Film History
Film history traces the development of cinema as a technology, an art, an industry, and a global cultural form from its 1890s origins to the present, across national contexts and shifting modes of production.
Definition
The historical investigation of cinema's development, encompassing its technologies, styles, industries, institutions, and audiences across periods and nations.
Scope
This area covers the historical study of moving images: the invention and early years of cinema, the rise of narrative and the studio systems, national and avant-garde movements, postwar modernisms and new waves, and the technological and institutional transformations from sound and color through digital media. It attends to aesthetics, economics, technology, and reception, and to the historiographic methods used to reconstruct the past from films and archives.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How did cinema originate and become a narrative art and mass medium?
- How have modes of production, from studio systems to independents, shaped films?
- How did technological changes such as sound, color, and digital reshape cinema?
- What methods allow historians to reconstruct film's past from surviving evidence?
Key theories
- Cinema of attractions
- Gunning's account of early cinema as an exhibitionist medium of display and spectacle that solicited the viewer's attention directly, before narrative integration became dominant.
- Stylistic-technological history
- The approach, exemplified by Salt and by Bordwell and Thompson, that explains changes in film style through the interaction of available technology, economic conditions, and aesthetic norms.
History
Film historiography began as journalistic and biographical chronicle and matured after the 1970s into a rigorous academic discipline, with the 'New Film History' emphasizing archival research, economic analysis, and reception over a 'great works' canon. Periodization typically runs from the 1895 Lumière screenings through silent and classical sound eras, postwar new waves, the New Hollywood, and the contemporary global and digital landscape.
Debates
- Aesthetic canon versus social history
- Historians disagree over whether film history should center masterpieces and influential auteurs or instead reconstruct the everyday production, exhibition, and reception of ordinary films and audiences.
Key figures
- David Bordwell
- Kristin Thompson
- Tom Gunning
- Barry Salt
Related topics
Seminal works
- bordwellthompson2019hist
- cook2016
- gunning1986
Frequently asked questions
- When was cinema invented?
- Public projected motion pictures are usually dated to 1895, when the Lumière brothers held paid screenings in Paris, though Edison's Kinetoscope and other devices preceded projection in the early 1890s.
- What is the 'New Film History'?
- It is the post-1970s movement that grounded film history in archival sources, industrial and economic records, and the study of exhibition and audiences, moving beyond anecdote and the canon of great directors.