first ever film biography

History Cooperative

First Movie Ever Made: The Early History of Film

With modern-day smartphone technology giving us the ability to make a high-quality movie almost instantly, it’s hard to believe there was a time before making a film was simple, cheap, and easy.

In fact, for many years, the most engaging motion pictures of the past were the stories told by your parents and grandparents and, later on, crackling audio scratched from a large vinyl disk and projected from a wooden box. Pretty primitive stuff.

But this all changed thanks to the work of one man: Eadweard Muybridge.

His experimentations and endeavors, often funded by generous benefactors, reshaped the possibilities of society and paved the way for what we now consider staples of modern life: easily accessible and digestible visual content.

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The First Movie Ever Made and Its Release Date

The first movie ever made was an 11-frame clip shot on June 19th, 1878 , using twelve separate cameras ( frame 12 was not used ) to film a man riding a horse on Leland Stanford’s (the founder of Stanford University) Palo Alto Stock Farm (the eventual site of Stanford University).

Not exactly the high-action, special effects-driven, Braveheart-style, Hollywood blockbusters that grace our cinema screens today, but pretty impressive considering no one ever, in the history of the entire world, had made a movie before.

The man we have to thank for this 11-frame cinematic first is Eadweard Muybridge.

He was born Edward James Muggeridge on April 4th, 1830 , in England, and for some unknown reason, later changed his name to the far harder-to-spell Eadweard James Muybridge. During his twenties, he traveled across America selling books and photographs before a serious head injury he suffered in a stagecoach accident in Texas in 1860 forced him back to England for rest and recovery.

There, he married 21-year-old Flora Shallcross Stone and fathered a child. Upon discovering letters between her and a local drama critic, Major Harry Larkyns, discussing the fact that Larkyns may have fathered Muybridge’s 7-month-old son, he shot Larkyns point-blank, killed him, and was arrested that night without protest .

At his trial, he pleaded insanity on the grounds that his head injury had dramatically altered his personality but undercut this plea by his own insistence that his actions were deliberate and premeditated .

The jury dismissed his insanity plea, but he was eventually acquitted on the grounds of justifiable homicide . It turns out that in the 1900s, it’s completely OK to kill your wife’s alleged lover in a rage of passion.

The Horse in Motion (1878)

In 1872, one of the main barroom debates revolved around this question: when a horse is trotting or galloping, are all four of the horse’s feet off the ground at the same time ?

The answer to this question is plainly obvious to anyone who has ever seen slow-motion footage of a horse in full flight, but it’s much harder to be certain when the animal is moving at full speed.

In 1872, the then-governer of California, racehorse owner, and eventual founder of Stanford University , Leland Stanford, decided to settle the debate once and for all.

He reached out to Muybridge, who at that time was a famous photographer, and offered him $2,000 to prove conclusively whether a horse ever engaged in ‘ unsupported transit ‘.

Muybridge provided conclusive proof of what we now take as common knowledge in 1872 when he produced a single photographic frame of Stanford’s horse “Occident ” trotting with all four feet off the ground.

This initial experiment spurred Muybridge’s interest to capture a sequence of images of a horse in full gallop, but the photographic technology of the time was inadequate for such an endeavor.

Most photo exposures took between 15 seconds and a minute (meaning the subject had to remain still for that entire time) making them completely unsuited for capturing an animal running at full speed. Also, automatic shutter technology was in its very early infancy, making it unreliable and expensive.

He spent the next six years (partly interrupted by his murder trial) and spent over $50,000 of Stanford’s money (more than $1 million in today’s money) improving both camera shutter speeds and the film emulsions , eventually bringing the camera shutter speed down to 1/25 of a second .

On June 15th, 1878 , he placed 12 large glass-plate cameras in a line at Stanford’s Palo Alto Stock Farm (now the Stanford University campus), set up a sheet in the background to reflect as much light as possible, and rigged them with a cord to fire sequentially as the horse passed.

The results are the 11 frames of the very first movie ever made (the 12th frame was not used in the final movie).

But, having 11 frames shot in sequence doesn’t make a movie.

To make a movie, the frames need to be viewed consecutively at high speed. This is a simple feat to accomplish today, but no device capable of presenting these images existed in 1878, so Muybridge created one.

In 1879, Muybridge devised a way to view his famous galloping horse images in sequence at high speed. It consisted of a circular metal housing with slots that held 16-inch glass disks . The housing was cranked in a circular motion by hand, and the images from the glass disks would be projected onto a screen just like this:

This was initially named a Zoographiscope and zoogyroscope but eventually became the zoöpraxiscope.

Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

The first motion picture ever shot was Roundhay Garden Scene, shot in 1888. Louis Le Prince dazzles the eye with a remarkable display of 4 people walking in a garden, creating this 2.11-second cinematic masterpiece.

Arrival of a Train (1895)

In 1895, the Lumière Brothers propelled film into the future with their short film, “Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.” This film stunned early audiences with its simple yet powerful depiction of a train coming towards the camera. Unlike earlier films that focused on static scenes or controlled environments, “Arrival of a Train” showcased the film’s ability to capture life in motion, bringing the dynamism of the real world onto the silver screen. This film is often cited as one of the first movies to demonstrate the narrative filmmaking potential of cinema, moving beyond novelty and toward storytelling. The Lumière Brothers’ innovation in film shows and camera obscura techniques would influence the development of film as a modern art form, marking a critical point in film history and the journey toward narrative cinema.

Lumière Brothers: The Earliest Filmmakers and Their First Films

The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, are often celebrated as pioneering figures in the film world. They played a crucial role in the birth of cinema as we know it today, holding their first film screening in 1895. This event marked the beginning of the film industry, transforming the way stories could be told and experienced.

Their contributions to film technology, including the invention of the Cinématographe, allowed them to produce and show films to a public audience, a monumental step in the development of film as an art form. The films produced by the Lumière brothers were short films showcasing everyday life, and they quickly gained popularity, showing the potential of film to captivate and entertain.

First Motion Picture

The concept of motion pictures predates the invention of the first “film” as we understand it today. Early experiments in motion pictures date back to the 19th century, with various inventors and researchers making contributions to the development of motion capture and projection technologies. However, one of the earliest recognized examples of a motion picture is the work of French inventor Louis Le Prince.

The Father of Motion Pictures

Louis Le Prince is credited with creating the world’s first motion picture in the late 1880s. He used a single-lens camera to capture moving images onto paper film. Le Prince’s experiments culminated in a short film known as “Roundhay Garden Scene,” filmed in the garden of his father-in-law’s house in Roundhay, Leeds, England, in 1888.

This short film is widely recognized as the first movie ever made, capturing a brief moment of people walking around in a garden in Roundhay, Leeds, England. Despite its duration of just over two seconds, it holds immense significance as the earliest surviving instance of the motion picture.

Shot at 12 frames per second on paper film, the Roundhay Garden Scene features four individuals: Adolphe Le Prince (Louis’s son), Sarah Whitley (Louis’s mother-in-law), Joseph Whitley (Louis’s father-in-law), and Harriet Hartley. They are seen walking in circles and laughing in the Whitley family’s garden. The simplicity of the scene belies the groundbreaking nature of the footage.

Le Prince used a single-lens camera to capture this footage, a piece of photographic equipment he had designed himself, demonstrating a significant advancement in the ability to record moving images. This invention and the film it produced were crucial in the transition from static photography to motion picture technology, setting the stage for the future film industry.

READ MORE: The First Camera Ever Made: A History of Cameras

The Oldest Full-Length Movie

The title of the oldest full-length movie is often given to “The Story of the Kelly Gang,” produced in Australia in 1906. This film is significant for several reasons, primarily because it represents a major step in the evolution of cinema from short films to feature-length narratives. With a running time of about 70 minutes, it was the first film of its length to tell a complete story, making it a key moment in film history.

“The Story of the Kelly Gang” tells the tale of the notorious Australian bushranger Ned Kelly and his gang. The film’s production demonstrated early filmmakers’ ability to weave complex narratives into longer formats, a departure from the simple scenes and brief glimpses of life that characterized the earliest films. This narrative depth signaled the medium’s potential for storytelling on a scale comparable to that of novels and theater.

Shot on location in and around Melbourne, the film used actual members of the Kelly family as consultants, adding a layer of authenticity to the portrayal. Despite its initial success and influence on the growing film industry, only fragments of “The Story of the Kelly Gang” survive today. Much of the film was lost due to the fragile nature of the nitrate film stock used at the time, as well as through the lack of proper archival preservation techniques available then.

The surviving portions of “The Story of the Kelly Gang” have been inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

The First Film with Sound

The first film ever created with an accompanying soundtrack was William Dickson’s test project on Thomas Edison’s latest invention – The Edison Kinetophone .

The Kinetophone was a combination of Thomas Edison’s single-viewer movie player and The Kinetoscope with his wax cylinder phonograph.

If you were one of the lucky few to witness it in late 1894 or early 1895, this is what you would have seen.

The complex plot structure, lack of true character development, and sub-standard special effects left audiences and critics unimpressed.

The obnoxiously large cone on the left-hand side of the screen was a microphone connected to a wax cylinder recorder sitting just off-screen.

The Kinetophone’s drawback of only being viewable by one person at a time, combined with advancements in projection technology making movie viewing into a group experience, resulted in the Kinetophone being superseded before it could gain widespread (or any) popularity.

The Short Film with Sound

Between 1900 and 1910, a number of significant advancements in film and sound technology were made.

The first was a number of devices that mechanically linked a film projector with a disc player to synchronize sound.

The visuals were typically captured on a machine such as a Chronograph, with sound recorded on a Chronophone . These two separate elements were then later synchronized to create the movie.

Just like the Kinetophone, these machines had significant limitations. They were extremely quiet, could only record a few minutes of audio, and if the disk jumped, the following audio would be out of sync.

These limitations prevented them from ever being used for more than short films, and they were never adopted in Hollywood .

Over the next 10 years, two major developments transformed cinema.

The Tri-Ergon Process

The first was the ‘sound on film’ or Tri Ergon process. Invented by Engl Josef, Massolle Joseph, and Hans Vogt in 1919, it translated sound waves into electrical pulses and then into light, allowing the sounds to be hardcoded directly onto the film next to the accompanying images.

This eliminated the problem of soundtrack skipping, which produced a higher-quality product for consumers to enjoy.

The Audion Tube

The second major advancement was the development of the Audion Tube.

Originally invented by Lee De Forest in 1905, the Audion Tube allowed for the amplification of electrical signals and was used in a number of different technology applications .

He later combined this technology with a sound-on-film process of his own development, called the Phonofilm, sparking a craze in short movie production.

Nearly 1,000 short films with sound were produced in the 4 years following the Phonofilm’s development in 1920.

None of these, however, were Hollywood productions.

The Vitaphone

The Phonofilm failed to impress Hollywood, and it was never adopted by any studio. The first sound and film system to be taken seriously was the Vitaphone.

The Vitaphone was a sound-on-disk system developed by General Electric, a company that had gone into business with a relatively small studio called Warner Brothers Pictures Incorporated.

The First Hollywood Movie with Sound

Together, Warner Brothers and General Electric produced the first feature-length Hollywood film with a sound called Don Juan .

Although it doesn’t have synchronized speech, it does have synchronized sound effects and a soundtrack recorded by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.

Despite its popularity, Don Juan failed to recoup its production costs of $790,000 (roughly $11 million in today’s money) because most theaters lacked the facilities necessary to play films with sound.

The First Film with Speech

The critical success of Don Juan convinced Warner Brothers that film with sound was the future of cinema. This was contrary to what most of the cinema industry was doing because not only was there no standardized audio system readily available to upgrade cinemas, but the actors, whilst skilled at pantomime, weren’t trained to talk in films.

The studio took on significant debt and spent nearly $3 million (more than $42 million in today’s money) rewiring all their cinemas to play audio recorded through the Vitaphone.

On top of this, in 1927, they announced that every film produced would be accompanied by a Vitaphone soundtrack.

To ensure their first film with speech was a success, they decided to adapt a popular Broadway stage show at the time, The Jazz Singer . It was the second most expensive film ever produced at the time (behind Don Juan), starring the popular actor of the time, Al Jolson .

It was originally planned as a silent film with 6 synchronized songs performed by Jolson. However, in two scenes, dialogue improvised by Jolson made it into the final cut, making The Jazz Singer the first-ever film with dialogue (commonly referred to as a ‘ Talkie ‘).

The audience response was overwhelming, with co-star Eugenie Besserer recalling that when they started their dialogue scene, “ the audience became hysterical. “

The film became an overwhelming box-office success, taking over $3 million in ticket sales.

This was followed in 1928 by the first all-talking production on the Vitaphone, also created by Warner Brothers, called The Lights of New York .

The First Movie ever Made in Color

The development of the first color film followed a similarly complicated path to that of the first films with sound.

The First Film Presented in Colour

The first movie ever presented to the public in color wasn’t actually filmed in color.

The movie, made by W.K.L. Dickson, William Heise, and James White for Thomas Edison’s company Edison Co. in 1895, was titled Annabelle Serpentine Dance , and it was intended to be viewed through the above-discussed Edison Kinetoscope.

Bizarrely, this film has been rated more than 1,500 times on IMDB, and even more bizarrely, it’s been rated 6.4/10 .

The movie was shot in black and white, with each individual frame hand-tinted after shooting, thus creating the first color movie without shooting the film in color.

The First Feature-Length Film Presented in Color

The technique of hand-tinting films quickly spread, and it wasn’t long before the first feature-length, hand-tinted film was released.

In 1903, French directors Lucien Nonguet and Ferdinand Zecca released La Vie et la Passion De Jésus Christ (The Passion and Death of Christ) with hand-tinted scenes created using the stencil-based film tinging process Pathécolor .

The Pathécolor process would continue to be used for nearly 3 decades, with the last film released using this technique in 1930 .

The First Film Filmed in Color

Until the early 2000s, it was widely accepted that the first color film was those shot using the Kinemacolor System developed by George Albert Smith and launched by Charles Urban’s organization, Natural Color Kinematograph Company .

The Kinemacolor system exposed black and white film through alternating red and green filters. The camera filmed at 32 frames per second (one red and one green), which, when combined, gave them the silent film projection rate of 16 frames per second in color.

They found early success with their movie The Delhi Dubar – a two-and-a-half-hour documentary of the coronation held in Dehli of the newly crowned King George V in 1911 (India was still a British Colony at this time).

This belief was proven incorrect, however, with the discovery of Edward Turner’s color footage from ten years earlier.

His footage of London street scenes, a pet macaw, and his three children playing with a goldfish in the family’s back garden make his footage the first color footage ever shot.

He created color images by shooting each frame through three separate lenses, each with a different color filter (red, green, and blue), and combining those to create one singular color film.

The process was patented on March 22, 1899, by Edward Turner and Frederick Marshall Lee. This was actually the second color filming process patented after H. Isensee patented an earlier color filming process, but it was the first to prove effective.

Unfortunately, when Turner died in 1903, the man he passed his technology to in the hopes he could make it commercially viable, George Smith, found the system unworkable and discarded it, eventually creating Kinemacolor in 1909.

The First Two-Color Hollywood Feature

Despite its success and wide acceptance in Europe, Kinemacolor struggled to break into the US film industry. This was largely thanks to the Motion Picture Patent Company – an organization established by Thomas Edison to ensure control of the motion picture industry and force movie producers to only use the technology of MPCC members.

This created space for a new color system to become the favorite of Hollywood producers and directors – Technicolor.

The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation was formed in Boston in 1914 by Herbert Kalmus, Daniel Comstock, and W. Burton Wescott, who drew their inspiration for their company name from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where Kalmus and Comstock studied.

Just like Kinemacolor, Technicolor was a two-color system, but instead of using alternating red and green filters, it used a prism inside the camera to split the incoming image into two streams filtered through both red and green lenses, which were then imprinted onto the black and white film strip simultaneously.

The first Hollywood two-color movie, titled The Gulf Between, was filmed in 1917. Unfortunately, the film was destroyed in a fire on March 25, 1961, with only small fragments of footage surviving.

Luckily, the second Hollywood feature film shot in the two-color Technicolor system survived.

The First Three-Color Hollywood Feature

The Technicolor Motion Picture Corporation continued to refine its process. They made big advancements in their two-color system (which can be seen in Mystery of the Wax Museum from 1933), and in 1932, they finally completed work on developing their three-color system.

Their three-strip system also utilized a prism to split the incoming visual stream, but this time, it was split into three streams – green, blue, and red.

The first movie released using this three-color system was a short Disney cartoon released in 1932 titled Flowers and Trees :

It wasn’t until 1934 that the first live-action, three-color Hollywood film was released.

This three-strip system would be used by Hollywood until the final Technicolor feature film was produced in 1955.

Wrapping It Up

The film industry isn’t going away any time soon. With a record of $42.5 billion in ticket sales in 2019 , it’s clear that the industry as a whole is as strong as ever.

In saying that, the established players in the film production industry are facing challenges from emerging technology. The invention of the iPhone has placed cinema-quality cameras in the hands of everyday people, and with previously obscure film terms such as ‘ storyboard ‘ and ‘ film shot list ‘ becoming more and more common, the barriers to entering the film production industry are dropping dramatically.

Will they pose a threat to the established industry leaders? Only time will tell for sure. But if the pace of innovation over the last 100 years continues at the same rate, there are sure to be some shakeups.

https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/8-2-the-history-of-movies

https://library.tc.columbia.edu/blog/content/2023/october/today-in-history-thomas-edison-and-the-first-motion-picture.php

CORBETT, KEVIN J. “EMPTY SEATS: THE MISSING HISTORY OF MOVIE-WATCHING.” Journal of Film and Video , vol. 50, no. 4, 1998, pp. 34–48. JSTOR , http://www.jstor.org/stable/20688196. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.

Phruksachart, Melissa. “THE BOURGEOIS CINEMA OF BOBA LIBERALISM.” Film Quarterly , vol. 73, no. 3, 2020, pp. 59–65. JSTOR , https://www.jstor.org/stable/48713771. Accessed 1 Apr. 2024.

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Justifiable homicide?? Surely that can’t be true…

Hi Sonar, thank you for leaving input on our article. As “crazy’ as it may sound, justifiable homicide was in fact true. If you have any other questions or concerns, please let us know!

I have read your blog its really good.

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The Lumière Brothers, Pioneers of Cinema

By: Sarah Pruitt

Updated: June 1, 2023 | Original: October 3, 2014

After his father, Antoine, a well-known portrait painter turned photographer, opened a small business in photographic plates based in Lyon, Louis Lumière began experimenting with the equipment his father was manufacturing. In 1881, 17-year-old Louis invented a new “dry plate” process of developing film, which boosted his father’s business enough to fuel the opening of a new factory in the Lyon suburbs. By 1894, the Lumières were producing some 15 million plates a year.

That year, Antoine Lumière attended an exhibition of Edison’s Kinetoscope in Paris. Upon his return to Lyon, he showed his sons a length of film he had received from one of Edison’s concessionaires; he also told them they should try to develop a cheaper alternative to the peephole film-viewing device and its bulky camera counterpart, the Kinetograph. While the Kinetoscope could only show a motion picture to one individual viewer, Antoine urged Auguste and Louis to work on a way to project film onto a screen, where many people could view it at the same time.

Auguste began the first experiments in the winter of 1894, and by early the following year the brothers had come up with their own device, which they called the Cinématographe. Much smaller and lighter than the Kinetograph, it weighed around five kilograms (11 pounds) and operated with the use of a hand-powered crank. The Cinématographe photographed and projected film at a speed of 16 frames per second, much slower than Edison’s device (48 frames per second), which meant that it was less noisy to operate and used less film.

The key innovation at the heart of the Cinématographe was the mechanism through which film was transported through the camera. Two pins or claws were inserted into the sprocket holes punched into the celluloid film strip; the pins moved the film along and then retracted, leaving the film stationary during exposure. Louis Lumière designed this process of intermittent movement based on the way in which a sewing machine worked, a tactic that Edison had considered but rejected in favor of continuous movement.

A three-in-one device that could record, develop and project motion pictures, the Cinématographe would go down in history as the first viable film camera. Using it, the Lumière brothers shot footage of workers at their factory leaving at the end of the day. They showed the resulting film, “La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière” (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”) at an industrial meeting in Paris in March 1895; it is considered to be the very first motion picture.

After a number of other private screenings, the Lumière brothers unveiled the Cinématographe in their first public screening on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard de Capuchines. In early 1896, they would open Cinématographe theaters in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York. After making more than 40 films that year, mostly scenes of everyday French life, but also the first newsreel (footage of the French Photographic Society conference) and the first documentaries (about the Lyon Fire Department), they began sending other cameramen-projectionists out into the world to record scenes of life and showcase their invention.

By 1905, the Lumières had withdrawn from the moviemaking business in favor of developing the first practical photographic color process, known as the Lumière Autochrome. Meanwhile, their pioneering motion picture camera, the Cinématographe, had lent its name to an exciting new form of art (and entertainment): cinema.

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• Film Reference
• Criticism - Ideology

Historical Films

The biographical film.

The biographical film, or biopic, also has a long and distinguished history in world cinema, with several works attaining high status for their critical as well as their commercial success. For example, The Private Life of Henry VIII (Alexander Korda, 1933) was the British

Oliver Stone during production of Alexander (2004).

cinema's first international success; Charles Laughton (1899–1962) won a Best Actor Oscar ® for his portrayal of the monarch. The French film Napoléon (Abel Gance, 1927) brought a similar sense of national pride to a country whose film industry had been devastated by World War I. Still regarded as one of the most outstanding achievements in the history of the cinema, Napoléon was seen as the culmination of the French cinema's rise from near annihilation in 1914. The Last Emperor (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1987), which won nine Academy Awards ® , was the first film to be shot on location in Beijing's Forbidden City, heralding a more open era in Chinese–Western cultural relations.

The biopic emerged as a recognizable subgenre in the 1930s. The first biopic is generally considered to be the George Arliss (1868–1946) vehicle Disraeli (1929), marketed as a Warner Bros. prestige production. Arliss also starred in Alexander Hamilton (1931) for Warner Bros. and in Voltaire (1933). The commercial and critical accomplishment of these works paved the way for several later Warner Bros. films directed by William Dieterle (1893–1972), including The Story of Louis Pasteur (1935), for which Paul Muni (1895–1967) won the Oscar ® for Best Actor; The White Angel (1936), the story of Florence Nightingale; and The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and Juarez (1939), both also starring Muni.

Biographical films are often driven by a national, myth-making impulse. Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), starring Henry Fonda (1905–1982) in his first film with John Ford (1894–1973), and Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), starring Raymond Massey (1896–1983), were not so much historical as mythological exercises, as neither film was particularly accurate with regard to the actual events of Lincoln's life nor to his character. Nevertheless, Young Mr. Lincoln , in particular, succeeded in elevating Lincoln's early years to the level of national myth.

Eisenstein's Ivan Groznyy I ( Ivan the Terrible, Part One , 1944) focused on an individual protagonist, rather than the collective protagonist of his earlier films, in part to rally the Russian people during World War II by giving them a historical hero who had unified Russia, fought off treachery, and defeated external enemies in the sixteenth century. Unlike his earlier Aleksandr Nevskiy

La Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV ( The Rise to Power of Louis XIV , 1966) was one of several historical biographies Roberto Rossellini made for television.

( Alexander Nevsky , co-directed by Dmitri Vasilyev, 1938), however, which focused on the story of a thirteenth-century prince who defeated an invading Teutonic army, Ivan the Terrible, Part One is less a symbol of the Russian people than a portrait of a fully rounded character, complex and beset by internal conflicts. Although Ivan the Terrible, Part One received the Stalin Prize, Ivan Groznyy II ( Ivan the Terrible, Part Two , co-directed by M. Filimonova, 1958) was condemned by Stalin and suppressed. Ivan the Terrible, Part One has long been considered one of the most important and original films in world cinema in terms of its formal design; the two parts taken together may also be the first biographical film to explore the darker side of its main character.

As the biopic matured as a form, its subjects became more complex. Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962), starring Peter O'Toole, for example, paints an arresting portrait of its main character that shows him as both heroic and fatally flawed. Patton (Franklin Schaffner, 1970) took a similar approach, with George C. Scott (1927–1999) depicting the main character as both a noble warrior and vainglorious egomaniac. The complex and subtle shadings of character that distinguish films such as Lawrence of Arabia and Patton are also found in later examples of the form. Works such as Bertolucci's The Last Emperor and Stone's Nixon are distinguished examples of films that take a complicated view of the link between the individual subject and the historical process, refusing to see the individual agent as simply the crystallized expression of historical forces. Malcolm X (Spike Lee, 1992) and Gandhi (Richard Attenborough, 1982) as well as Schindler's List , consider the question that is at the heart of the biographical film: the relationship between the currents and forces of history and the charismatic individual who strives to shape those forces.

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A very short history of cinema

Published: 18 June 2020

Learn about the history and development of cinema, from the Kinetoscope in 1891 to today’s 3D revival.

Cinematography is the illusion of movement by the recording and subsequent rapid projection of many still photographic pictures on a screen. Originally a product of 19th-century scientific endeavour, cinema has become a medium of mass entertainment and communication, and today it is a multi-billion-pound industry.

Who invented cinema?

No one person invented cinema. However, in 1891 the Edison Company successfully demonstrated a prototype of the  Kinetoscope , which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures.

The first public Kinetoscope demonstration took place in 1893. By 1894 the Kinetoscope was a commercial success, with public parlours established around the world.

The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France. They used a device of their own making, the Cinématographe, which was a camera, a projector and a film printer all in one.

What were early films like?

At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened. Subjects included local scenes and activities, views of foreign lands, short comedies and newsworthy events.

The films were accompanied by lectures, music and a lot of audience participation. Although they did not have synchronised dialogue, they were not ‘silent’ as they are sometimes described.

The rise of the film industry

By 1914, several national film industries were established. At this time, Europe, Russia and Scandinavia were the dominant industries; America was much less important. Films became longer and storytelling, or narrative, became the dominant form.

As more people paid to see movies, the industry which grew around them was prepared to invest more money in their production, distribution and exhibition, so large studios were established and dedicated cinemas built. The First World War greatly affected the film industry in Europe, and the American industry grew in relative importance.

The first 30 years of cinema were characterised by the growth and consolidation of an industrial base, the establishment of the narrative form, and refinement of technology.

Adding colour

Colour was first added to black-and-white movies through hand colouring, tinting, toning and stencilling.

By 1906, the principles of colour separation were used to produce so-called ‘natural colour’ moving images with the British Kinemacolor process, first presented to the public in 1909.

Kinemacolor was primarily used for documentary (or ‘actuality’) films, such as the epic With Our King and Queen Through India (also known as The Delhi Durbar ) of 1912, which ran for over 2 hours in total.

The early Technicolor processes from 1915 onwards were cumbersome and expensive, and colour was not used more widely until the introduction of its three‑colour process in 1932. It was used for films such as Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939) in Hollywood and A Matter of Life and Death (1946) in the UK.

Frames of stencil colour film

Advertisement for With Our King and Queen Through India , 1912

Adding sound

The first attempts to add synchronised sound to projected pictures used phonographic cylinders or discs.

The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronised dialogue, The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927), used the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system, which employed a separate record disc with each reel of film for the sound.

This system proved unreliable and was soon replaced by an optical, variable density soundtrack recorded photographically along the edge of the film, developed originally for newsreels such as Movietone.

Cinema’s Golden Age

By the early 1930s, nearly all feature-length movies were presented with synchronised sound and, by the mid-1930s, some were in full colour too. The advent of sound secured the dominant role of the American industry and gave rise to the so-called ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’.

During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the principal form of popular entertainment, with people often attending cinemas twice a week. Ornate ’super’ cinemas or ‘picture palaces’, offering extra facilities such as cafés and ballrooms, came to towns and cities; many of them could hold over 3,000 people in a single auditorium.

In Britain, the highest attendances occurred in 1946, with over 31 million visits to the cinema each week.

What is the aspect ratio?

Thomas Edison had used perforated 35mm film in the Kinetoscope, and in 1909 this was adopted as the worldwide industry standard. The picture had a width-to-height relationship—known as the aspect ratio—of 4:3 or 1.33:1. The first number refers to the width of the screen, and the second to the height. So for example, for every 4 centimetres in width, there will be 3 in height. 

With the advent of optical sound, the aspect ratio was adjusted to 1.37:1. This is known as the ‘Academy ratio’, as it was officially approved by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars people) in 1932.

Although there were many experiments with other formats, there were no major changes in screen ratios until the 1950s.

How did cinema compete with television?

The introduction of television in America prompted a number of technical experiments designed to maintain public interest in cinema.

In 1952, the Cinerama process, using three projectors and a wide, deeply curved screen together with multi-track surround sound, was premiered. It had a very large aspect ratio of 2.59:1, giving audiences a greater sense of immersion, and proved extremely popular.

However, Cinerama was technically complex and therefore expensive to produce and show. Widescreen cinema was not widely adopted by the industry until the invention of CinemaScope in 1953 and Todd‑AO in 1955. Both processes used single projectors in their presentation.

CinemaScope ‘squeezed’ images on 35mm film; when projected, they were expanded laterally by the projector lens to fit the screen. Todd-AO used film with a width of 70mm. By the end of the 1950s, these innovations had effectively changed the shape of the cinema screen, with aspect ratios of either 2.35:1 or 1.66:1 becoming standard. Stereo sound, which had been experimented with in the 1940s, also became part of the new widescreen experience.

Specialist large-screen systems using 70mm film were also developed. The most successful of these has been IMAX, which as of 2020 has over 1,500 screens around the world. For many years IMAX cinemas have shown films specially made in its unique 2D or 3D formats but more recently they have shown popular mainstream feature films which have been digitally re-mastered in the IMAX format, often with additional scenes or 3D effects.

How have cinema attendance figures changed?

While cinemas had some success in fighting the competition of television, they never regained the position and influence they held in the 1930s and 40s, and over the next 30 years audiences dwindled. By 1984 cinema attendances in Britain had declined to one million a week.

By the late 2000s, however, that number had trebled. The first British multiplex was built in Milton Keynes in 1985, sparking a boom in out-of-town multiplex cinemas.

Today, most people see films on television, whether terrestrial, satellite or subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. Streaming film content on computers, tablets and mobile phones is becoming more common as it proves to be more convenient for modern audiences and lifestyles.

Although America still appears to be the most influential film industry, the reality is more complex. Many films are produced internationally—either made in various countries or financed by multinational companies that have interests across a range of media.

What’s next?

In the past 20 years, film production has been profoundly altered by the impact of rapidly improving digital technology. Most mainstream productions are now shot on digital formats with subsequent processes, such as editing and special effects, undertaken on computers.

Cinemas have invested in digital projection facilities capable of producing screen images that rival the sharpness, detail and brightness of traditional film projection. Only a small number of more specialist cinemas have retained film projection equipment.

In the past few years there has been a revival of interest in 3D features, sparked by the availability of digital technology. Whether this will be more than a short-term phenomenon (as previous attempts at 3D in the 1950s and 1980s had been) remains to be seen, though the trend towards 3D production has seen greater investment and industry commitment than before.

Further reading

• Cinematography in the Science Museum Group collection
• The Lumière Brothers: Pioneers of cinema and colour photography , National Science and Media Museum blog
• Cinerama in the UK: The history of 3-strip cinema in Pictureville Cinema , National Science and Media Museum blog
• BFI Filmography—a complete history of UK feature film
• BFI National Archive
• Imperial War Museums film archive

Pictureville Cinema

Pictureville is the home of cinema at the National Science and Media Museum, showing everything from blockbusters to indie gems.

Robert Paul and the race to invent cinema

Discover the story of Robert Paul, the forgotten pioneer whose innovations earned him the title of ‘father of the British film industry’.

Cinema technology

Discover objects from our collection which illuminate the technological development of moving pictures.

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The History of Film Timeline — All Eras of Film History Explained

M otion 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. By the end, you’ll know all the broad strokes in the history of film.

Note: this article doesn’t cover every piece of film history. Some minor movements and technical breakthroughs have been left out – check out the StudioBinder blog for more content.

• Pre-Film: Photographic Techniques and Motion Picture Theory
• The Nascent Film Era (1870s-1910): The First Motion Pictures
• The First Film Movements: Dadaism, German Expressionism, and Soviet Montage Theory
• Manifest Destiny and the End of the Silent Era
• Hollywood Epics and the Pre-Code Era
• The Early Golden Age and the Introduction of Color
• Wartime Film and Cinematic Propaganda
• Post-War Film Movements: French New Wave, Italian Neorealism, Scandinavian Revival, and Bengali Cinema
• The Golden Age of Hollywood: The Studio System and Censorship
• New Hollywood: The Emergence of Global Blockbuster Cinema
• Dogme 95 and the Independent Movement
• New Methods of Cinematic Distribution and the Current State of Film

When Were Movies Invented?

Pre-film techniques and theory.

Movies refer to moving pictures and moving pictures can be traced all the way back to prehistoric times. Have you ever made a shadow puppet show? If you have, then you’ve made a moving picture.

To create a moving picture with your hands is one thing, to utilize a device is another. The camera obscura (believed to have been circulated in the fifth century BCE) is perhaps the oldest photographic device in existence. The camera obscura is a device that’s used to reproduce images by reflecting light through a small peephole.

Here’s a picture of one from Gemma Frisius’ 1545 book De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica :

When Did Movies Start?  •  Camera Obscura in ‘De Radio Astronomica et Geometrica’

Through the camera obscura, we can trace the principles of filmmaking back thousands of years. But despite the technical achievement of the camera obscura, it took many of those years to develop the technology needed to capture moving images then later display them. 

When Was Film Invented?

The first motion pictures.

When were movies invented ? The first motion pictures were incredibly simple – usually just a few frames of people or animals. Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion is perhaps the most famous of these early motion pictures. In 1878, Muybridge set up a racing track with 24 cameras to photograph whether horses gallop with all four hooves off the ground at any time

The result was sensational. Muybridge’s pictures set the stage for all coming films; check out a short video on Muybridge and his work below.

When Did the First Movie Come Out?  •  Eadweard Muybridge’s ‘The Horse in Motion’ by San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Muybridge’s job wasn’t done after taking the photographs though; he still had to produce a projection machine to display them. So, Muybridge built a device called the zoopraxiscope, which was regarded as a breakthrough device for motion picture projecting.

Muybridge’s films (and tech) inspired Thomas Edison to study motion picture theory and develop his own camera equipment.

Films as we know them today emerged globally around the turn of the century, circa 1900. Much of that development can be attributed to the works of the Lumière Brothers, who together pioneered the technical craft of moviemaking with their cinematograph projection machine. The Lumière Brothers’ 1895 shorts are regarded as the first commercial films of all-time; though not technically true (remember Muybridge’s work).

French actor and illusionist Georges Méliès attempted to buy a cinematograph from the Lumière Brothers in 1895, but was denied. So, Méliès ventured elsewhere; eventually finding a partner in Englishman Robert W. Paul.

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.

When Were Movies Invented?  •  Georges Méliès – Master of Illusion by Crash Course

Méliès’ shorts The One Man Band (1900) and A Trip to the Moon (1902) are considered two of the most trailblazing films in all of film history. Over the course of his career, Méliès produced over 500 films. His contemporary mastery of visual effects , multiple exposure , and cinematography made him one of the greatest filmmakers of all-time .

Movie History

The first film movements.

War and cinema go together like two peas in a pod. As we continue on through our analysis of the history of film, you’ll start to notice that just about every major movement sprouted in the wake of war. First, the movements that sprouted in response to World War I:

DADAISM AND SURREALISM

History of Motion Pictures  •  Still From ‘Un Chien Andalou’ by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí

Major Dadaist filmmakers: Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dalí, Germaine Dulac.

Major Dadaist films: Return to Reason (1923), The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928), U n Chien  Andalou (1929).

Dadaism – an art movement that began in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I (1915) – rejected authority; effectively laying the groundwork for surrealist cinema . 

Dadaism may have begun in Zurich circa 1915, but it didn’t take off until years later in Paris, France. By 1920, the people of France had expressed a growing disillusionment with the country’s government and economy. Sound familiar?

That’s because they’re the same points of conflict that incited the French Revolution. But this time around, the French people revolted in a different way: with art. And not just any art: bonkers, crazy, absurd, anti-this, anti-that art. 

It’s important to note that Paris wasn’t the only place where dadaist art was being created. But it was the place where most of the dadaist, surrealist film was being created. We’ll get to dadaist film in a short bit, but first, let’s review a quick video on Dada art from Curious Muse.

Where Did Film Originate?  •  Dadaism in 8 Minutes by Curious Muse

Salvador Dalí, Germaine Dulac, and Luis Buñuel were some of the forefront faces of the surrealist film movement of the 1920s. French filmmakers, such as Jean Epstein and Jean Renoir experimented with surrealist films during this era as well.

Dalí and Buñuel’s 1929 film Un Chien Andalou is undoubtedly one of the most influential surrealist/dadaist films. Let’s check out a clip:

History of Movies  •  ‘Un Chien Andalou’ Clip

The influence of Un Chien Andalou on surrealist cinema can’t be quantified; key similarities can be seen between the film and the works of Walt Disney, David Lynch , Terry Gilliam , and other surrealist directors.

Learn more about surrealism in film →

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM 

The Creation of Film and German Expressionism  •  Still From ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ by Robert Wiene

• German Expressionism – an art movement defined by monumentalist structures and ideas – began before World War I but didn’t take off in popularity until after the war, much like the Dadaist movement.
• Major German Expressionist filmmakers: Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, Robert Wiene 
• Major German Expressionist films: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), and Metropolis   (1927).

German Expressionism changed everything for the “look” and “feel” of cinema. When you think of German Expressionism, think contrast, gothic, dark, brooding imagery and colored filters. Here’s a quick video on the German Expressionist movement from Crash Course:

History of Film Timeline  •  German Expressionism Explained

The great works of the German Expressionist movement are some of the earliest movies I consider accessible to modern audiences. 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. Check out the trailer for M below.

Most Important Film in History of German Expressionism  •  ‘M’ (1931) Trailer, Restored by BFI

M not only epitomized the “monster” tone of the German Expressionist era, it set the stage for all future psychological thrillers. The film also pioneered sound engineering in film through the clever use of diegetic and non-diegetic sound . Fun fact: it was also one of the first movies to incorporate a leitmotif as part of its soundtrack.

Over time, the stylistic flourishes of the German Expressionist movement gave way to new voices – but its influence lived on in monster-horror and chiaroscuro lighting techniques. 

Learn more about German Expressionism →

SOVIET MONTAGE THEORY

Film History 101  •  The Odessa Steps in ‘Battleship Potemkin’

• Soviet Montage Theory – a Soviet Russian film movement that helped establish the principles of film editing – took place from the 1910s to the 1930s. 
• Major Soviet Montage Theory filmmakers: Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein , Dziga Vertov.
• Major Soviet Montage Theory films: Kino-Eye (1924), Battleship Potemkin (1925), Man With a Movie Camera (1929).

Soviet Montage Theory was a deconstructionist film movement, so as to say it wasn’t as interested in making movies as it was taking movies apart… or seeing how they worked. That being said, Soviet Montage Theory did produce some classics.

Here’s a video on Soviet Montage Theory from Filmmaker IQ:

Eras of Movies  •  The History of Cutting in Soviet Montage Theory by Filmmaker IQ

The Bolshevik government set-up a film school called VGIK (the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography) after the Russian Revolution. The practitioners of Soviet Montage Theory were the OG members of the “film school generation;” Kuleshov and Eisenstein were their teachers.

Battleship Potemkin was the most noteworthy film to come out of the Soviet Montage Theory movement. Check out an awesome analysis from One Hundred Years of Cinema below.

History of Film Summary  •  How Sergei Eisenstein Used Montage to Film the Unfilmable by One Hundred Years of Cinema

Soviet Montage Theory begged filmmakers to arrange, deconstruct, and rearrange film clips to better communicate emotional associations to audiences. The legacy of Soviet Montage Theory lives on in the form of the Kuleshov effect and contemporary montages .

Learn more about Soviet Montage Theory →

When Did Movies Become Popular?

The end of the silent era.

There was no Hollywood in the early years of American cinema – there was only Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company in New Jersey.

Ever wonder why Europe seemed to dominate the early years of film? Well it was because Thomas Edison sued American filmmakers into oblivion. Edison owned a litany of U.S. patents on camera tech – and he wielded his stamps of ownership with righteous fury. The Edison Manufacturing Company did produce some noteworthy early films – such as 1903’s The Great Train Robbery – but their gaps were few and far between.

To escape Edison’s legal monopoly, filmmakers ventured west, all the way to Southern California. 

Fortunate for the nomads: the arid temperature and mountainous terrain of Southern California proved perfect for making movies. By the early 1910s, Hollywood emerged as the working capital of the United States’s movie industry.

Director/actors like Charlie Chaplin , Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton became stars – but remember, movies were silent, and people knew there would be an acoustic revolution in cinema. Before we move on from the Silent Era, check out this great video from Crash Course.

When Did Movies Become Popular?  •  The Silent Era by Crash Course

The Silent Era holds an important place in film history – but it was mostly ushered out in 1927 with The Jazz Singer . Al Jolson singing in The Jazz Singer is considered the first time sound ever synchronized with a feature film . Over the next few years, Hollywood cinema exploded in popularity. This short period from 1927-1934 is known as pre-Code Hollywood.

When Did Hollywood Start?

Pre-code hollywood.

In our previous section, we touched on the rise of Hollywood, but not the Hollywood epic. The Hollywood epic, which we regard as longer in duration and wider in scope than the average movie, set the stage for blockbuster cinema. So, let’s quickly touch on the history of Hollywood epics before jumping into pre-code Hollywood.

It’s impossible to talk about Hollywood epics without bringing up D.W. Griffith. Griffith was an American film director who created a lot of what we consider “the structure” of feature films. His 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation brought the technique of cinematic storytelling into the future, while consequently keeping its subject matter in the objectionable past.

For more on Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (and its complicated legacy), check out this poignant interview clip with Spike Lee . 

History of Filmmaking  •  Spike Lee on ‘The Birth of a Nation’

As Lee suggests, it’s important to acknowledge the technical achievement of films like The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind without condoning their horrid subject matter. 

As another great director once said: “tomorrow’s democracy discriminates against discrimination. Its charter won’t include the freedom to end freedom.” – Orson Welles.

Griffith made more than a few Hollywood epics in his time, but none were more famous than The Birth of a Nation .

Okay, now that we reviewed the foundations of the Hollywood epic, let’s move on to pre-code Hollywood.

PRE-CODE HOLLYWOOD

A History of Film  •  James Cagney in ‘The Public Enemy’

• Pre-Code Hollywood – a period in Hollywood history after the advent of sound but before the institution of the Hays Code – circa ~1927-1934.
• Major Pre-Code stars: Ruth Chatterton, Warren William, James Cagney.
• Major Pre-Code films: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Baby Face (1933).

Pre-Code Hollywood was wild. Not just wild in an uninhibited sense, but in a thematic sense too. Films produced during the pre-Code era often focused on illicit subject matter, like bootlegging, prostitution, and murder – that wasn't the status quo for Hollywood – and it wouldn’t be again until 1968.

We’ll get to why that year is important for film history in a bit, but first let’s review pre-Code Hollywood with a couple of selected scenes from Kevin Wentink on YouTube.

Movie Film History  •  Pre-Code Classic Clips

Pre-Code movies were jubilant in their creativity; largely because they were uncensored . But alas, their period was short-lived. In 1934, MPPDA Chairman William Hays instituted the Motion Picture Production Code banning explicit depictions of sex, violence, and other “sinful” deeds in movies. 

Learn more about Pre-Code Hollywood →

Development of Movies

The early golden age and color in film.

The 1930s and early 1940s produced some of the greatest movies of all-time – but they also changed everything about the movie-making process. By the end of the Pre-Code era, the free independent spirit of filmmaking had all but evaporated; Hollywood studios had vertically integrated their business operations, which meant they conceptualized, produced, and distributed everything “in-house.”

That doesn’t mean movies made during these years were bad though. Quite the contrary – perhaps the two greatest American films ever made, Citizen Kane and Casablanca , were made between 1934 and 1944.

But despite their enormous influence, neither Citizen Kane nor Casablanca could hold a candle to the influence of another film from this decade: The Wizard of Oz .

The Wizard of Oz wasn’t the first film to use Technicolor , but it was credited with bringing color to the masses. For more on the industry-altering introduction of color, check out this video on The Wizard of Oz from Vox.

When Was Color Movies Invented?  •  How Technicolor Changed Movies

Technicolor was groundbreaking for cinema, but the dye-transfer process of its colorization was hard… and cost prohibitive for studios. So, camera manufacturers experimented with new processes to streamline color photography. Overtime, they were rewarded with new technologies and techniques.

Learn more about Technicolor →

Cinema Eras

Wartime and propaganda films.

In 1937, Benito Mussolini founded Cinecittà , a massive studio that operated under the slogan “Il cinema è l'arma più forte,” which translates to “the cinema is the strongest weapon.” During this time, countries all around the world used cinema as a weapon to influence the minds and hearts of their citizens.

This was especially true in the United States – prolific directors like Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces to make movies to support the U.S. war cause. 

Documentarian Laurent Bouzereau made a three-part series about the war films of Capra, Ford, Huston, Stevens, and Wyler. Check out the trailer for Five Came Back below.

A History of Film  •  Five Came Back Trailer

Wartime film is important to explore because it teaches us about how people interpret propaganda. For posterity’s sake, let’s define propaganda as biased information that’s used to promote political points.

Propaganda films are often regarded with a negative connotation because they sh0w a one-sided perspective. Films of this era – such as those commissioned for the US Department of War’s Why We Fight series – were one-sided because they were made to counter the enemy’s rhetoric. It’s important to note that “one-sided” doesn’t mean “wrong” – in the case of the Why We Fight series, I think most people would agree that the one-sidedness was appropriate. 

Over time, wartime film became more nuanced – a point proven by the 1966 masterwork The Battle of Algiers .

History of Movies

Post-war film movements.

Global cinema underwent a renaissance after World War II; technically, creatively, and conceptually. We’re going to cover a few of the most prominent post-war film movements, starting with Italian Neorealism.

ITALIAN NEOREALISM

Movie Film History  •  Still from Vittorio De Sica’s ‘Umberto D.’

• Italian Neorealism (1944-1960) – an Italian film movement that brought filmmaking to the streets; defined by depictions of the Italian state after World War II.
• Major Italian Neorealist film-makers: Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Luchino Visconti, Federico Fellini .
• Major Italian Neorealist films: Rome, Open City (1945), Bicycle Thieves (1948), La Strada (1954), Il Posto (1961).

Martin Scorcese called Italian Neorealism “the rehabilitation of an entire culture and people through cinema.” World War II devastated the Italian state: socially, economically, and culturally.

It took people’s lives and jobs, but perhaps more importantly, it took their humanity. After the War, the people needed an outlet of expression, and a place to reconstruct a new national identity. Here’s a quick video on Italian Neorealism.

Movie History  •  How Italian Neorealism Brought the Grit of the Streets to the Big Screen by No Film School

Italian Neorealism produced some of the greatest films ever made. There’s some debate as to when the movement started and ended – some say 1943-1954, others say 1945-1955 – but I say it started with Rome, Open City and ended with Il Posto . Why? Because those movies perfectly encompass the defining arc of Italian Neorealism, from street-life after World War II to the rise of bureaucracy. Rome, Open City shows Italy in the thick of chaos, and Il Posto shows Italy on the precipice of a new era.

The legacy of Italian Neorealism lives on in the independent filmmaking of directors like Richard Linklater, Steven Soderbergh, and Sean Baker.

Learn more about Italian Neorealism →

FRENCH NEW WAVE

Development of Movies  •  Still From Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless

• French New Wave (1950s onwards) – or La Nouvelle Rogue, a French art movement popularized by critics, defined by experimental ideas – inspired by old-Hollywood and progressive editing techniques from Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.
• Major French New Wave filmmakers: Jean-Luc Godard , François Truffaut , Agnes Varda.
• Major French New Wave films: The 400 Blows (1959), Breathless (1960), Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962).

The French New Wave proliferated the auteur theory , which suggests the director is the author of a movie; which makes sense considering a lot of the best French New Wave films featured minimalist narratives. Take Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless for example: the story is secondary to audio and visuals. The French New Wave was about independent filmmaking – taking a camera into the streets and making a movie by any means necessary. 

Here’s a quick video on The French New Wave by The Cinema Cartography.

History of Filmmaking  •  Breaking the Rules With the French New Wave by The Cinema Cartography

It’s important to note that the pioneers of the French New Wave weren’t amateurs – most (but not all) were critics at Cahiers du cinéma , a respected French film magazine. Writers like Godard, Rivette, and Chabrol knew what they were doing long before they released their great works. 

Other directors, like Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais, were members of the Left Bank, a somewhat more traditionalist art group. Left Bank directors tended to put more emphasis on their narratives as opposed to their Cahiers du cinéma counterparts.

The French New popularized (but did not invent) innovative filmmaking techniques like jump cuts and tracking shots . The influence of the French New Wave can be seen in music videos, existentialist cinema, and French film noir .

Learn more about the French New Wave → 

Learn more about the Best French New Wave Films →

SCANDINAVIAN REVIVAL

A History of Film  •  Still from Ingmar Bergman’s ‘The Seventh Seal’

• Scandinavian Revival (1940s-1950s) – a filmmaking movement in Scandinavia, particularly Denmark and Sweden, defined by monochrome visuals, philosophical quandaries, and reinterpretations of religious ideals.
• Major Scandinavian Revival filmmakers: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Ingmar Bergman.
• Major Scandinavian Revival films: Day of Wrath (1943), The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957).

Swedish, Danish, and Finnish films have played an important role in cinema for more than 100 years. The Scandinavian Revival – or renaissance of Scandinavian-centric films from the 1940s-1950s – put the films of Sweden, Denmark, and Finland in front of the world stage.

Here’s a quick video on the works of the most famous Scandinavian director of all-time: Ingmar Bergman .

History of Cinema  •  Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema by The Criterion Collection

The influence of Scandinavian Revival can be seen in the works of Danish directors like Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier , as well as countless other filmmakers around the world.

BENGALI CINEMA

History of Motion Pictures  •  Still from Satyajit Ray’s ‘Pather Panchali’

• Bengali Cinema – or the cinema of West Bengal; also known as Tollywood, helped develop arthouse films parallel to the mainstream Indian cinema.
• Major Bengali filmmakers: Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen.
• Major Bengali films: Pather Panchali (1955) and Bhuvan Shome (1969).

The Indian film industry is the biggest film industry in the world. Each year, India produces more than a thousand feature-films. When most people think of Indian cinema, they think of Bollywood “song and dance” masalas – but did you know the country underwent a New Wave (similar to France, Italy, and Scandinavia) after World War II? The influence of the Indian New Wave, or classic Bengali cinema, is hard to quantify; perhaps it’s better expressed by the efforts of the Academy Film Archive, Criterion Collection, and L'Immagine Ritrovata film restoration artists. Here's an introduction to one of India's greatest directors, Satyajit Ray.

Evolution of Cinema  •  How Satyajit Ray Directs a Movie

In 2020, Martin Scorsese said, “In the relatively short history of cinema, Satyajit Ray is one of the names that we all need to know, whose films we all need to see.” Ray is undoubtedly one of the preeminent masters of international cinema – and his name belongs in the conversation with Hitchcock, Renoir, Kurosawa, Welles, and all the other trailblazing filmmakers of the mid-20th century.

Learn more about Indian Cinema →

OTHER POST-WAR & NEW WAVE MOVEMENTS

How Has Film Changed Over Time?  •  Still from Akira Kurosawa’s ‘Stray Dog’

Italy, France, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and India weren’t the only countries that underwent “New Waves” after World War II; Japan, Iran, Great Britain, and Russia had minor film revolutions as well.

In Japan, directors like Akira Kurosawa and Yasujirō Ozu introduced new filmmaking techniques to the masses; their 1940s-1950s films were great, but some filmmakers, like Hiroshi Teshigahara and Nagisa Ōshima felt they were better suited to make films about “modern” Japan. 

Here’s a quick video on the Japanese New Wave from Film Studies for YouTube.

Cinema Eras  •  Japanese New Wave Video Essay by Film Studies for YouTube

Some cinema historians combine the Japanese New Wave with the post-war era. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll do the same: the major films of this era (1940s-1960s) include Rashomon (1950), Tokyo Story (1953), and Seven Samurai (1954).

The Iranian New Wave began about fifteen years after the end of World War II, circa 1960-onwards. Iranian cinema is an important part of Iranian culture. Here’s a quick video on Iranian cinema from BBC News.

Important Dates in Film History  •  Spotlight on Iran’s Film Industry via BBC News

Cinema historians widely consider Dariush Mehrjui’s The Cow (1969) to be a foundational film for the movement. Abbas Kiarostami is perhaps the most famous Iranian filmmaker of all-time. His film Close-Up (1990) is regarded as one of the greatest films ever produced in Iran.

The British New Wave was a minor film movement that was defined by kitchen-sink realism – or depictions of ordinary life. Many filmmakers of the British New Wave were critics before they were directors; and they wanted to depict the average life of Britain through a filmic eye.

Here’s a lecture on the British New Wave from Professor Ian Christie at Gresham College. 

History of Filmmaking  •  Street-Life and New Wave British Cinema by Gresham College

The British New Wave became synonymous with Cinéma vérité (cinema of truth) over the course of its brief existence. Some of the major pictures of the movement include: Look Back in Anger (1959) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960).

Russian cinema is complex… probably just as complex as American cinema. We could spend 100 pages talking about Russian cinema – but that’s not the focus of this article. We already talked about Soviet Montage Theory, so let’s skip ahead to post World War II Soviet cinema. 

When I think of post-war Soviet cinema, I think of one name: Andrei Tarkovsky . Tarkovsky directed internationally-renowned films like Andrei Rublev (1969), Solaris (1972), and Stalker (1979) in his brief career as the Soviet Union’s pre-eminent maestro. 

Here’s a deep dive into the works of Tarkovsky by “Like Stories of Old.”

Film Industry Timeline  •  Praying Through Cinema – Understanding Andrei Tarkovsky by Like Stories of Old

Tarkovsky wasn’t the only great filmmaker in the post-war Soviet Union – but he was probably the best. I’d be remiss if I didn’t use this section to focus on him. 

History of Film Timeline

The golden age of hollywood.

The Hollywood Golden Age began with the fall of pre-Code Hollywood (1934) and lasted until the birth of New Hollywood (1968).

• Major stars of the Hollywood Golden Age: Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Ingrid Bergman, Henry Fonda, Kirk Douglas, Gregory Peck, Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, James Dean, Marlon Brando.
• Major filmmakers of the Hollywood Golden Age: Cecil B. DeMille , Orson Welles , Billy Wilder , Frank Capra , John Huston , Alfred Hitchcock , John Ford , Elia Kazan , David Lean , Joseph Manckiewicz.

Notice how many names we included? It’s ridiculous – it would be wrong to omit any of them; and still, there are probably dozens of iconic figures missing. The Hollywood Golden Age was all about stars. Stars sold pictures and the studios knew it. “Hepburn” could sell a movie every time; it didn’t matter which Hepburn – or what the movie was about.

Here’s a breakdown of the Hollywood Golden Age from Crash Course.

History of Movies  •  The Golden Age of Hollywood by Crash Course

There are a few sub-eras within the Hollywood Golden Age era; let’s break them down in detail.

Important Dates in Film History  •  Photo of MPPDA Chairman William Hays

In 1934, Chairman William Hays of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America instituted a production code that banned graphic cinematic depictions of sex, violence, and other illicit deeds. 

The “Production Code” or “ Hays Code ” was responsible for the censorship of Hollywood films for 34 years. 

For more on the history of Hollywood censorship and movie ratings, check out the video from Filmmaker IQ below.

How Has Film Changed Over Time?  •  History of Hollywood Censorship by Filmmaker IQ

The Hays Code kept cinema tame, which led to Hollywood romanticism. But it also made cinema unrealistic, which made the American public yearn for improbable outcomes. Not to mention that it set race relations back an indeterminable amount of years. The Hays Code specifically forbade miscegenation, or “the breeding of people of different races.” 

Ultimately, the censorship of Hollywood films was about keeping power in the hands of people with power. It had some positive unintended outcomes – but it wasn’t worth the cost of suppression.

Learn more about the Hays Code →

Learn more about the history of movie censorship →

Film Industry Timeline  •  Still from Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place’

Film noir is a style of film that’s defined by moralistic themes, high contrast lighting, and mysterious plots. Oftentimes, film noirs feature hardboiled protagonists . It’s important to note that film noir is a style, not a film movement. As such, we won’t list “film noir directors,” but we will list some iconic examples of film noir.

Major Hollywood film noirs: The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Hollywood film noirs were inspired by classic detective fiction stories, like those of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe. Over time, film noir was adopted as a style around the world – most famously in Great Britain with Carol Reed’s The Third Man .

Here’s a video on defining film noir from Jack’s Movie Reviews.

Eras of Movies  •  Defining Film Noir by Jack’s Movie Reviews

We could spend another 50 pages on film noir (like many other topics in this compendium) – but instead, let’s continue on.

Learn more about film noir →

How Movies Have Changed Over Time  •  Still from John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’

Hollywood westerns were incredibly popular during the Golden Age. Why? Because the American people loved stories of lawlessness and expansion, dating all the way back to Erastus Beadle’s dime novels – making the western the perfect subgenre for vicarious cinema.

Major Hollywood westerns: Stagecoach (1939), High Noon (1952), The Searchers (1956). 

Westerns, much like film noirs, allowed repressed audiences to feel alive at the movie theater. Remember: Hollywood films were censored during the Golden Age, which meant you couldn’t find graphic violence or pornography at the theaters. So, audiences took what they could get – which was usually film noirs and Westerns.

Here’s a video on the history of Westerns in Hollywood cinema. 

Evolution of Film  •  Western Movies History by Ministry of Cinema

Hollywood westerns inspired a global fascination with cowboys, mercenaries, and gunslingers, directly leading to samurai cinema, spaghetti westerns, zapata westerns, and neo-westerns.

Learn more about Spaghetti Westerns →

Learn more about Neo-Westerns →

McCARTHYISM & THE BLACKLIST

How Movies Have Changed Over Time  •  Bryan Cranston as Blacklisted Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo

In 1947, the state of Wisconsin elected notorious fear-monger Joseph McCarthy as senator of their state. McCarthy hated free-speech – that’s not a one-sided perspective, that’s the truth. McCarthy spent his entire career demagoguing, and his legacy shows that. 

In 1950, ten Hollywood screenwriters were summoned to appear before the United States Congress House of Un-American Activities, largely because of McCarthy's divisive rhetoric against communist sympathizers. The screenwriters were cited for contempt of congress and fired from their jobs, and thus, the blacklist was born.

For more on McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist , check out the video from Ted-Ed below.

The History of Film  •  McCarthyism and the Blacklist by Ted-Ed

The Hollywood blacklist derailed the careers of hundreds of writers, directors, and producers from 1950-1960. The blacklist ended when Kirk Douglas credited Dalton Trumbo – one of the most famous blacklisted screenwriters – as the screenwriter of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus , effectively taking back control of Hollywood.

Learn more about the Hollywood Blacklist →

THE PARAMOUNT CASE

The History of Film  •  Paramount Studios Classic Style Logo

In 1948, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the five major motion picture studios: Paramount, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO violated the U.S. Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890.

As a result of the decision, movie studios could no longer solely create and distribute movies to their own theaters.

It may not sound important, but the Paramount Case changed everything for American cinema. Here’s a quick video on the Case and its lasting impact on Hollywood.

The History of Filmmaking  •  Film History 101: The Paramount Decree by Omar Rivera

The Paramount Case opened the door for international films and independent theaters. It also gave businesses more freedom to show movies outside of the MPPDA ratings system.

Evolution of Cinema

New hollywood.

Movie History  •  Still from Arthur Penn’s’ Bonnie and Clyde’

• New Hollywood, otherwise known as the Hollywood New Wave, introduced “the film school generation” to Hollywood. New Hollywood films are defined as larger in scope, darker in subject matter, and overtly more graphic than their Golden Age predecessors.
• Major New Hollywood filmmakers: George Lucas , Steven Spielberg , Martin Scorsese , Brian De Palma , Peter Bogdanovich, Woody Allen , Francis Ford Coppola , James Cameron .
• Major New Hollywood films: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Easy Rider (1969), Midnight Cowboy (1969), The Godfather (1972), American Graffiti (1973).

New Hollywood ushered American filmmaking into a new era by returning to the popular genres of the pre-Code era, such as gangster films and sex-centric films. It also marked the emergence of “film-school” directors like George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. It’s clear from watching New Hollywood films that the writers and directors who produced them were acutely aware of cinema history. 

During this era, writers like Woody Allen employed themes of existentialist cinema found in the French New Wave and Italian Neorealism (among other movements). Directors like Martin Scorsese utilized advanced framing techniques pioneered by masters of the pre-war era.

For more on New Hollywood, check out this feature documentary based Peter Biskind's seminal book "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls."

Movie History  •  How New Hollywood Was Born

New Hollywood (and its immediate aftermath) produced some of the greatest films of all-time: such as The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Chinatown   (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Network (1976), and Annie Hall (1977).

Somewhat tragically, New Hollywood ended with the emergence of blockbuster films – such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977) – in the mid to late 1970s.

Learn more about New Hollywood →

Eras of Movies

Dogme 95 and independent movements.

Big-budget movies dominated the movie-scene after New Hollywood ended. Suddenly, cinema became more of a spectacle than an art-form. That’s not to say movies produced during this era (1975-1995) were bad – some big-budget films, like Back to the Future (1985) and   Jurassic Park (1993) were financially successful and critically acclaimed; and writer/directors like John Hughes found enormous success making studio films about seemingly mundane life. 

But despite the financial prospect of making contrived studio films, some filmmakers decided to go back to their roots and make films independently, much in the vein of the artists of the French New Wave. This spirit inspired the Danish Dogme 95 movement and the American Independent movement.

Evolution of Film  •  Photo Still from ‘Festen’ by Thomas Vinterberg

D0gme 95 – a Danish film movement that brought filmmaking back to its primal roots: no non-diegetic sound, no superficial action, and no director credit. 

Major Dogme 95 filmmakers: Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier

Major Dogme 95 films: Dogme #1 – Festen (1998), Dogme #2 – The Idiots (1998), Dogme #12 – Italian for Beginners (2000).

It’s ironic that Dogme 95 , which states the director must not be credited, is perhaps best known for the fame of two of its founders: Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier. Dogme 95 sought to rid cinema of extravagant special effects and challenging productions by making the filmmaking process as simple as possible. To do this, its founders created the Vows of Chastity: a ten-part manifesto for Dogme 95 filmmaking.

Check out a video on the Vows of Chastity and Dogme 95 below.

History of Cinema  •  Vows of Chastity – Films of Dogme 95 by FilmStruck

Ultimately, the Vows of Chastity proved too limiting for filmmakers – but their influence lives on in New Danish cinema and independent films all over the world.

Learn more about Dogme 95 →

History of Cinema  •  Still from Kevin Smith’s ‘Clerks’

Indie film – or late 80s, early 90s cinema produced outside of the major motion picture system – was about experimenting with new cinematic forms, pushing the Generation Next agenda, and making art by any means necessary. 

Major indie filmmakers: Richard Linklater , Wes Anderson , Steven Soderbergh , Jim Jarmusch . 

Major indie films: Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Slacker (1990), and Bottle Rocket (1994).

The American indie movement launched the careers of a myriad of great directors. It also marked the beginning of a major decline for film. The advent of digital cameras and DVDs meant film was becoming a luxury. Conversely, it meant procuring the necessary equipment needed to make movies was easier than ever.

Indie-films introduced the idea that anybody could make movies. For better or worse, the point proved to be true. The '90s and early 2000s were littered with independently produced, scarcely funded movies. It was unrestrained, but it was also liberating.

Check out this video on no-budget filmmaking from The Royal Ocean Film Society to learn more about the indie movement.

Evolution of Cinema  •  Lessons for the No-Budget Feature by The Royal Ocean Film Society

The indie movement (as it was known then) ended when the major studios (like Disney and Turner) bought the independent studios (like Miramax and New Line). Today, we often refer to minimalist, low-budget movies as independent, but the truth is just about every production studio is owned by a conglomerate.

How Has the Film Industry Changed?

New distribution methods.

The current state of cinema is in flux due to a wide array of issues, including (but not limited to) the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, the wide-adoption of new streaming services from first-party producers, i.e. Netflix, Disney, Paramount, etc., and the growth of new media forms.

Over the last few years, big-budget epics like Marvel’s The Avengers and Star Wars have performed well at the U.S. and Chinese box-office, but their success has often come at the expense of medium-budget movies; the result being a deeper lining of the pockets of exorbitantly wealthy corporations.

Still, there’s a lot of money to be made – a point perhaps best proven by the rise of the Chinese film industry. In 2020, China overtook North America as the world’s biggest box-office market, per THR. Check out a video on Hengdian, China’s largest film studio from South China Morning Report.

Movie History  •  Inside China’s Largest Film Studio by South China Morning Report

Movies seem to get bigger and bigger every year but the development of computer-generated-imagery and compositing techniques has given filmmakers the technology to create vast worlds in limited spaces.

So: what’s next for film? Who’s to say for certain? The future of the industry looks cloudy – but there’s definite promise on the horizon. More people have cinema-capable cameras in their pocket today than ever before. Perhaps the next great movement will take off soon.

Related Posts

• What is CinemaScope  →
• When Was the Camera Invented →
• What Was the First Movie Ever Made  →

100 Years of Cinematography

The history of film includes a lot more than what we went over here. In 2019, the American Society of Cinematographers celebrated 100 years of great cinematography with a list of legendary works. In our next article, we break down some of the ASC’s choices with video examples. Follow along as we look at the work of Conrad Hall, Vittorio Storaro, and more.

Up Next: Best Cinematography of All-Time →

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The First Film review – a secret cinematic history

Were the first ever moving pictures made in Leeds by Louis Le Prince? David Nicholas Wilkinson’s intriguing documentary makes a convincing case

W hat starts as a somewhat creaky investigation into the blue-plaque claim that Louis Le Prince “probably” made the world’s first short films in Leeds in 1888 mutates into something altogether more moving and mysterious as director/presenter David Nicholas Wilkinson is consumed by the magic of the moving image. Arguing convincingly that Le Prince’s experiments beat both Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers to the punch, Wilkinson traces the strange story of his subject’s disappearance from the world, and from the history books. Although some of his on-screen discoveries seem staged (“Look, here it is!”), there’s no faking the passion and sincerity that Wilkinson brings to the few fleeting seconds of footage at the heart of this story. Anyone who enjoyed Thomas Lawes’s The Last Projectionist will swoon at this insider’s view of the first movie cameras, while others will be captivated by a flickering story that blends intrigue, industrial espionage, and possibly even murder.

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World’s first feature film

1906: World’s first feature-length film The Story of the Kelly Gang produced in Victoria

Still image showing a shoot out in the bar, from The Story of the Kelly Gang . National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

On Boxing Day 1906 The Story of the Kelly Gang opened at the Athenaeum Theatre in Melbourne. It was the first multi-reel, feature-length film ever produced in the world.

The film caused controversy by presenting the Kelly gang sympathetically. The Victorian Government tried to censor it but the public flocked to screenings around Australia and then internationally.

Paul Byrnes, film critic:

It is difficult now, 100 years later, to imagine the impact the film must have had on audiences in 1906.

The Story of the Kelly Gang daybill. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Early motion pictures

Moving films were shown to the public in the 1890s in Europe and North America by travelling exhibitors who set up in temporary spaces, or in conjunction with vaudeville programs in permanent theatres around the world.

The popularity of the medium made it clear that moving films could be presented as stand-alone entertainment. Evening-long programs of silent films interspersed with sound recordings of the latest popular musicians became commonplace.

One of the first commercial film successes was the American movie The Great Train Robbery in 1903.

It was just over 10 minutes long, a typical length for the time, but it was the first film with a cohesive narrative. The Great Train Robbery ’s success spread worldwide.

Australian film history

In Melbourne, the Tait family of five brothers, who were all involved in show business, had begun including films in their concert programs at the Athenaeum Theatre.

They had been impressed by The Great Train Robbery although it was being exhibited by a rival entrepreneur.

In early 1906 the Taits took their first step into movie production when they financed Living Hawthorne , a documentary-style short film about the Melbourne suburb.

John and Nevin Tait had been influenced by several long-running stage productions about bushranger Ned Kelly's last stand at Glenrowan in 1880.

By the turn of the 20th century the Kelly story had become a myth familiar to many Australians and the Taits saw it as a perfect subject for a longer narrative film.

Production of The Story of the Kelly Gang

The Story of the Kelly Gang was financed jointly by the Taits and Millard Johnson and William Gibson. Johnson and Gibson were chemists by profession, but they had acquired a projector and were successfully showing films to crowds across Melbourne.

Charles Tait, the brother with the most theatrical production experience, directed the movie. Some of the cast and costumes were secured from a local theatre company that had staged a recent production of the Kelly story.

The film was shot around Melbourne. The outdoor scenes were probably filmed at the estate of Charles Tait’s wife’s family near Heidelberg. Some of the interior scenes were shot on sets built in the back garden of Tait’s home.

The production took six months and cost £1,000, a large amount at that time.

First screenings

The Story of the Kelly Gang opened at the Athenaeum Theatre on Collins Street on 26 December 1906. It ran for five weeks to full houses. An actor, sometimes two, added voices to the screening and young boys were employed backstage to create sound effects.

The film opened at the Palace Theatre in Sydney in February 1907 and then moved to Adelaide and Brisbane.

The Biograph Company was employed to tour the film to regional towns across Australia and by September 1907 it was being shown in New Zealand and in England where it was advertised as the ‘longest film ever made’.

The Story of the Kelly Gang was edited multiple times over the years and was 70 to 80 minutes long, depending on the edition.

Financially the film was a great success, with William Gibson claiming the production returned £25,000 to its investors.

Film censorship

The film depicted Ned Kelly as a hero and the police as villains. This displeased the Victorian Government and police who claimed The Story of the Kelly Gang was responsible for an increase in crime. The film was banned in Benalla and Wangaratta, towns in the north of the state with connections to the Kelly story.

In April 1912 the Victorian Government banned a revised version of the film from being screened altogether.

Legacy of The Story of the Kelly Gang

The Story of the Kelly Gang was shown internationally and became a starting point for the development of narrative feature films, which continue to thrive to this day.

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Restoration of the original 1906 film, Australian Screen

Tait Brothers, Australian Dictionary of Biography

Scott Murray (ed), Australian Cinema , Allen and Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1994.

Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film: 1900–1977 , Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1998.

Saskia Vanderbent, Australian Film , Pocket Essentials, Harpeden, UK, 2006.

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Clint Eastwood

• Born May 31 , 1930 · San Francisco, California, USA
• Birth name Clinton Eastwood Jr.
• Height 6′ 4″ (1.93 m)
• Clint Eastwood was born May 31, 1930 in San Francisco, to Clinton Eastwood Sr., a bond salesman and later manufacturing executive for Georgia-Pacific Corporation, and Ruth Wood (née Margaret Ruth Runner), a housewife turned IBM clerk. He grew up in nearby Piedmont. At school Clint took interest in music and mechanics, but was an otherwise bored student; this resulted in being held back a grade. In 1949, the year he's said to have graduated high school, his parents and younger sister Jeanne moved to Seattle. Clint spent a couple years in the Pacific Northwest himself, operating log broncs in Springfield, Oregon, with summer gigs lifeguarding in Renton, Washington. Returning to California in 1951, he did a two-year stint at Fort Ord Military Reservation and later enrolled at L.A. City College, but dropped out to pursue acting. During the mid-'50s he landed uncredited bit parts in such B-films as Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Tarantula (1955) while digging swimming pools and driving a garbage truck to supplement his income. In 1958, he landed his first consequential acting role in the long-running TV show Rawhide (1959) with Eric Fleming . Though only a secondary player the first seven seasons, Clint was promoted to series star when Fleming departed--both literally and figuratively--in its final year, along the way becoming a recognizable face to television viewers around the country. Eastwood's big-screen breakthrough came as The Man with No Name in Sergio Leone 's trilogy of excellent spaghetti westerns: A Fistful of Dollars (1964) , For a Few Dollars More (1965) , and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) . The movies were shown exclusively in Italy during their respective copyright years with Enrico Maria Salerno providing the voice of Clint's character, finally getting American distribution in 1967/68. As the last film racked up respectable grosses, Eastwood, 37, rose from a barely registering actor to sought-after commodity in just a matter of months. Again a success was the late-blooming star's first U.S.-made western, Hang 'Em High (1968) . He followed that up with the lead role in Coogan's Bluff (1968) (the loose inspiration for the TV series McCloud (1970) ), before playing second fiddle to Richard Burton in the World War II epic Where Eagles Dare (1968) and Lee Marvin in the bizarre musical Paint Your Wagon (1969) . In Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) and Kelly's Heroes (1970) , Eastwood leaned in an experimental direction by combining tough-guy action with offbeat humor. 1971 proved to be his busiest year in film. He starred as a sleazy Union soldier in The Beguiled (1971) to critical acclaim, and made his directorial debut with the classic erotic thriller Play Misty for Me (1971) . His role as the hard edge police inspector in Dirty Harry (1971) , meanwhile, boosted him to cultural icon status and helped popularize the loose-cannon cop genre. Eastwood put out a steady stream of entertaining movies thereafter: the westerns Joe Kidd (1972) , High Plains Drifter (1973) and The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) (his first of six onscreen collaborations with then live-in love Sondra Locke ), the Dirty Harry sequels Magnum Force (1973) and The Enforcer (1976) , the action-packed road adventures Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and The Gauntlet (1977) , and the prison film Escape from Alcatraz (1979) . He branched out into the comedy genre in 1978 with Every Which Way But Loose (1978) , which became the biggest hit of his career up to that time; taking inflation into account, it still is. In short, The Eiger Sanction (1975) notwithstanding, the '70s were nonstop success for Clint. Eastwood kicked off the '80s with Any Which Way You Can (1980) , the blockbuster sequel to Every Which Way but Loose. The fourth Dirty Harry film, Sudden Impact (1983) , was the highest-grossing film of the franchise and spawned his trademark catchphrase: "Make my day." Clint also starred in Bronco Billy (1980) , Firefox (1982) , Tightrope (1984) , City Heat (1984) , Pale Rider (1985) and Heartbreak Ridge (1986) , all of which were solid hits, with Honkytonk Man (1982) being his only commercial failure of the period. In 1988 he did his fifth and final Dirty Harry movie, The Dead Pool (1988) . Although it was a success overall, it did not have the box office punch the previous films had. About this time, with outright bombs like Pink Cadillac (1989) and The Rookie (1990) , it seemed Eastwood's star was declining as it never had before. He then started taking on low-key projects, directing Bird (1988) , a biopic of Charlie Parker that earned him a Golden Globe, and starring in and directing White Hunter Black Heart (1990) , an uneven, loose biopic of John Huston (both films had a limited release). Eastwood bounced back--big time--with his dark western Unforgiven (1992) , which garnered the then 62-year-old his first ever Academy Award nomination (Best Actor), and an Oscar win for Best Director. Churning out a quick follow-up hit, he took on the secret service in In the Line of Fire (1993) , then accepted second billing for the first time since 1970 in the interesting but poorly received A Perfect World (1993) with Kevin Costner . Next up was a love story, The Bridges of Madison County (1995) , where Clint surprised audiences with a sensitive performance alongside none other than Meryl Streep . But it soon became apparent he was going backwards after his brief revival. Subsequent films were credible, but nothing really stuck out. Absolute Power (1997) and Space Cowboys (2000) did well enough, while True Crime (1999) and Blood Work (2002) were received badly, as was Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997) , which he directed but didn't appear in. Eastwood surprised again in the mid-'00s, returning to the top of the A-list with Million Dollar Baby (2004) . Also starring Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman , the hugely successful drama won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Clint. He scored his second Best Actor nomination, too. Eastwood's next starring vehicle, Gran Torino (2008) , earned almost $30 million in its opening weekend and was his highest grosser unadjusted for inflation. 2012 saw him in a rare lighthearted movie, Trouble with the Curve (2012) , as well as a reality show, Mrs. Eastwood & Company (2012) . Between acting jobs, Clint chalked up an impressive list of credits behind the camera. He directed Mystic River (2003) (in which Sean Penn and Tim Robbins gave Oscar-winning performances), Flags of Our Fathers (2006) , Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) (nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Changeling (2008) (a vehicle for Angelina Jolie ), Invictus (2009) (again with Freeman), Hereafter (2010) , J. Edgar (2011) , Jersey Boys (2014) , American Sniper (2014) (2014's top box office champ), Sully (2016) (starring Tom Hanks as hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger ) and The 15:17 to Paris (2018) . Back on screens after a considerable absence, he played an unlikely drug courier in The Mule (2018) , which reached the top of the box office with a nine-figure gross, then directed Richard Jewell (2019) . At age 91, Eastwood made history as the oldest actor to star above the title in a movie with the release of Cry Macho (2021) . Away from the limelight, Eastwood has led an aberrant existence and is described by biographer Patrick McGilligan as a cunning manipulator of the media. His convoluted slew of partners and children are now somewhat factually acknowledged, but for the first three decades of his celebrity, his personal life was kept top secret, and several of his families were left out of the official narrative. The actor refuses to disclose his exact number of offspring even to this day. He had a longtime relationship with similarly abstruse co-star Locke (who died aged 74 in 2018, though for her entire public life she masqueraded about being younger), and has fathered at least eight children by at least six different women in an unending string of liaisons, many of which overlapped. He has been married only twice, however, with a mere three of his progeny coming from those unions. Clint's known children are: Laurie Murray (b. 1954), whose mother is unidentified; Kimber Eastwood (b. 1964) with stuntwoman Roxanne Tunis ; Kyle Eastwood (b. 1968) and Alison Eastwood (b. 1972) with his first ex-wife, Margaret Neville Johnson ; Scott Eastwood (b. 1986) and Kathryn Eastwood (b. 1988) with stewardess Jacelyn Reeves; Francesca Eastwood (b. 1993) with actress Frances Fisher ; and Morgan Eastwood (b. 1996) with his second ex-wife, Dina Eastwood . The entire time that he lived with Locke--by all accounts the love of his life--she was legally married to sculptor Gordon Anderson . Eastwood has real estate holdings in Bel-Air, La Quinta, Carmel-by-the-Sea, Cassel (in remote northern California), Idaho's Sun Valley and Kihei, Hawaii. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Scott- [email protected]
• Spouses Dina Eastwood (March 31, 1996 - December 22, 2014) (divorced, 1 child) Margaret Neville Johnson (December 19, 1953 - November 19, 1984) (divorced, 2 children)
• Children Kimber Eastwood Kyle Eastwood Alison Eastwood Scott Eastwood Kathryn Eastwood Francesca Eastwood Morgan Eastwood Laurie Murray
• Parents Clinton Eastwood Sr. Ruth Wood Ruth Eastwood
• Relatives Jeanne Bernhardt (Sibling) Lowell Murray (Grandchild) Clint Frovarp McCartney (Grandchild) Kelsey Hayford (Grandchild) Clinton McCartney Jr. (Great Grandchild) Penelope McCartney (Great Grandchild) Wells Hayford (Great Grandchild) Beau Hayford (Great Grandchild)
• During the credits at the end of his movies, the camera will move around the location it was filmed in, after which there will be freezeframe for the rest of the credits.
• Frequently uses shadow lightning in his films
• Known on-set as a director for filming very few takes and having an easy shooting schedule. Tim Robbins once said that when working on Mystic River (2003) , Eastwood would usually ask for only one take, or two "if you were lucky", and that a day of filming would consist of starting "no earlier than 9 a.m. and you leave, usually, after lunch."
• The lead characters in his movie are often outsiders with a dark past they prefer not to remember
• Narrow eyes and towering height
• At age 74, he became the oldest person to win the Best Director Oscar for Million Dollar Baby (2004) .
• When he directs, he insists that his actors wear as little makeup as possible and he likes to print first takes. As a result, his films consistently finish on schedule and on budget.
• When directing, he simply says "okay" instead of "action" and "cut." (source: Shootout (2003) ).
• Learned mountain climbing for The Eiger Sanction (1975) because he felt the scenes were too dangerous for him to pay a stuntman to do for him. He was the last climber up The Totem Pole in Monument Valley, and as part of the contract, the movie crew removed the pitons left by decades of other climbers. The scene where he was hanging off the mountain by a single rope was actually Eastwood, and not a stuntman.
• As a director, he has always refused to test screen his films before their release.
• [on Sondra Locke ] She plays the victim very well. Unfortunately she had cancer and so she plays that card.
• [to Eli Wallach prior to starting work on The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) ] Never trust anyone on an Italian movie. I know about these things. Stay away from special effects and explosives.
• [what he says after a take, instead of "Cut!"] That's enough of that shit.
• I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live.
• I love every aspect of the creation of motion pictures and I guess I am committed to it for life.
• Hereafter (2010) - $6,000,000
• Invictus (2009) - $6,000,000
• In the Line of Fire (1993) - $7,000,000
• White Hunter Black Heart (1990) - No upfront fee in exchange for unspecified percentage of the gross
• Heartbreak Ridge (1986) - $10,000,000

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Screen Rant

First man & 9 other movies to watch if you love historical biographies.

First Man is a historic biopic about Neil Armstrong and if you enjoyed that, there are plenty of similar biographic films out there.

Historical biographies are not movies that appeal to everyone. Indeed, most of the time, such movies take on a serious tone to depict real-life events as accurately as possible (though they don't always succeed in this). In fact, biopics can often come off as boring if they don't have a grain of humor in them.

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Yet, such movies are a necessary part of cinema because they allow audiences to learn about important historical events and significant figures in an enjoyable and easy way. Fortunately, there are historical biographies about virtually any topic, so everyone will definitely find something they will like.

Creation (2009)

Though not a very well-known movie, 2009's Creation has been well-received by audiences and is an interesting addition to Paul Bettany's career.

A fictionalized account of what is recounted in the book the movie is based on, it follows Charles Darwin and his relationship with his wife Emma. As Charles recalls his memories about his daughter Annie, he struggles to write his monumental work On the Origin of Species .

The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015)

A moderate success at the box office, 2015's The Man Who Knew Infinity stars Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons, and was received well both by critics and audiences.

Based on the book of the same name, it tells the real-life story of a poor Indian mathematician named Srinivasa Ramanujan who is admitted to Cambridge University during World War I where he is guided by professor G.H. Hardy to become a pioneer in mathematical theories.

First Man (2018)

One of the most recent space movies, Damien Chazelle's First Man is a film that feels real thanks to its minimalistic yet powerful performances. Starring  Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong , it was both a critical and box office success.

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Based on the 2005 book by James R. Hansen, it depicts the years leading up to the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon in 1969 with Neil Armstrong being the protagonist. It did so by telling this iconic story in an intimate fashion.

Apollo 13 (1995)

Unlike other movies on this list, Apollo 13 is a docudrama meaning that it is a reenactment of the events that actually happened and comes as close as possible to the true story. Starring Tom Hanks , Kevin Bacon, and Bill Paxton, it was a huge success and went down in history as one of the best movies about space ever made.

An adaptation of the 1994 book Lost Moon , it reenacts the story of astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise who are on America's fifth crewed mission to the Moon that suddenly goes awry because of an explosion and turns into a struggle to get the three men home safely.

The Theory Of Everything (2014)

Arguably one of the most inspiring biopics of all time, The Theory of Everything stars the talented Eddie Redmayne  as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife Jane Hawking. It was a critical and commercial success with Jones getting a Best Actress Academy Award nomination and Redmayne winning for Best Actor.

Based on Jane Hawking's book Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen , the film depicts the life of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking as he meets his wife, gets diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and makes significant findings in the field of physics.

Hidden Figures (2016)

History is often written by those in the spotlight, so some instrumental people often stay unnoticed - and Hidden Figures is the movie that tries to right this wrong. Starring Taraji P. Henson , Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, it shined with critics and fans and went on to receive multiple award nominations.

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Based on the non-fiction book of the same name, it follows three Black female mathematicians who worked for NASA during the Space Race and helped calculate flight trajectories for and supervised various missions.

October Sky (1999)

A forgotten work in  Jake Gyllenhaal's filmography , October Sky is actually a very motivational and inspiring story about always following your dreams no matter how many people believe in you or what background you come from.

Based on the memoir of the same name, it depicts the true story of a coal miner's son named Homer H. Hickam Jr. who was inspired by the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and decided to become a NASA engineer against his father's wishes.

The Right Stuff (1983)

One of the best movies about space exploration, The Right Stuff was a box office failure yet it received widespread critical acclaim and won four Academy Awards out of the eight nominations it received.

Based on the book of the same name, it follows the test pilots involved in aeronautical research at Edwards Air Force Base and the seven military pilots known as the Mercury Seven who were selected for the first-ever human spaceflight by the United States known as the Project Mercury. It has since been adapted into a National Geographic series on Disney+.

The Imitation Game (2014)

A great success with critics and audiences, The Imitation Game stars Benedict Cumberbatch  and Keira Knightley among others, and was nominated for and won multiple awards (including a win for Best Adapted Screenplay).

Based on the 1983 biography by Andrew Hodges, it follows British cryptoanalyst Alan Turing who worked for the British government during World War II decrypting German intelligence messages.

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A movie that The Imitation Game is often compared to, A Beautiful Mind stars Russell Crowe , Ed Harris, and Jennifer Connelly among others, and was likewise a big success both with critics and at the box office.

Based on the book of the same name, it depicts the life of the American mathematician John Nash with the story beginning when Nash was a graduate student at Princeton University. As the story goes on, he is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which affects his life and relationships.

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O.J. Simpson, Football Star Whose Trial Riveted the Nation, Dies at 76

He ran to football fame and made fortunes in movies. His trial for the murder of his former wife and her friend became an inflection point on race in America.

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By Robert D. McFadden

O.J. Simpson, who ran to fame on the football field, made fortunes as an all-American in movies, television and advertising, and was acquitted of killing his former wife and her friend in a 1995 trial in Los Angeles that mesmerized the nation, died on Wednesday at his home in Las Vegas. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, his family announced on social media.

The jury in the murder trial cleared him, but the case, which had held up a cracked mirror to Black and white America, changed the trajectory of his life. In 1997, a civil suit by the victims’ families found him liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald L. Goldman, and ordered him to pay $33.5 million in damages. He paid little of the debt, moved to Florida and struggled to remake his life, raise his children and stay out of trouble.

In 2006, he sold a book manuscript, titled “If I Did It,” and a prospective TV interview, giving a “hypothetical” account of murders he had always denied committing. A public outcry ended both projects, but Mr. Goldman’s family secured the book rights, added material imputing guilt to Mr. Simpson and had it published.

In 2007, he was arrested after he and other men invaded a Las Vegas hotel room of some sports memorabilia dealers and took a trove of collectibles. He claimed that the items had been stolen from him, but a jury in 2008 found him guilty of 12 charges, including armed robbery and kidnapping, after a trial that drew only a smattering of reporters and spectators. He was sentenced to nine to 33 years in a Nevada state prison. He served the minimum term and was released in 2017.

Over the years, the story of O.J. Simpson generated a tide of tell-all books, movies, studies and debate over questions of justice, race relations and celebrity in a nation that adores its heroes, especially those cast in rags-to-riches stereotypes, but that has never been comfortable with its deeper contradictions.

There were many in the Simpson saga. Yellowing old newspaper clippings yield the earliest portraits of a postwar child of poverty afflicted with rickets and forced to wear steel braces on his spindly legs, of a hardscrabble life in a bleak housing project and of hanging with teenage gangs in the tough back streets of San Francisco, where he learned to run.

“Running, man, that’s what I do,” he said in 1975, when he was one of America’s best-known and highest-paid football players, the Buffalo Bills’ electrifying, swivel-hipped ball carrier, known universally as the Juice. “All my life I’ve been a runner.”

And so he had — running to daylight on the gridiron of the University of Southern California and in the roaring stadiums of the National Football League for 11 years; running for Hollywood movie moguls, for Madison Avenue image-makers and for television networks; running to pinnacles of success in sports and entertainment.

Along the way, he broke college and professional records, won the Heisman Trophy and was enshrined in pro football’s Hall of Fame. He appeared in dozens of movies and memorable commercials for Hertz and other clients; was a sports analyst for ABC and NBC; acquired homes, cars and a radiant family; and became an American idol — a handsome warrior with the gentle eyes and soft voice of a nice guy. And he played golf.

It was the good life, on the surface. But there was a deeper, more troubled reality — about an infant daughter drowning in the family pool and a divorce from his high school sweetheart; about his stormy marriage to a stunning young waitress and her frequent calls to the police when he beat her; about the jealous rages of a frustrated man.

Calls to the Police

The abuse left Nicole Simpson bruised and terrified on scores of occasions, but the police rarely took substantive action. After one call to the police on New Year’s Day, 1989, officers found her badly beaten and half-naked, hiding in the bushes outside their home. “He’s going to kill me!” she sobbed. Mr. Simpson was arrested and convicted of spousal abuse, but was let off with a fine and probation.

The couple divorced in 1992, but confrontations continued. On Oct. 25, 1993, Ms. Simpson called the police again. “He’s back,” she told a 911 operator, and officers once more intervened.

Then it happened. On June 12, 1994, Ms. Simpson, 35, and Mr. Goldman, 25, were attacked outside her condominium in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, not far from Mr. Simpson’s estate. She was nearly decapitated, and Mr. Goldman was slashed to death.

The knife was never found, but the police discovered a bloody glove at the scene and abundant hair, blood and fiber clues. Aware of Mr. Simpson’s earlier abuse and her calls for help, investigators believed from the start that Mr. Simpson, 46, was the killer. They found blood on his car and, in his home, a bloody glove that matched the one picked up near the bodies. There was never any other suspect.

Five days later, after Mr. Simpson had attended Nicole’s funeral with their two children, he was charged with the murders, but fled in his white Ford Bronco. With his old friend and teammate Al Cowlings at the wheel and the fugitive in the back holding a gun to his head and threatening suicide, the Bronco led a fleet of patrol cars and news helicopters on a slow 60-mile televised chase over the Southern California freeways.

Networks pre-empted prime-time programming for the spectacle, some of it captured by news cameras in helicopters, and a nationwide audience of 95 million people watched for hours. Overpasses and roadsides were crowded with spectators. The police closed highways and motorists pulled over to watch, some waving and cheering at the passing Bronco, which was not stopped. Mr. Simpson finally returned home and was taken into custody.

The ensuing trial lasted nine months, from January to early October 1995, and captivated the nation with its lurid accounts of the murders and the tactics and strategy of prosecutors and of a defense that included the “dream team” of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. , F. Lee Bailey , Alan M. Dershowitz, Barry Scheck and Robert L. Shapiro.

The prosecution, led by Marcia Clark and Christopher A. Darden, had what seemed to be overwhelming evidence: tests showing that blood, shoe prints, hair strands, shirt fibers, carpet threads and other items found at the murder scene had come from Mr. Simpson or his home, and DNA tests showing that the bloody glove found at Mr. Simpson’s home matched the one left at the crime scene. Prosecutors also had a list of 62 incidents of abusive behavior by Mr. Simpson against his wife.

But as the trial unfolded before Judge Lance Ito and a 12-member jury that included 10 Black people, it became apparent that the police inquiry had been flawed. Photo evidence had been lost or mislabeled; DNA had been collected and stored improperly, raising a possibility that it was tainted. And Detective Mark Fuhrman, a key witness, admitted that he had entered the Simpson home and found the matching glove and other crucial evidence — all without a search warrant.

‘If the Glove Don’t Fit’

The defense argued, but never proved, that Mr. Fuhrman planted the second glove. More damaging, however, was its attack on his history of racist remarks. Mr. Fuhrman swore that he had not used racist language for a decade. But four witnesses and a taped radio interview played for the jury contradicted him and undermined his credibility. (After the trial, Mr. Fuhrman pleaded no contest to a perjury charge. He was the only person convicted in the case.)

In what was seen as the crucial blunder of the trial, the prosecution asked Mr. Simpson, who was not called to testify, to try on the gloves. He struggled to do so. They were apparently too small.

“If the glove don’t fit, you must acquit,” Mr. Cochran told the jury later.

In the end, it was the defense that had the overwhelming case, with many grounds for reasonable doubt, the standard for acquittal. But it wanted more. It portrayed the Los Angeles police as racist, charged that a Black man was being railroaded, and urged the jury to think beyond guilt or innocence and send a message to a racist society.

On the day of the verdict, autograph hounds, T-shirt vendors, street preachers and paparazzi engulfed the courthouse steps. After what some news media outlets had called “The Trial of the Century,” producing 126 witnesses, 1,105 items of evidence and 45,000 pages of transcripts, the jury — sequestered for 266 days, longer than any in California history — deliberated for only three hours.

Much of America came to a standstill. In homes, offices, airports and malls, people paused to watch. Even President Bill Clinton left the Oval Office to join his secretaries. In court, cries of “Yes!” and “Oh, no!” were echoed across the nation as the verdict left many Black people jubilant and many white people aghast.

In the aftermath, Mr. Simpson and the case became the grist for television specials, films and more than 30 books, many by participants who made millions. Mr. Simpson, with Lawrence Schiller, produced “I Want to Tell You,” a thin mosaic volume of letters, photographs and self-justifying commentary that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and earned Mr. Simpson more than $1 million.

He was released after 474 days in custody, but his ordeal was hardly over. Much of the case was resurrected for the civil suit by the Goldman and Brown families. A predominantly white jury with a looser standard of proof held Mr. Simpson culpable and awarded the families $33.5 million in damages. The civil case, which excluded racial issues as inflammatory and speculative, was a vindication of sorts for the families and a blow to Mr. Simpson, who insisted that he had no chance of ever paying the damages.

Mr. Simpson had spent large sums for his criminal defense. Records submitted in the murder trial showed his net worth at about $11 million, and people with knowledge of the case said he had only $3.5 million afterward. A 1999 auction of his Heisman Trophy and other memorabilia netted about $500,000, which went to the plaintiffs. But court records show he paid little of the balance that was owed.

He regained custody of the children he had with Ms. Simpson, and in 2000 he moved to Florida, bought a home south of Miami and settled into a quiet life, playing golf and living on pensions from the N.F.L., the Screen Actors Guild and other sources, about $400,000 a year. Florida laws protect a home and pension income from seizure to satisfy court judgments.

The glamour and lucrative contracts were gone, but Mr. Simpson sent his two children to prep school and college. He was seen in restaurants and malls, where he readily obliged requests for autographs. He was fined once for powerboat speeding in a manatee zone, and once for pirating cable television signals.

In 2006, as the debt to the murder victims’ families grew with interest to $38 million, he was sued by Fred Goldman, the father of Ronald Goldman, who contended that his book and television deal for “If I Did It” had advanced him $1 million and that it had been structured to cheat the family of the damages owed.

The projects were scrapped by News Corporation, parent of the publisher HarperCollins and the Fox Television Network, and a corporation spokesman said Mr. Simpson was not expected to repay an $800,000 advance. The Goldman family secured the book rights from a trustee after a bankruptcy court proceeding and had it published in 2007 under the title “If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.” On the book’s cover, the “If” appeared in tiny type, and the “I Did It” in large red letters.

Another Trial, and Prison

After years in which it seemed he had been convicted in the court of public opinion, Mr. Simpson in 2008 again faced a jury. This time he was accused of raiding a Las Vegas hotel room in 2007 with five other men, most of them convicted criminals and two armed with guns, to steal a trove of sports memorabilia from a pair of collectible dealers.

Mr. Simpson claimed that he was only trying to retrieve items stolen from him, including eight footballs, two plaques and a photo of him with the F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover, and that he had not known about any guns. But four men, who had been arrested with him and pleaded guilty, testified against him, two saying they had carried guns at his request. Prosecutors also played hours of tapes secretly recorded by a co-conspirator detailing the planning and execution of the crime.

On Oct. 3 — 13 years to the day after his acquittal in Los Angeles — a jury of nine women and three men found him guilty of armed robbery, kidnapping, assault, conspiracy, coercion and other charges. After Mr. Simpson was sentenced to a minimum of nine years in prison, his lawyer vowed to appeal, noting that none of the jurors were Black and questioning whether they could be fair to Mr. Simpson after what had happened years earlier. But jurors said the double-murder case was never mentioned in deliberations.

In 2013, the Nevada Parole Board, citing his positive conduct in prison and participation in inmate programs, granted Mr. Simpson parole on several charges related to his robbery conviction. But the board left other verdicts in place. His bid for a new trial was rejected by a Nevada judge, and legal experts said that appeals were unlikely to succeed. He remained in custody until Oct. 1, 2017, when the parole board unanimously granted him parole when he became eligible.

Certain conditions of Mr. Simpson’s parole — travel restrictions, no contacts with co-defendants in the robbery case and no drinking to excess — remained until 2021, when they were lifted, making him a completely free man.

Questions about his guilt or innocence in the murders of his former wife and Mr. Goldman never went away. In May 2008, Mike Gilbert, a memorabilia dealer and former crony, said in a book that Mr. Simpson, high on marijuana, had admitted the killings to him after the trial. Mr. Gilbert quoted Mr. Simpson as saying that he had carried no knife but that he had used one that Ms. Simpson had in her hand when she opened the door. He also said that Mr. Simpson had stopped taking arthritis medicine to let his hands swell so that they would not fit the gloves in court. Mr. Simpson’s lawyer Yale L. Galanter denied Mr. Gilbert’s claims, calling him delusional.

In 2016, more than 20 years after his murder trial, the story of O.J. Simpson was told twice more for endlessly fascinated mass audiences on television. “The People v. O.J. Simpson,” Ryan Murphy’s installment in the “American Crime Story” anthology on FX, focused on the trial itself and on the constellation of characters brought together by the defendant (played by Cuba Gooding Jr.). “O.J.: Made in America,” a five-part, nearly eight-hour installment in ESPN’s “30 for 30” documentary series (it was also released in theaters), detailed the trial but extended the narrative to include a biography of Mr. Simpson and an examination of race, fame, sports and Los Angeles over the previous half-century.

A.O. Scott, in a commentary in The New York Times, called “The People v. O.J. Simpson” a “tightly packed, almost indecently entertaining piece of pop realism, a Dreiser novel infused with the spirit of Tom Wolfe” and said “O.J.: Made in America” had “the grandeur and authority of the best long-form fiction.”

In Leg Braces as a Child

Orenthal James Simpson was born in San Francisco on July 9, 1947, one of four children of James and Eunice (Durden) Simpson. As an infant afflicted with the calcium deficiency rickets, he wore leg braces for several years but outgrew his disability. His father, a janitor and cook, left the family when the child was 4, and his mother, a hospital nurse’s aide, raised the children in a housing project in the tough Potrero Hill district.

As a teenager, Mr. Simpson, who hated the name Orenthal and called himself O.J., ran with street gangs. But at 15 he was introduced by a friend to Willie Mays, the renowned San Francisco Giants outfielder. The encounter was inspirational and turned his life around, Mr. Simpson recalled. He joined the Galileo High School football team and won All-City honors in his senior year.

In 1967, Mr. Simpson married his high school sweetheart, Marguerite Whitley. The couple had three children, Arnelle, Jason and Aaren. Shortly after their divorce in 1979, Aaren, 23 months old, fell into a swimming pool at home and died a week later.

Mr. Simpson married Nicole Brown in 1985; the couple had a daughter, Sydney, and a son, Justin. He is survived by Arnelle, Jason, Sydney and Justin Simpson and three grandchildren, his lawyer Malcolm P. LaVergne said.

After being released from prison in Nevada in 2017, Mr. Simpson moved into the Las Vegas country club home of a wealthy friend, James Barnett, for what he assumed would be a temporary stay. But he found himself enjoying the local golf scene and making friends, sometimes with people who introduced themselves to him at restaurants, Mr. LaVergne said. Mr. Simpson decided to remain in Las Vegas full time. At his death, he lived right on the course of the Rhodes Ranch Golf Club.

From his youth, Mr. Simpson was a natural on the gridiron. He had dazzling speed, power and finesse in a broken field that made him hard to catch, let alone tackle. He began his collegiate career at San Francisco City College, scoring 54 touchdowns in two years. In his third year he transferred to Southern Cal, where he shattered records — rushing for 3,423 yards and 36 touchdowns in 22 games — and led the Trojans into the Rose Bowl in successive years. He won the Heisman Trophy as the nation’s best college football player of 1968. Some magazines called him the greatest running back in the history of the college game.

His professional career was even more illustrious, though it took time to get going. The No. 1 draft pick in 1969, Mr. Simpson went to the Buffalo Bills — the league’s worst team had the first pick — and was used sparingly in his rookie season; in his second, he was sidelined with a knee injury. But by 1971, behind a line known as the Electric Company because they “turned on the Juice,” he began breaking games open.

In 1973, Mr. Simpson became the first to rush for over 2,000 yards, breaking a record held by Jim Brown, and was named the N.F.L.’s most valuable player. In 1975, he led the American Football Conference in rushing and scoring. After nine seasons, he was traded to the San Francisco 49ers, his hometown team, and played his last two years with them. He retired in 1979 as the highest-paid player in the league, with a salary over $800,000, having scored 61 touchdowns and rushed for more than 11,000 yards in his career. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

Mr. Simpson’s work as a network sports analyst overlapped with his football years. He was a color commentator for ABC from 1969 to 1977, and for NBC from 1978 to 1982. He rejoined ABC on “Monday Night Football” from 1983 to 1986.

Actor and Pitchman

And he had a parallel acting career. He appeared in some 30 films as well as television productions, including the mini-series “Roots” (1977) and the movies “The Towering Inferno” (1974), “Killer Force” (1976), “Cassandra Crossing” (1976), “Capricorn One” (1977), “Firepower” (1979) and others, including the comedy “The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad” (1988) and its two sequels.

He did not pretend to be a serious actor. “I’m a realist,” he said. “No matter how many acting lessons I took, the public just wouldn’t buy me as Othello.”

Mr. Simpson was a congenial celebrity. He talked freely to reporters and fans, signed autographs, posed for pictures with children and was self-effacing in interviews, crediting his teammates and coaches, who clearly liked him. In an era of Black power displays, his only militancy was to crack heads on the gridiron.

His smiling, racially neutral image, easygoing manner and almost universal acceptance made him a perfect candidate for endorsements. Even before joining the N.F.L., he signed deals, including a three-year, $250,000 contract with Chevrolet. He later endorsed sporting goods, soft drinks, razor blades and other products.

In 1975, Hertz made him the first Black star of a national television advertising campaign. Memorable long-running commercials depicted him sprinting through airports and leaping over counters to get to a Hertz rental car. He earned millions, Hertz rentals shot up and the ads made O.J.’s face one of the most recognizable in America.

Mr. Simpson, in a way, wrote his own farewell on the day of his arrest. As he rode in the Bronco with a gun to his head, a friend, Robert Kardashian, released a handwritten letter to the public that he had left at home, expressing love for Ms. Simpson and denying that he killed her. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he wrote. “I’ve had a great life, great friends. Please think of the real O.J. and not this lost person.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to the glove that was an important piece of evidence in Mr. Simpson’s murder trial. It was not a golf glove. The error was repeated in a picture caption.

How we handle corrections

Robert D. McFadden is a Times reporter who writes advance obituaries of notable people. More about Robert D. McFadden

Tribeca Enterprises Sets Date and Speakers for First European Edition of the Tribeca Festival

By Jack Dunn

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Tribeca Enterprises, SIC, the Portuguese broadcast company, its streaming service OPTO and the City of Lisbon have unveiled the first-ever European-edition of the Tribeca Festival , which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal from Oct. 17-19.

The festival will kick off with an opening night celebration followed by a two-day event on Lisbon’s waterfront. Patty Jenkins, Whoopi Goldberg and Griffin Dunne have already signed on as headline speakers.

“At its core, Tribeca is about uplifting a community of artists – whether that community is below 14th Street in Manhattan or across the Atlantic Ocean in Lisbon,” said Robert De Niro, co-founder of Tribeca Enterprises.

Popular on Variety

Programming is led by Tribeca’s SVP of programming and festival director Cara Cusumano and executive producer Tony Gonçalves, a former WarnerMedia executive and a Portuguese native. The program for the European edition includes a curated collection of both Portuguese and international films, live talks with Portuguese and international talent, immersive installations, networking opportunities and more.

“Tribeca is a festival that aligns perfectly with Lisbon’s cultural ethos and policy, where we engage with our people in their neighborhoods, on the streets of Lisbon,” said Carlos Moedas, the mayor of Lisbon. “Culture is rooted in a city’s people and events like this put it on display and bring our community together. That is the spirit of Tribeca.”

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