First Immense Achievement Of Documentary Film example essay topic

The Frenchman, Louis Lumiere is considered to be the founder of what is now considered by everyone to be as movie. He was one of the first who invented the motion picture camera in 1895. Though he had several competitors, like an American scientist Thomas Alva Edison, his suitcase-sized multifunctional device served as a camera, film-processing unit, and a projector all in one. Though Edison camera was bulky and not portable, it can be claimed that the history of American film started from his invention. During the first twenty years since the aforementioned devices by Lumiere and Edison were invented, mostly silent films, few minutes in length, were shot. In the early 1910's the silent film reached sufficient level of complexity, until in 1929 it was discovered that it was possible to record sound simultaneously with the recorded images, thus ending the silent era and starting a new one.

Charlie Chaplin can be referred to as the most famous actor of the silent era. His character Tramp amazed the spectators with his expressive physical moves that attracted large numbers of people to watch these films. The trademarks that Tramp could be recognized upon were his ill-fitting suit, floppy over-sized shoes and a bowler hat, and his ever-present cane. Einsteins role in the development of film industry was of vital importance. His contribution to the development of cinema was mainly in his theory of editing, or montage, which focused on the clash of opposites in order to create a new entity. One of the utmost achievements in editing is the Odessa Steps sequence, in his film Potemkin (1925).

Eisenstein intercut between shots of townspeople trapped on the steps by Czarist troops, and shots of the troops firing down upon the crowd. Those present in the crowd became individual characters to the spectators as the montage continued. Though the technology for shooting movies was invented in 1895, a noteworthy realization of the potential for film as art occurred with the appearance of D.W. Griffith's 1915 full-length film, Birth of a Nation. In this epic Griffith used crosscutting (parallel editing) effectively, particularly at the pinnacle, when a number of editing tracks play off one another. He also showed battle scenes brilliantly, with action in one set of shots moving from left to right, while the action in another set of shots moves from right to left.

The film Nanook of the North of 1922, shot by the American director Robert Flaherty, is usually credited as the first immense achievement of documentary (or non-fiction) film. Flaherty was living among the Eskimos for six months, edited the film back in America, and was lauded for his achievement when the film premiered in New York City. Not many documentary films could be compared to the Flaherty for several decades. In the first half of the century various film studios in America were established, many of which are still known worldwide and produce films of a high quality. Among them were such as 20th-Century Fox (1935), Paramount Pictures (1912), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1924), Columbia Pictures (1920), and Warner Brothers (1923). The studios had an immense power at that time.

They employed the actors who were recognized in any part of the world: Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney, Mary Pickford, W.C. Fields, Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Mae West, etc. A key source of income for the studios was their possession of large theater chains. But in 1949 the studios were required to deprive themselves of these theater empires because of their monopolistic tendencies. The foundation of television in the 1950's, the rise of the director as auteur, and the opportunity of actors to become "free agents" led to the demise of the old Studio System.

Since middle fifties the film industry was subject to the immense changes, which made it one of the most profitable industries in the world, having billions of dollars in profit. The aforementioned Hollywood studios, that already grew to giants, continue to produce numerous films that are aimed to entertain us.