Introduction. The cinema is an art form that is accessible to most people and it is one that most people enjoy

· Are you one of them?

· Do you follow the movie world?

4.1.1. Answer the questions in the quiz below to find out whether you’re a film buff.

1. Who “invented” the cinema?

2. How long did the first films last?

3. What nationality was Charlie Chaplin?

4. What does “genre” mean?

5. Whose real name was Marion Morrison?

6. Which B-movie actor became President of the USA?

7. What is the name for the US award for excellence in the film industry?

8. Which film is most consistently in the critics’ top ten of films?

9. Who was the director of Psycho?

10. In which country did the Neo-Realist movement originate?

11. Which film directed by Akira Kurosawa was based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth?

12. Which city is responsible for the greatest annual production of films?

13. Which 1988 Spielberg film mixed cartoon characters with real actors?

14. Which Japanese company invented Betamax?

4.1.2. Skimming and scanning. Read through the text quickly to find out the answers to the quiz. How many did you get right?

1. The origins of cinema as we know it lie in a machine patented in 1891 by Thomas Edison - the kinetoscope. This machine rotated, rapidly showing different frames, so giving the impression of a moving picture. Early films were made solely to show off the ingeniousness of the machines that projected them, and were only one or two minutes long, but by the early 1900s films started to tell stories. During the years of the First World War, American cinema flourished and technical innovations abounded. By 1927 the use of sound on film became commercially viable and the film recognised as the first successful sound movie was released – The Jazz Singer.

2. It was in the late 1920s that the Hollywood golden era really began. With the advent of commercial film-making in the early 1900s various film production companies had started up in the United States in fierce competition with each other. Many of these companies became associated with stars still popular and famous today, for example, Charlie Chaplin, who, having left his native UK for the USA, became a founder in 1919 of United Artists. By the 1930s most of these studios were in financial difficulties because of the Depression. They had to make certain compromises to survive, which in part led to the development of film genre. A genre is a number of films, all containing characteristics in common, including sets and -stars. Certain studios started producing a number of films from one genre in order to use the same sets, and to use contracted stars who were becoming popular with audiences. For example, Warner Brothers was associated with a great number of gangster films and Universal with horror films, while others were associated with melodramas or musicals. It was this studio system that typified the golden age of Hollywood, but by the 1950s it was somewhat in' decline, with a stronger European film industry and the rising popularity of television hitting their box office takings.

3. One continuing feature of the studio system is that of the film star. Studios vied with each other to find and contract popular film stars as a way of increasing audience share. Some of the biggest stars of the 1930s and '40s were closely associated with particular studios, for example, Rita Hayworth with Columbia. Through the 1940s and '50s the popularity of stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne (who, incidentally, was christened Marion Morrison!) continued to grow. Film stars became part of people's everyday lives and some began to take an interest in other areas, for example, politics. As everyone knows, Ronald Reagan, a B-movie actor of the ‘40s and ‘50s, was voted President of the USA in 1980! Apart from the occasional presidency, the highest accolade that can be given to film stars is the famous Oscar, a little gold statuette that forms the peak of many an actor's career.

4. Of course, actors are not the only stars of the film industry. Certain film directors have achieved star status in the past, such as Orson Welles, whose innovative Citizen Kane is the only film to appear consistently in the critics' top tens, and Alfred Hitchcock, who really gave the thriller genre its name with films such as Psycho and Frenzy. Contemporary directors, while being perhaps more difficult to understand, are equally as popular, and are finding success in areas other than feature films, for example, television and pop promotional videos.

5. Not all cinema, needless to say, comes from Hollywood. Much early European cinema has, in fact, had a lasting influence on Hollywood with, for example, the low-key lighting and strange camera angles of German Expressionism being transferred to Hollywood ‘film noir’. Apart from Hollywood cinema, over the last forty years or so we have seen very strong film industries emerge from many countries. In some cases these herald new movements, for example, the French New Wave and Italian Neo-Realism, in others they feature particular directors, such as Ingmar Bergman in Sweden, Akira Kurosawa in Japan (whose interpretations of Macbeth and King Lear -Throne of Blood and Ran respectively - made Shakespeare more widely accessible) and, more recently, Pedro Almodovar in Spain. In fact, while most people believe Los Angeles to be the biggest "production village', that honour goes to Bombay, India, which has the most prolific film industry of any country in the world.

6. In many countries film-makers take their role in society more seriously than they do in Hollywood. Much European cinema, as indeed some American non-mainstream cinema, focuses on contemporary issues, such as the sociology of the inner city, violence, poverty, the psychology of marriage and racism. Possibly the most striking developments in film over the last few years, however, have been those in technology and special effects, bringing us images of space travel and strange creatures in films such as Star Wars, and the mixture of reality and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? This film, of course, did little more than to carry on the tradition of the greatest cartoon film-maker of all lime -Walt Disney, who was one of the most financially successful producers ever.

7. What about the future of the film industry in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century? Film-making is thriving: more money is being spent on producing films and on viewing them than ever before. However, is the ever-increasing sophistication of television and video likely to affect the popularity of cinema? With the possibility of large screen viewing in the home, and the boom in video rentals since one video standard, VHS, became fairly universal (Sony’s Betamax never really took off), video and TV have become a cheaper, more convenient and more comfortable alternative to the cinema. We will have to wait and see.

Source: http:///www.filmsite.org/filmh.html

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