Film History

107 flashcards by MentisLibrary

From the Lumiere brothers to Parasite: the movements, techniques, and directors that built the language of cinema. Learn what a jump cut, a MacGuffin, and Italian Neorealism actually are.

Who held the first commercial public film screening?
The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, who projected short films to a paying audience in Paris in December 1895.
Kinetoscope
A peephole viewing cabinet developed at Thomas Edison's laboratory, largely by W.K.L. Dickson, that showed a short film loop to one viewer at a time.
A Trip to the Moon (1902)
Georges Melies's fantasy short, famous for the rocket landing in the eye of the man in the moon.
Who pioneered in-camera special effects such as the substitution splice?
Georges Melies, a stage magician who discovered that stopping and restarting the camera could make objects appear, vanish, or transform.
The Great Train Robbery (1903)
Edwin S. Porter's Western short that used cross cutting between separate lines of action and a famous shot of an outlaw firing at the camera.
The Birth of a Nation (1915)
D.W. Griffith's Civil War epic, technically influential for its scale and editing but notorious for its racist portrayal of Black Americans and glorification of the Ku Klux Klan.
Continuity editing
A system of cutting that hides the edit, keeping space, time, and screen direction consistent so the audience follows the story without noticing the joins.
The 180 degree rule
Keeping the camera on one side of an imaginary line drawn between two subjects so their screen positions stay consistent from shot to shot.
Shot reverse shot
Alternating shots that show one character, then the other, usually over the shoulder, to cover a conversation.
Eyeline match
A cut from a character looking offscreen to a shot of what they are looking at.
Kuleshov effect
Lev Kuleshov's demonstration that viewers read different emotions into the same neutral face depending on the shot cut next to it.
Soviet montage
A 1920s movement holding that meaning arises from the collision of shots, associated with Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Vertov, and Kuleshov.
Battleship Potemkin (1925)
Sergei Eisenstein's account of a naval mutiny, containing the Odessa Steps sequence often studied as the model of montage.
Man with a Movie Camera (1929)
Dziga Vertov's city symphony documenting Soviet urban life with split screens, freeze frames, and reflexive shots of the camera crew.
German Expressionism
A 1920s German movement using distorted sets, extreme shadows, and stylized performance to externalize psychological states.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
Robert Wiene's film with painted, jagged sets and a twist framing device, the defining work of German Expressionism.
Metropolis (1927)
Fritz Lang's science fiction epic about a stratified future city and a robot double, made with elaborate miniatures and crowd choreography.
Nosferatu (1922)
F.W. Murnau's unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, shot largely on location with a famously gaunt vampire.
The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Carl Theodor Dreyer's trial drama built almost entirely from close ups of faces.
Who were the leading comedians of the silent era?
Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd, each with a distinct persona and approach to physical comedy.
What is Buster Keaton known for?
Deadpan performance, dangerous stunts performed himself, and precisely engineered physical gags, as in The General and Sherlock Jr.
The Jazz Singer (1927)
The Warner Bros. feature with synchronized song and some spoken dialogue that made sound film commercially unavoidable.
Why did early sound cameras have to be enclosed?
Cameras were noisy, so they were sealed inside soundproof booths, which briefly made the camera almost immobile.
The Hollywood studio system
The vertically integrated arrangement in which major studios owned production, distribution, and theaters, and kept talent under long term contract.
The Big Five studios of the classical era
MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and RKO, the majors that also owned theater chains.
Paramount decision (1948)
The Supreme Court ruling that forced studios to divest their theater chains, ending vertical integration.
The Hays Code
The Motion Picture Production Code, a self censorship regime enforced from 1934 that restricted depictions of sex, crime, and other subjects.
What replaced the Hays Code?
The MPAA ratings system, introduced in 1968, which classified films by audience rather than forbidding content.
Citizen Kane (1941)
Orson Welles's debut about a newspaper magnate, told in overlapping flashbacks with deep focus photography by Gregg Toland.
Deep focus
Keeping foreground, middle ground, and background all in sharp focus at once, achieved with wide lenses, small apertures, and strong light.