Introduction

This book is designed mainly for History of Film, a course in the Film and Media Studies Program, University of Texas at San Antonio Texas. The rationale for developing this book is two-fold: to offer a free textbook in the course and to expand the limits of the topics studied under the history of film, including information about emerging film aesthetics and the burgeoning film industries in the Global South.  The book is organized according to the following topics:

1. General History
2. Early Cinema
3. The Silent Era
4. The Sound Era
5. The Hollywood Studio System
6. French Film
7. German Film
8. Soviet Film
9. Italian Neo-Realism
10. Film Noir
11. 20th Century in American Film
12. Documentary
13. Colonial Cinema
14. International Cinema

Overall, this book offers students an opportunity to compare and study the film traditions of the past.  Each chapter contains sub-chapters as a means of addressing the complexities of topics and traditions within each heading.  More importantly, the chapters and sub-chapters are designed to accompany the course description, course goals, and the learning modules in the course.

Course Description

HUM-2053 is an introductory survey of the history, criticism, and cultural importance of film. This course will focus on the development of film as a medium for cultural production including a comparative analysis between film and other cultural media such as literature, drama, and the visual arts.

Course Goals

Students who complete this course will be able to demonstrate the following objectives:

• Explain the historical and cultural factors that affect film production
• Understand theoretical concepts that are used in film production
• Understand the range of influences among film directors
• Explain the evolution of film techniques
• Explain the nature of film traditions in the Global South
• Analyze films to explain their artistic merits

To facilitate the learning outcomes, each chapter contains reading questions and highlights of key ideas to help students monitor and improve comprehension. As this book is customized for a course at The University of Texas at San Antonio, (UTSA), it has an interface with the Learning Management System at UTSA.  Accordingly, students should expect to engage in discussion activities based on the chapters in the book in addition to the accompanying videos.

What Is Film? (Dr. Yelizaveta Moss and Dr. Candice Wilson)
Since the early 1900s, filmmakers and theorists have argued over the question of what differentiates film from the other arts of literature, painting, theater and photography. Film, also known as cinema, or movies, refers not just to moving images and the telling of stories, but also to the celluloid or film stock upon which these moving images were printed. For well over a century, film has profoundly impacted our world and our perceptions of ourselves and others. However, we have also had an impact upon the medium. Surrounded as we are in society by a constant barrage of images from television, cell phones, and compu­ter screens to digital ad screens in subways, department stores, and airports, moving images are everywhere; they have become so pervasive that we fail to recognize how trained we already are in reading images. We often neglect to give these images the careful, critical consideration they require to develop an appreciation for their construction, and the different kinds of audiovisual expe­riences in which they invite us to participate.

Film celluloid is composed of frames, which are still images that together make up the entirety of a film. The practice of framing a subject or a shot within the ‘frame’ of the camera’s rectan­gular shaped viewfinder delimits and directs our vision. For instance, a camera can move to follow a young girl home from work late at night. This young girl can be positioned in diffe­rent ways within the camera’s rectangular viewpoint to be ‘read’ in the framing of the shot. As we follow film history, we see the development of our cinematic sight from an objective stance where we are held at a distance from the screen, to a subjective one where we begin to perceive the emotions or aura of things. Today, cinema constantly moves between these two states of objective and subjective positioning of the spectator. But it also interacts with a third state—the invisible. Invisible processes, such as the story world off-screen or outside the camera frame, influence both the content and the appea­rance of the films we watch. This includes the cultural, political, economic, technological, and industrial events constantly occurring in the real world off-camera. In this way, there is always an inside and outside of the frame, what we can visibly see and hear, and what works outside of our vision in the image.

Imagine, for example, the aforementioned young girl who is walking home alone at night. She seems tired, but unworried as she hurries home. The camera keeps her clearly visible and to the front of the frame, but over her shoulder, in the background, an indistinct figure follows. Why are we concerned? What is behind her? A harmless passerby, a serial killer, a supernatural monster? The director deliberately prevents us from knowing for certain, which makes the figure looming behind the young girl more threatening. Positioning the girl in the foreground brings her closer to the viewers, so that we try to understand what she is feeling, and begin to align ourselves with her perspective. While her face is in focus, naturally attracting our gaze, the blurred figure in the background takes on a more ominous cast, removed as it is from the familiar and the human.

Through the choices the director makes, we begin to shift from a purely objective view (the visible) where we watch a woman walk home, to a more subjective viewership where we begin to feel uneasy as we are emotionally influenced by subject positions and the structural elements that make up the film. Film physically moves us. When the hairs on our arms raise or we leap from our seats in fear, when our faces contort with anguish for a character, and our chests heave with a sudden intake of breath in shared shock over the death of a belo­ved character, we are emotionally moved by the communal experience of cinema. We also move cinema in turn by suspending our disbelief, and immersing ourselves fully into the wonderland of film, sound, and image. Even clearly, and carefully constructed films, which critically direct its meaning and influence on us emotionally, the film audience ultimately makes the leaps and connections in cinema which drives the film forward. We bring our own experiences and understandings to the film, making cinema not just a communal expe­rience but also an intensely personal one.

For French philosopher Roland Barthes, one of the chief ways in which cinema separates itself from the art of photography, is in its ability to fully immerse audiences into the screen so that they forget they are watching a film (also called “suturing”). To have the audience see themselves projected onto the screen is an ability that cinema depends upon. This cine­matic world, one imagined by a director or character, can seem very familiar to us, entwi­ned as we are within the screen and the character. Cinema can embody us within the screen, where we adopt the vision and point of view of characters. Simultaneously, it can hold us at a distance allowing us to examine the social norms in which we participate and take for granted.

Roland Barthes speaks to the double nature of cinema, one that produces an ‘enthralled spectator’ and forms the basis for the promise of a shared community, a community where we all touch and are touched by images. This enthrallment by the moving image points to a darker aspect of cinema— its insidious ability to manipulate and encourage mass audien­ces to consume harmful images and ideologies. For example, The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915) and Triumph of the Will (Riefenstahl, 1935), both instant successes on their release, used the emotionally persuasive craft of cinema to bolster white nationalistic pride through heroic Christ-like representations of the Ku Klux Klan and Hitler, respectively. Mainstream cinema, films geared towards wide release in theaters and marketed to wide audiences, aims at attaining the greatest revenue. This tends to adhere to a dominant system of belief that largely neglects stories told from marginalized perspectives outside of the Hollywood narrative system. In this way, even ‘light’ fare, like romantic comedies, Marvel superhero movies, and Disney animations, can participate in producing narratives that privilege hetero­sexuality, monogamy, and marriage as well as certain races, religions, ethnic groups, genders, and their way of life over others. Think here, for instance, of how many films you have seen that feature a queer character at its center? Or a practicing Muslim character as its hero? What do they wear? In what language do they speak? What is typically represented as social reality in the mainstream cinema of your country?

We can think of film as constantly moving between dream and disruption. The dream machine of cinema allows the spectator to imagine that the intoxicating images on screen are true representations of reality. The destabilizing cinema, on the other hand, shakes the audience out of its stupor through violence and fear, stark documentations of reality, or a self­-aware camera that demands audience participation in its production of meaning. In Funny Games (Haneke, 1997) for instance, characters on screen constantly interrupt the action (breaking the fourth wall), and taunt the cinema audience, making the spectator complicit not just in the torture of the family on screen, but so too in the mass production of these grisly images. The audience is made to feel uncomfortable in their casual pleasure taking in such violent images. The cinema spectator thus always walks a tightrope between pleasura­ble absorption in the image and distrust of the image. By learning to appreciate film, we not only gain new insight, but also a new ability to perceive and challenge representations of the world. Peering through the frame of the camera, we see ourselves through the eyes of others across the globe.

Here is a series on video lectures of the general outlook of the history of film according to the historic periods and movements.

1. Pre-Classical Film [NEW TAB]
2. Rise of the Studio System [NEW TAB]
3. The Golden Age of Hollywood [NEW TAB]
4. The Foreign New Wave [NEW TAB]
5. The New Hollywood [NEW TAB]
6. The Contemporary Cinema [NEW TAB]

Of course, the history of film is limited to what occurred in the West as Bradley videos show.  This book expands on that by providing explosive film movements and Traditions in the Global South, for example, Bollywood [NEW TAB] , Nollywood [NEW TAB], African Cinema [NEW TAB], Chinese Cinema [NEW TAB] , Mexican Cinema [NEW TAB].  Here is short history of Indian Cinema [NEW TAB].  More important, students are invited to contribute to and enrich the text by identifying/developing pertinent resources to include in the book. For each of the resources, students should offer a convincing argument to justify the inclusion; they should also develop the assessments based on the identified/developed resources.