A Guide to the Basic Film Genres and How to Use Them
He began, however, getting more involved in live action films, producing classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), and Old Yeller (1957). Television began competing seriously with films projected in theatres, but surprisingly it promoted more filmgoing rather than curtailing it. Kinemacolor, the first commercially successful cinematographic colour process, produced films in two colours (red and cyan) from 1908 to 1914. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be standardized).
Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). During 1995, the first feature-length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, computer animation would grow to become the dominant technique for feature-length animation, which would allow competing film companies such as DreamWorks, 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros. to effectively compete with Disney with successful films of their own. During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. The terminology used for describing motion pictures varies considerably between British and American English. The word “movie” is understood but seldom used.[34][35] Additionally, “the pictures” (plural) is used semi-frequently to refer to the place where movies are exhibited, while in American English this may be called “the movies”, but it is becoming outdated.
We’ll get to dadaist film in a short bit, but first, let’s review a quick video on Dada art from Curious Muse. There has been an increasing globalization of cinema during this decade, with foreign-language films gaining popularity in English-speaking markets. Examples of such films include Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin), Amélie (French), Lagaan (Hindi), Spirited Away (Japanese), City of God (Brazilian Portuguese), The Passion of the Christ (Aramaic), Apocalypto (Mayan) and Inglourious Basterds (multiple European languages). Italy is the most awarded country at the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with 14 awards won, 3 Special Awards and 31 nominations. In Japanese cinema, Academy Award-winning director Akira Kurosawa produced Yojimbo (1961), which like his previous films also had a profound influence around the world. The influence of this film is most apparent in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing (1996).
Later in the decade, The Dark Knight was the first major feature film to have been at least partially shot in IMAX technology. Since the late 2000s streaming media platforms like YouTube provided means for anyone with access to internet and cameras (a standard feature of smartphones) to publish videos to the world. Also competing with the increasing popularity of video games and other forms of home entertainment, the industry once again started to make theatrical releases more attractive, with new 3D technologies and epic (fantasy and superhero) films becoming a mainstay in cinemas. During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was also threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some film theatres would bankrupt and close. The demise of the “studio system” spurred the self-commentary of films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Technicolor’s natural three-strip colour process was very successfully introduced in 1932 with Walt Disney’s animated Academy Award-winning short “Flowers and Trees”, directed by Burt Gillett.
Teasers are used to get patrons excited about a film coming out in the next six to twelve months. One of the earliest film genres, the action genre, has close ties to classic strife and struggle narratives that you find across all manner of art and literature. With some of the earliest examples dating back to everything from historical war epics to some basic portrayals of dastardly train robberies, action films have been popular with cinema audiences since the very beginning. Motion pictures have enticed and inspired artists, audiences, and critics for more than a century. Today, we’re going to explore the history of film by looking at the major movements that have defined cinema worldwide. We’re also going to explore the technical craft of filmmaking from the persistence of vision to colorization to synchronous sound.
- Perhaps no German Expressionist film proves this point better than Fritz Lang’s M; which was the ultimate culmination of the movement’s stylistic tenets.
- There is also the concrete nature of film; it appears to show actual people and things.
- 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.
- Through the camera obscura, we can trace the principles of filmmaking back thousands of years.
- Typical films showed employees leaving a factory gate, people walking in the street, and the view from the front of a trolley as it traveled a city’s Main Street.
It’s up to you to not just consume, but also strive to understand what other movies are doing. Then, apply your own research and inclinations toward the genres you choose to work with in your projects. If the martial arts http://newsmartadmin.com/ genre captures our fascination with combat, then the sports film captures our fascination with competition. We love a good underdog story, and the best sports films take us on a journey that charts a winner’s unlikely beginnings through the tremendous challenges they must overcome to become the best. Viewers will watch competitions of all kinds, from championship football matches to hot dog eating contests to how long people can stand and maintain contact with an automobile.
The film went on to become the most successful martial arts film in cinematic history, popularized the martial arts film genre across the world, and cemented Bruce Lee’s status as a cultural icon. Hong Kong action cinema, however, was in decline due to a wave of “Bruceploitation” films. This trend eventually came to an end in 1978 with the martial arts comedy films, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow and Drunken Master, directed by Yuen Woo-ping and starring Jackie Chan, laying the foundations for the rise of Hong Kong action cinema in the 1980s. In 1950, the Lettrists avante-gardists caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou’s Treatise on Slime and Eternity was screened.
Many of Guy’s early dance films were popular in music-hall attractions such as the serpentine dance films – also a staple of the Lumières and Thomas Edison film catalogs.[54] In 1906, she made The Life of Christ, a big-budget production for the time, which included 300 extras. In 1833, scientific study of a stroboscopic illusion in spoked wheels by Joseph Plateau, Michael Faraday and Simon Stampfer led to the invention of the Fantascope, also known as the stroboscopic disk or the phenakistiscope, which was popular in several European countries for a while. Plateau thought it could be further developed for use in phantasmagoria and Stampfer imagined a system for longer scenes with strips on rollers, as well as a transparent version (probably intended for projection). A few people managed to get decent results from stop motion techniques, but these were only very rarely marketed and no form of animated photography had much cultural impact before the advent of chronophotography. Conventions toward a general cinematic language also developed, with film editing camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films.
1946 saw RKO Radio releasing It’s a Wonderful Life directed by Italian-born filmmaker Frank Capra. Soldiers returning from the war would provide the inspiration for films like The Best Years of Our Lives, and many of those in the film industry had served in some capacity during the war. Samuel Fuller’s experiences in World War II would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One. The Actors Studio was founded in October 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, and the same year Oskar Fischinger filmed Motion Painting No. 1.
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. 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.
Surviving the deluge of special effects is the name of the game, and the budgets for these blockbusters are usually huge. For a full write-up on the history and development of science fiction films (and how to make one of your own), see our filmmaker’s guide to science fiction. While the horror genre is sometimes considered a younger film genre, elements of horror have long been a bedrock of classic cinema, dating back to some of the earliest—and eeriest—days of filmmaking. Over the following years, Méliès learned just about everything there was to know about movies and projection machines. Here’s a video on Méliès’ master of film and the illusory arts from Crash Course Film History.