movies
Many films now considered ''cult movies'' came to achieve this status through repeat screenings at independent repertory cinemas, usually very late at night. Such films were cheaper for theaters to hire than current releases, often since their ownership had fallen into public domain. It became traditional, during the 1950s and 60s, to begin showing these films at midnight, when audience attendance was lower, and sensibilities often less discriminating. However, the first movie to be...
STAN BRAKHAGE b Kansas City Missouri January d March
The most prolific and influential experimental filmmaker in US film history, Stan Brakhage also wrote insightfully about his own films and the work of other filmmakers. The most oft-quoted passage in experimental film criticism is the opening of Brakhage's text Metaphors on Vision 1963 Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life...
Fandom As A Social Activity
Unlike the individual fan, whose peer group or colleagues may coincidentally include like-minded film lovers, organized fandom involves fans specifically seeking out those who share their tastes, thereby becoming involved in a range of social, cultural, and media activities that take this shared fandom as their starting point. Film fandom can involve participating in online discussion and posting to sites such as the Internet Movie Database imdb.com , joining film clubs or groups, or producing...
Wartime And Postwar Cinema
The Japanese bombed Shanghai in 1932, disrupting film production. By 1937 the film industry in China dispersed from Shanghai to Chungking the wartime capital and Hong Kong. Between 1933 and 1941 four hundred Cantonese films were made in Hong Kong, many with patriotic themes. When the Japanese occupied Hong Kong in 1941 production abruptly ceased, though the screening of films, mostly American, continued. By 1943 the occupying Japanese formed a coalition and began to make pro-Japan films without...