"Movie" and "Moving picture" redirect here. For other uses, see
.
. Films are produced by
.
Films are
cultural artifacts created by specific
cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important
art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for
educating — or
indoctrinating — citizens.
The visual elements of cinema gives motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using
dubbing or
subtitles that
translate the dialogue.
Traditional films are made up of a series of individual images called frames. When these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring. The viewer cannot see the flickering between
frames due to an effect known as
persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Viewers perceive motion due to a psychological effect called
beta movement.
The origin of the name "film" comes from the fact that
photographic film (also called
film stock) had historically been the primary
medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, photo-play, flick, and most commonly, movie. Additional terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the cinema, and the movies.
Preceding film by thousands of years,
plays and
dances had elements common to film,
scripts,
sets,
costumes,
production,
direction,
actors,
audiences,
storyboards, and
scores. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism applied, such as
mise en scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Moving visual and aural images were not recorded for replaying as in film.
Near the year 1600, the
camera obscura was perfected by
della Porta. Light is inverted through a small hole or
lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a moving image, but it is not preserved in a recording.
In the 1860s, mechanisms for producing artificially created, two-dimensional images in motion were demonstrated with devices such as the
zoetrope and the
praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as
magic lanterns) and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving, a phenomenon called
persistence of vision. Naturally the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect, and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film
animation.
A frame from
Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest film, by
Louis Le Prince, 1888
With the development of
celluloid film for still
photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. Early versions of the technology sometimes required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Some of these machines were coin operated.
By the 1880s the development of the
motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single
reel, and led quickly to the development of a
motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience.
These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as "motion pictures". Early motion pictures were static
shots that showed an event or action with no
editing or other cinematic techniques.
Ignoring Dickson's early sound experiments (1894), commercial motion pictures were purely
visual art through the late 19th century, but these innovative
silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Around the turn of the twentieth century, films began developing a narrative structure by stringing
scenes together to tell
narratives.
The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were realized as effective ways to portray a story on film. Rather than leave the audience in silence, theater owners would hire a
pianist or
organist or a full
orchestra to play music fitting the mood of the film at any given moment.
By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete
film scores being composed for major productions.
A shot from
Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), an early narrative film.
In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a
soundtrack of speech, music and
sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These
sound films were initially distinguished by calling them "talking pictures", or talkies.
The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of so-called "natural"
color. While the addition of
sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color was adopted more gradually as methods evolved making it more practical and cost effective to produce "natural color" films.
The public was relatively indifferent to color photography as opposed to black-and-white,[
citation needed] but as color processes improved and became as affordable as
black-and-white film, more and more movies were filmed in color after the end of
World War II, as the industry in America came to view color as essential to attracting audiences in its competition with television, which remained a black-and-white medium until the mid-1960s. By the end of the 1960s, color had become the norm for film makers.
Since the decline of the
studio system in the 1960s, the succeeding decades saw changes in the production and style of film.
New Hollywood,
French New Wave and the rise of film school educated independent filmmakers were all part of the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology has been the driving force in change throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century.
