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A lost film is a feature film or short film that is no longer known to exist in studio archives, private collections or public archives such as the Library of Congress, where at least one copy of all American films are deposited and catalogued for copyright reasons.^[1] Of American silent films far more have been lost than have survived, and of American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, perhaps half have been lost.^[2] The phrase "lost film" can also be used in a literal sense for instances where footage of deleted scenes, unedited and alternative versions of feature films are known to have been created but can no longer be accounted for. Sometimes a copy of a lost film is rediscovered. A film that has not been recovered in its entirety is called a partially lost film. For example, the 1922 film Sherlock Holmes was eventually discovered but some of the footage is still missing. Quite often a lost film of a major (i.e. Hollywood) production studio may have still photographs, shot at the time of production, often on glass negative. Glass negatives, if properly maintained, can last indefinitely, preserving image fidelity.

Reasons for film loss[link]

Most lost films are from the silent film and early talkie era, from about 1894 to 1930.^[3] Martin Scorsese's Film Foundation estimates that over 90 percent of American films made before 1929 are lost.^[4]

Many early motion pictures are lost because the nitrate film used in that era was combustable and autoignited. Fires have destroyed entire archives of films; for example, a storage vault fire in 1937 destroyed all the original negatives of Fox Pictures' pre-1935 movies.^[5] Nitrate film is also chemically unstable and over time can decay rapidly if not preserved in temperature- and humidity-controlled storage. Films with a nitrate base are often preserved by being copied to safety film or digitized, though both methods result in some loss of quality.

Eastman Kodak introduced a nonflammable 35 mm film stock in spring 1909. However, the plasticizers used to make the film flexible evaporated too quickly, making the film dry and brittle, causing splices to part and perforations to tear. By 1911 the major American film studios were back to using nitrate stock.^[6] "Safety film" was relegated to sub-35 mm formats such as 16 mm and 8 mm until improvements were made in the late 1940s.

But the largest cause of silent film loss was intentional destruction, as silent films were perceived as having little or no commercial value after the end of the silent era by 1930. Film preservationist Robert A. Harris has said, "Most of the early films did not survive because of wholesale junking by the studios. There was no thought of ever saving these films. They simply needed vault space and the materials were expensive to house."^[7]

Many early talkies from Warner Bros. and First National were lost because they used a sound-on-disk process, with separate soundtracks on special phonograph records. These records were often lost or damaged, thereby making the reel a "mute print", and virtually useless for showing. It was not until 1930 that those studios converted to a sound-on-film process.

Before the eras of television and later home video, films were viewed as having little future value when their theatrical runs ended. Thus, again, many were deliberately destroyed to save the space and cost of storage; many were recycled for their silver content. Many Technicolor two-color negatives from the 1920s and 1930s were thrown out when the studios refused to reclaim their films, still being held by Technicolor in its vaults. Some prints were sold either intact or broken into short clips to individuals who bought early novelty home projection machines and wanted scenes from their favorite movies to play for guests or family members.

As a consequence of this widespread lack of care, the work of many early filmmakers and performers has come down to us in fragmentary form. Particularly striking is the case of Theda Bara, one of the best-known actresses of the early silent era: of the 40 films she made, only three and a half are now known to exist. However, this was still better than the fate of her vamp rival at Fox, Valeska Suratt, not one of whose films survives. Likewise stage actresses such as Pauline Frederick and Elsie Ferguson who made the jump to silent films and became more popular have large caches of lost films. Frederick has about seven films that survive from the years 1915-1928 and Ferguson has one from 1919 that survives from her entire silent career 1917-1925. More typical is the case of Clara Bow: of her 57 movies, 20 are completely lost and five more are incomplete.^[8]

There are occasional exceptions. Almost all of Charlie Chaplin's films from his entire career have survived as well as extensive amounts of unused footage dating back to 1916. The exceptions are A Woman of the Sea (which he destroyed himself as a tax writeoff) and one of his early Keystone films, Her Friend the Bandit (see Unknown Chaplin). The filmography of D.W. Griffith is nearly complete as many of his early Biograph films were deposited by the company in paper print form at the Library of Congress. Much of Griffith's feature film work, of the 1910s and 1920s, found their way to the film collection at the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and were preserved under the auspices of curator Iris Barry. Mary Pickford's filmography is very much complete being that her early years were spent with Griffith and especially films produced later after she gained control of her own productions in the late late 1910s and early 1920s. She also backtracked to as many of her Zukor controlled early Famous Players films that were salvageable. Stars like Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks enjoyed stupendous popularity and their films were reissued over and over throughout the silent era, meaning prints of their films were likely to surface decades later. Pickford, Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Cecil B. DeMille were early champions of film preservation. Lloyd lost a good deal of his silent work in a vault fire in the early 1940s.

Another remarkable case was the 1919 German film Different from the Others (Anders als die Andern), starring Conrad Veidt. A striking plea for tolerance for homosexuality, produced in collaboration with Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, it was targeted for destruction by the Nazis, with many prints of the film burned as decadent. However, a 50-minute fragment survived the censorship attempt.

Later lost films[link]

An improved 35 mm safety film was introduced in 1949. Since safety film is much more stable than nitrate film, there are comparatively few lost films after about 1950. However, color fading of certain color stocks and vinegar syndrome threaten the preservation of films made since about this time.

Most mainstream movies from the 1950s onwards survive today, but several early pornographic films and some B-Movies are lost. In most cases these obscure films go unnoticed and unknown, but some films by noted cult directors have been lost as well:

• Cult favorite Herschell Gordon Lewis's 1969 films, Ecstasies of Women and Linda and Abilene, have disappeared.
• Several films by Kenneth Anger from across his career have been lost for a variety of reasons.
• Ed Wood's 1972 film, The Undergraduate, has been lost along with his 1970 film Take It Out In Trade, which exists only in fragments without sound. Wood's 1971 film Necromania was believed lost for years until an edited version resurfaced at a yard sale in 1992, followed by a complete unedited print in 2001.^[9] A complete print of the previously lost Wood pornographic film The Young Marrieds was discovered in 2004.
• Tom Graeff's first feature film, The Noble Experiment (1955), in which director/writer Graeff plays a misunderstood genius scientist, was considered lost until found by Elle Schneider during the production of a documentary about Graeff entitled The Boy from Out of This World.
• Most of Andy Milligan's early films are considered lost.
• Many short sponsored films—films made for educational, training, or religious purposes—from the 1940s through the 1970s are also lost, as they were thought of as disposable or upgradable.
• Some of Jackie Chan's and Sammo Hung's first roles, including Big and Little Wong Tin Bar, have been considered lost.
• The first three films of noted Finnish melodrama actor and director Teuvo Tulio were lost along with several other films that were of interest at least for historians of Finnish cinema, when the film depository of the company Adams Filmi burnt down in Helsinki in 1959.
• Sometimes only certain aspects of films may be lost. Early color films such as Lucien Hubbard's The Mysterious Island and John G. Adolfi's The Show of Shows exist only partially or not at all in color because the copies that were made of the film that exist were created on black-and-white stock. (See List of early color feature films.)
• Two 3-D films from 1954, Top Banana and Southwest Passage, both exist only in their flat form because only one print, made for either the left or right eye to see, exists.

Lost film soundtracks[link]

Some films produced in 1926–1930 in sound-on-disc systems such as Vitaphone, where the sound discs are separate from the film element, are now considered lost because the sound discs were damaged or destroyed, while the picture element was not. Conversely, some Vitaphone films survive only as sound, with the film missing (such as 1930's The Man from Blankley's, starring John Barrymore).

Many stereophonic soundtracks from the early-to-mid 1950s that were either played in interlock on a 35 mm fullcoat magnetic reel or single-strip magnetic film (such as Fox's four-track magnetic, which became the standard of mag stereophonic sound) are now lost. Films such as House of Wax, The Caddy, The War of the Worlds, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, and From Here to Eternity that were originally available with 3-track, magnetic sound are now available only with a monophonic optical soundtrack. The chemistry behind adhering magnetic particles to the tri-acetate film base eventually caused the autocatalytic breakdown of the film (vinegar syndrome). As long as studios had a monaural optical negative that could be printed, studio executives felt no need to preserve the stereophonic versions of the soundtracks.

List of lost films[link]

List of incomplete or partially lost films[link]

List of rediscovered films[link]

Occasionally, prints of films considered lost have been rediscovered. An example is the 1910 version of Frankenstein which was believed lost for decades until the existence of a print (which had been in the hands of an unwitting collector for years) was discovered in the 1970s. A print of Richard III (1912) was found in 1996 and restored by the American Film Institute.

Beyond the Rocks (1922) with Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino was considered a lost film for several decades. Swanson lamented the loss of this and other films in her 1980 memoirs, but optimistically concluded, "I do not believe these films are gone forever". In 2000, a print was found in the Netherlands and restored by the Nederlands Filmmuseum and the Haghefilm Conservation. It turned up among about 2000 rusty film canisters donated by an eccentric Dutch collector, Joop van Liempd, of Haarlem. It was given its first modern screening in 2005, and has since been aired on Turner Classic Movies.

In the early 2000s, the 1927 German film Metropolis—which had been distributed in many different edits over the years—was restored to as close to the original version as possible by reinstating edited footage and using computer technology to repair damaged footage. At that point, however, approximately a quarter of the original film footage was considered lost, according to Kino Video's DVD release of the restored film. On July 1, 2008 Berlin film experts announced that a copy of the film had been discovered in the archives of the film museum Museo del Cine in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which contained all but one of the scenes still missing from the 2002 restoration.^[10][11] The film now has been restored very close to its premiere version.

In 2010, digital copies of ten early American films were presented to the Library of Congress by the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library, the first film installment from the Russian state archives to be repatriated.^[12]

Television material existing on film has sometimes been recovered. The 1951 pilot of I Love Lucy was long believed lost, but in 1990 the widow of one of the actors, Pepito Pérez (who played Pepito the Clown), found a copy. It has since been shown on television. Sometimes a film believed lost in its original state has been restored, either through the process of colorization, or other restoration methods. The Cage, the original 1964 pilot film for Star Trek, survived only in a black-and-white print until 1987, when a film archivist found an unmarked (mute) 35mm reel in a Hollywood film laboratory with the negative trims of the unused scenes.^[13]

Similarly, a number of videotaped television programmes, previously thought lost (see wiping) have been recovered as overseas Kinescope film prints from private collectors and various other sources over the years.

Lost film in film[link]

Several films have been made with lost film fragments incorporated into the work. Decasia (2002) used nothing but decaying film footage as an abstract tone poem of light and darkness, much like Peter Delpeut's more historical Lyrisch Nitraat (Lyrical Nitrate, 1990) which contained only footage from canisters found stored in an Amsterdam cinema. In 1993, Delpeut released The Forbidden Quest, combining early film footage and archival photographs with new material to tell the fictional story of an ill-fated Antarctic expedition.

The Universal Pictures feature film The Cat Creeps (1930) is a lost film with the only now-extant footage included in a Universal short film called Boo! (1932). UCLA has still has a copy of the soundtrack. The Fox Film Corporation feature Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) only exists in a trailer made to promote the film, and in a Spanish language version Eran Trece.

The James Cagney film Winner Take All (1932) used scenes from the early talkie Queen of the Night Clubs (1929) starring Texas Guinan. While Queen of the Night Clubs was not a lost film in 1932, no prints of the film have survived through the decades since then. But the Cagney movie still is extant along with the selected footage taken from Queen of the Night Clubs.

Peter Jackson's mockumentary Forgotten Silver purports to show recovered footage of early films. Instead, the filmmakers used newly shot film sequences treated to look like lost film.

In Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse double feature, both the Planet Terror and Death Proof segments have missing reels used as plot devices.

John Carpenter's Masters of Horror episode Cigarette Burns deals with the search for a fictional lost film, La Fin Absolue Du Monde (The Absolute End of the World).

Actress turned gossip columnist Hedda Hopper made her screen debut in a Fox Film called Battle of Hearts (1916). The star of the film was William Farnum, then at the beginning of his long Fox contract. 26 years later in 1942 Hopper produced her documentary series Hedda Hopper's Hollywood #2. In the documentary, Hopper, Farnum, her son William Hopper, and Hopper's wife Jane Gilbert view portions of Battle of Hearts. These brief portions of that movie survive within the Hopper documentary. More than likely Hopper had an entire print of the movie in 1942. However, like many early Fox films, Battle of Hearts is now lost or missing.

See also[link]

Film portal

References[link]

External links[link]

• Subterranean Cinema a website about the search for lost and rare cinema
• List of lost silent films at www.silentera.com
• List of lost films of the 1970s at The Weird World of 70s Cinema - Archive copy at the Wayback Machine
• Vitaphone Project, restoring Vitaphone films and finding Vitaphone discs
• Josef von Sternberg. The Case of Lena Smith Book on Josef von Sternberg's last silent movie—one of the legendary lost masterpieces of the American cinema; Published by the Austrian Film Museum
• Film Threat's Top 50 Lost Films of All Time
• Lost Films database
• Allan Ellenberger's blog on the many fires at Universal Studios

Look up Lost or lost in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Lost may refer to:

In cinema or television[link]

• Lost (TV series), an ABC drama about people who become stranded on a mysterious island
• Lost (2001 TV series), a short-lived reality television program
• Lost (2004 film), an American thriller starring Dean Cain
• Lost (1956 film), a British thriller starring David Farrar

In literature[link]

• Lost (novel), a 2001 horror/mystery novel by Gregory Maguire
• The Lost (book), a memoir by Daniel Mendelsohn
• Lost, the second novel of Alice Lichtenstein
• Lost (Australian novel), a 2005 Michael Robotham novel

In music[link]

• Lost (band), an Italian pop rock band

Albums[link]

• Lost (Carpark North album), the Carpark North international debut studio album
• Lost (Cool Calm Pete album), the Cool Calm Pete debut solo album
• Lost (Eightball album), the debut solo album from rapper 8Ball
• Lost (RTZ album), the 1999 Return to Zero album by American rock band
• Lost (Elegy album), 1995 Elegy album

Songs[link]

• "Lost" (Faith Hill song), a 2007 song written by Mitch Allan and Kara DioGuardi and was recorded by American country singer Faith Hill, the first released from her album The Hits
• "Lost" (Gorilla Zoe song), Gorilla Zoe's single from Don't Feed Da Animals
• "Lost" (Kreator song), a 1995 Kreator single
• "Lost" (Lasgo song), the third single released by the Belgian dance group Lasgo after the addition of Jelle Van Dael as vocals. The video was shot in Blackpool (UK). It started immediately to climb the national charts
• "Lost" (Menudo song), a song by the Puerto Rican boy band, Menudo. It was released as a digital single with virtually no album support in June 2008. While it failed to enter the Billboard Hot 100, it instead charted on its companion Pop 100 chart at number 61
• "Lost" (Michael Bublé song), the second single from Michael Bublé's third studio album, Call Me Irresponsible. The song was inspired by the breakup with his former fiancée Debbie Timuss
• "Lost" (Roger Sanchez song), a 2006 single by Grammy Award winning Dominican-American progressive house DJ Roger Sanchez, featuring Lisa Pure and Katherine Ellis
• "Lost" (Skin song), a double A-sided single from ex-Skunk Anansie front woman Skin. The single was scheduled for release towards the end of 2003 but failed to be commercially released. Only promo copies were sent out to radio stations
• "Lost!", by Coldplay
• "Lost", by Anouk
• "Lost", by Annie Lennox
• "Lost", by Autechre
• "Lost", by Avenged Sevenfold
• "Lost", by Clockwork Radio from State of Mind EP
• "Lost", by Dead by April
• "Lost", by Delain
• "Lost", by Edge Of Sanity, from The Spectral Sorrows
• "Lost", by Haji's Kitchen
• "Lost", by Katy Perry
• "Lost", by Killswitch Engage
• "Lost", by Korn
• "Lost", by Orbital (band)
• "Lost", by Red (band)
• "Lost", by The Church (band)
• "Lost", by The Cure
• "Lost", by Tristania (band)
• "Lost", by Van der Graaf Generator

In video games[link]

• The Lost (video game), a 2002 vaporware game by Irrational Games
• Lost: Via Domus, a 2008 video game by Ubisoft based on the Lost TV series

Other uses[link]

• a person in Solitude
• Lost, Aberdeenshire, a hamlet in Scotland
• Mustard gas, also known as Lost, LOST, Schwefel-lost or S-Lost, from the company Lommel and Steinkopf
• "Lost", a slang term for being under the influence of the hypnotic drug Ambien
• abbreviation for Local option sales tax

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in the French Wikipedia. (January 2012) Don't speak French? Click here to read a machine-translated version of the French article. Click [show] on the right to review important translation instructions before translating. Google's machine translation is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. After translating, {{Translated|fr|Cinéma}} must be added to the talk page to ensure copyright compliance. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

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This 16 mm spring-wound Bolex "H16" Reflex camera is a popular entry level camera used in film schools.

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects. The process of filmmaking has developed into an art form and industry.

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating – or indoctrinating – citizens. The visual elements of cinema give motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue into the language of the viewer.

Films are made up of a series of individual images called frames. When these images are shown rapidly in succession, a viewer has the illusion that motion is occurring. The viewer cannot see the flickering between frames due to an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Viewers perceive motion due to a psychological effect called beta movement.

The origin of the name "film" comes from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion picture, including picture, picture show, moving picture, photo-play and flick. A common name for film in the United States is movie, while in Europe the term film is preferred. Additional terms for the field in general include the big screen, the silver screen, the cinema and the movies.

History[link]

A clip from the Charlie Chaplin silent film The Bond (1918)

Preceding film in origin by thousands of years, early plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism apply, such as mise en scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Owing to an absence of technology for doing so, moving visual and aural images were not recorded for replaying as in film.

In the 1860s, mechanisms for producing two-dimensional drawings in motion were demonstrated with devices such as the zoetrope, mutoscope and praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as magic lanterns) and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving, a phenomenon called persistence of vision. Naturally the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect, and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film animation.

With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. An 1878 experiment by English photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the United States using 24 cameras produced a series of stereoscopic images of a galloping horse, is arguably the first "motion picture", though it was not called by this name.^[1] This technology required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second, depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Commercial versions of these machines were coin operated.

A frame from Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest film produced using a motion picture camera, by Louis Le Prince, 1888

By the 1880s the development of the motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel, and led quickly to the development of a motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience. These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as "motion pictures". Early motion pictures were static shots that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. The first public exhibition of projected motion pictures in America was shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City on the 23rd of April 1896.

Ignoring W. K. L. Dickson's early sound experiments (1894), commercial motion pictures were purely visual art through the late 19th century, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. Around the turn of the 20th century, films began developing a narrative structure by stringing scenes together to tell a story. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots of varying sizes and angles. Other techniques such as camera movement were realized as effective ways to portray a story on film. Rather than leave the audience with noise of early cinema projectors, theater owners would hire a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music that would cover noises of projector. Eventually, musicians would start to fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purpose, with complete film scores being composed for major productions.

A shot from Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), an early narrative film.

The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I when the film industry in United States flourished with the rise of Hollywood, typified most prominently by the great innovative work of D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1914) and Intolerance (1916). However in the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang, in many ways inspired by the meteoric war-time progress of film through Griffith, along with the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton and others, quickly caught up with American film-making and continued to further advance the medium. In the 1920s, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them "talking pictures", or talkies.

The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of so-called "natural color", which meant color that was photographically recorded from nature rather than being added to black-and-white prints by hand-coloring, stencil-coloring or other arbitrary procedures, although the earliest processes typically yielded colors which were far from "natural" in appearance. While the addition of sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color replaced black-and-white much more gradually. The pivotal innovation was the introduction of the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, which was first used for short subjects and for isolated sequences in a few feature films released in 1934, then for an entire feature film, Becky Sharp, in 1935. The expense of the process was daunting, but continued favorable public response and enhanced box-office receipts increasingly justified the added cost. The number of films made in color slowly increased year after year.

In the early 1950s, as the proliferation of black-and-white television started seriously depressing theater attendance in the US, the use of color was seen as one way of winning back audiences. It soon became the rule rather than the exception. Some important mainstream Hollywood films were still being made in black-and-white as late as the mid-1960s, but they marked the end of an era. Color television receivers had been available in the US since the mid-1950s, but at first they were very expensive and few broadcasts were in color. During the 1960s, prices gradually came down, color broadcasts became common, and the sale of color television sets boomed. The strong preference of the general public for color was obvious. After the final flurry of black-and-white film releases in mid-decade, all major Hollywood studio film production was exclusively in color, with rare exceptions reluctantly made only at the insistence of "star" directors such as Peter Bogdanovich and Martin Scorsese.

Since the decline of the studio system in the 1960s, the succeeding decades saw changes in the production and style of film. Various New Wave movements (including the French New Wave, Indian New Wave, Japanese New Wave and New Hollywood) and the rise of film school educated independent filmmakers were all part of the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century. Digital technology has been the driving force in change throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. 3D technology increased in usage and has become more popular since the early 2010s.

Theory[link]

Film theory seeks to develop concise and systematic concepts that apply to the study of film as art. It was started by Ricciotto Canudo's The Birth of the Sixth Art. Formalist film theory, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasized how film differed from reality, and thus could be considered a valid fine art. André Bazin reacted against this theory by arguing that film's artistic essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality not in its differences from reality, and this gave rise to realist theory. More recent analysis spurred by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics among other things has given rise to psychoanalytical film theory, structuralist film theory, feminist film theory and others. On the other hand, critics from the analytical philosophy tradition, influenced by Wittgenstein, try to clarify misconceptions used in theoretical studies and produce analysis of a film's vocabulary and its link to a form of life.

Language[link]

Film is considered to have its own language. James Monaco wrote a classic text on film theory titled "How to Read a Film". Director Ingmar Bergman famously said, "[Andrei] Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream." Examples of the language are a sequence of back and forth images of one actor's left profile speaking, followed by another actor's right profile speaking, then a repetition of this, which is a language understood by the audience to indicate a conversation. Another example is zooming in on the forehead of an actor with an expression of silent reflection, then changing to a scene of a younger actor who vaguely resembles the first actor, indicating the first actor is having a memory of their own past.

Montage[link]

Parallels to musical counterpoint have been developed into a theory of montage, extended from the complex superimposition of images in early silent film^{[citation needed]} to even more complex incorporation of musical counterpoint together with visual counterpoint through mise en scene and editing, as in a ballet or opera; e.g., as illustrated in the gang fight scene of director Francis Ford Coppola’s film, Rumble Fish.

Criticism[link]

Film criticism is the analysis and evaluation of films. In general, these works can be divided into two categories: academic criticism by film scholars and journalistic film criticism that appears regularly in newspapers and other media.

Film critics working for newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media mainly review new releases. Normally they only see any given film once and have only a day or two to formulate opinions. Despite this, critics have an important impact on films, especially those of certain genres. Mass marketed action, horror, and comedy films tend not to be greatly affected by a critic's overall judgment of a film. The plot summary and description of a film that makes up the majority of any film review can still have an important impact on whether people decide to see a film. For prestige films such as most dramas, the influence of reviews is extremely important. Poor reviews will often doom a film to obscurity and financial loss.

The impact of a reviewer on a given film's box office performance is a matter of debate. Some claim that movie marketing is now so intense and well financed that reviewers cannot make an impact against it. However, the cataclysmic failure of some heavily promoted movies which were harshly reviewed, as well as the unexpected success of critically praised independent movies indicates that extreme critical reactions can have considerable influence. Others note that positive film reviews have been shown to spark interest in little-known films. Conversely, there have been several films in which film companies have so little confidence that they refuse to give reviewers an advanced viewing to avoid widespread panning of the film. However, this usually backfires as reviewers are wise to the tactic and warn the public that the film may not be worth seeing and the films often do poorly as a result.

It is argued that journalist film critics should only be known as film reviewers, and true film critics are those who take a more academic approach to films. This line of work is more often known as film theory or film studies. These film critics attempt to come to understand how film and filming techniques work, and what effect they have on people. Rather than having their works published in newspapers or appear on television, their articles are published in scholarly journals, or sometimes in up-market magazines. They also tend to be affiliated with colleges or universities.

Industry[link]

Cate Blanchett at the Berlin International Film Festival. Around 20,000 professionals from over 130 countries attend the event in Berlin.

The making and showing of motion pictures became a source of profit almost as soon as the process was invented. Upon seeing how successful their new invention, and its product, was in their native France, the Lumières quickly set about touring the Continent to exhibit the first films privately to royalty and publicly to the masses. In each country, they would normally add new, local scenes to their catalogue and, quickly enough, found local entrepreneurs in the various countries of Europe to buy their equipment and photograph, export, import and screen additional product commercially. The Oberammergau Passion Play of 1898^{[citation needed]} was the first commercial motion picture ever produced. Other pictures soon followed, and motion pictures became a separate industry that overshadowed the vaudeville world. Dedicated theaters and companies formed specifically to produce and distribute films, while motion picture actors became major celebrities and commanded huge fees for their performances. By 1917 Charlie Chaplin had a contract that called for an annual salary of one million dollars.

From 1931 to 1956, film was also the only image storage and playback system for television programming until the introduction of videotape recorders.

In the United States today, much of the film industry is centered around Hollywood. Other regional centers exist in many parts of the world, such as Mumbai-centered Bollywood, the Indian film industry's Hindi cinema which produces the largest number of films in the world.^[2] Whether the ten thousand-plus feature length films a year produced by the Valley pornographic film industry should qualify for this title is the source of some debate.^{[citation needed]} Though the expense involved in making movies has led cinema production to concentrate under the auspices of movie studios, recent advances in affordable film making equipment have allowed independent film productions to flourish.

Profit is a key force in the industry, due to the costly and risky nature of filmmaking; many films have large cost overruns, a notorious example being Kevin Costner's Waterworld. Yet many filmmakers strive to create works of lasting social significance. The Academy Awards (also known as "the Oscars") are the most prominent film awards in the United States, providing recognition each year to films, ostensibly based on their artistic merits.

There is also a large industry for educational and instructional films made in lieu of or in addition to lectures and texts.

Associated fields[link]

Derivative academic Fields of study may both interact with and develop independently of filmmaking, as in film theory and analysis. Fields of academic study have been created that are derivative or dependent on the existence of film, such as film criticism, film history, divisions of film propaganda in authoritarian governments, or psychological on subliminal effects of a flashing soda can during a screening. These fields may further create derivative fields, such as a movie review section in a newspaper or a television guide. Sub-industries can spin off from film, such as popcorn makers, and toys. Sub- industries of pre-existing industries may deal specifically with film, such as product placement in advertising.

Terminology used[link]

Although the words "film" and "movie" are sometimes used interchangeably, "film" is more often used when considering artistic, theoretical, or technical aspects, as studies in a university class and "movies" more often refers to entertainment or commercial aspects, as where to go for fun on a date. For example, a book titled "How to Read a Film" would be about the aesthetics or theory of film, while "Lets Go to the Movies" would be about the history of entertaining movies. "Motion pictures" or "Moving pictures" are films and movies. A "DVD" is a digital format which may be used to reproduce an analog film, while "videotape" ("video") was for many decades a solely analog medium onto which moving images could be recorded and electronically (rather than optically) reproduced. Strictly speaking, "Film" refers to the media onto which a visual image is shot, and to this end it may seem improper for work in other "moving image" media to be referred to as a "film" and the action of shooting as "filming", though these terms are still in general use. "Silent films" need not be silent, but are films and movies without an audible dialogue, though they may have a musical soundtrack. "Talkies" refers to early movies or films having audible dialogue or analog sound, not just a musical accompaniment. "Cinema" either broadly encompasses both films and movies, or is roughly synonymous with "Film", both capitalized when referring to a category of art. The "silver screen" refers to classic black-and-white films before color, not to contemporary films without color.

The expression "Sight and Sound", as in the film journal of the same name, means "film". The following icons mean film: a "candle and bell", as in the films Tarkovsky, of a segment of film stock, or a two faced Janus image, and an image of a movie camera in profile.

"Widescreen" and "Cinemascope" refers to a larger width to height in the frame, compared to an earlier historic aspect ratios.^[3] A "feature length film", or "feature film", is of a conventional full length, usually 60 minutes or more, and can commercially stand by itself without other films in a ticketed screening.^[4] A "short" is a film that is not as long as a feature length film, usually screened with other shorts, or preceding a feature length film. An "independent" is a film made outside of the conventional film industry.

A "screening" or "projection" is the projection of a film or video on a screen at a public or private theater, usually but not always of a film, but of a video or DVD when of sufficient projection quality. A "double feature" is a screening of two independent, stand-alone, feature films. A "viewing" is a watching of a film. A "showing" is a screening or viewing on an electronic monitor. "Sales" refers to tickets sold at a theater, or more currently, rights sold for individual showings. A "release" is the distribution and often simultaneous screening of a film. A "preview" is a screening in advance of the main release.

"Hollywood" may be used either as a pejorative adjective, shorthand for asserting an overly commercial rather than artistic intent or outcome, as in "too Hollywood", or as a descriptive adjective to refer to a film originating with people who ordinarily work near Los Angeles.

Expressions for Genres of film are sometimes used interchangeably for "film" in a specific context, such as a "porn" for a film with explicit sexual content, or "cheese" for films that are light, entertaining and not highbrow.

Any film may also have a "sequel", which portrays events following those in the film. Bride of Frankenstein is an early example. When there are a number of films with the same characters, we have a "series", such as the James Bond series. A film which portrays events that occur earlier than those in another film, but is released after that film, is sometimes called a "prequel", an example being Butch and Sundance: The Early Days.

Credits is a list of the people involved in making the film. Before the 1970s, credits were usually at the beginning of a film. Since then, the credits roll at the end of most films.

A Post-credits scene is a scene shown after the end of the credits. Ferris Bueller's Day Off has a post-credit scene in which Ferris tells the audience that the movie is over and they should go home.

Preview[link]

A preview performance refers to a showing of a movie to a select audience, usually for the purposes of corporate promotions, before the public film premiere itself. Previews are sometimes used to judge audience reaction, which if unexpectedly negative, may result in recutting or even refilming certain sections (Audience response).

Trailer[link]

Trailers or previews are film advertisements for films that will be exhibited in the future at a cinema, on whose screen they are shown. The term "trailer" comes from their having originally been shown at the end of a film programme. That practice did not last long, because patrons tended to leave the theater after the films ended, but the name has stuck. Trailers are now shown before the film (or the A movie in a double feature program) begins.

Film, or other art form?[link]

Film may be combined with performance art and still be considered or referred to as a "film", for instance, when there is a live musical accompaniment to a silent film. Another example is audience participation films, as at a midnight movies screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, where the audience dresses up in costume from the film and loudly does a karaoke-like reenactment along with the film. Performance art where film is incorporated as a component is usually not called film, but a film, which could stand-alone but is accompanied by a performance may still be referred to as a film.

The act of making a film can, in and of itself, be considered a work of art, on a different level from the film itself, as in the films of Werner Herzog.

Similarly, the playing of a film can be considered to fall within the realm of political protest art, as in the subtleties within the films of Tarkovsky. A "road movie" can refer to a film put together from footage from a long road trip or vacation.

Education and propaganda[link]

Film is used for education and propaganda. When the purpose is primarily educational, a film is called an "educational film". Examples are recordings of lectures and experiments, or more marginally, a film based on a classic novel.

Film may be propaganda, in whole or in part, such as the films made by Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany, US war film trailers during World War II, or artistic films made under Stalin by Eisenstein. They may also be works of political protest, as in the films of Wajda, or more subtly, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The same film may be considered educational by some, and propaganda by others, such as some of the films of Michael Moore.

Production[link]

At its core, the means to produce a film depend on the content the filmmaker wishes to show, and the apparatus for displaying it: the zoetrope merely requires a series of images on a strip of paper. Film production can therefore take as little as one person with a camera (or without it, such as Stan Brakhage's 1963 film Mothlight), or thousands of actors, extras and crewmembers for a live-action, feature-length epic.

The necessary steps for almost any film can be boiled down to conception, planning, execution, revision, and distribution. The more involved the production, the more significant each of the steps becomes. In a typical production cycle of a Hollywood-style film, these main stages are defined as:

1. Development
2. Pre-production
3. Production
4. Post-production
5. Distribution

This production cycle usually takes three years. The first year is taken up with development. The second year comprises preproduction and production. The third year, post-production and distribution.

The bigger the production, the more resources it takes, and the more important financing becomes; most feature films are not only artistic works, but for-profit business entities.

Crew[link]

A film crew is a group of people hired by a film company, employed during the "production" or "photography" phase, for the purpose of producing a film or motion picture. Crew are distinguished from cast, the actors who appear in front of the camera or provide voices for characters in the film. The crew interacts with but is also distinct from the production staff, consisting of producers, managers, company representatives, their assistants, and those whose primary responsibility falls in pre-production or post-production phases, such as writers and editors. Communication between production and crew generally passes through the director and his/her staff of assistants. Medium-to-large crews are generally divided into departments with well defined hierarchies and standards for interaction and cooperation between the departments. Other than acting, the crew handles everything in the photography phase: props and costumes, shooting, sound, electrics (i.e., lights), sets, and production special effects. Caterers (known in the film industry as "craft services") are usually not considered part of the crew.

Technology[link]

Film stock consists of transparent celluloid, acetate, or polyester base coated with an emulsion containing light-sensitive chemicals. Cellulose nitrate was the first type of film base used to record motion pictures, but due to its flammability was eventually replaced by safer materials. Stock widths and the film format for images on the reel have had a rich history, though most large commercial films are still shot on (and distributed to theaters) as 35 mm prints.

Originally moving picture film was shot and projected at various speeds using hand-cranked cameras and projectors; though 1000 frames per minute (16⅔ frame/s) is generally cited as a standard silent speed, research indicates most films were shot between 16 frame/s and 23 frame/s and projected from 18 frame/s on up (often reels included instructions on how fast each scene should be shown).^[5] When sound film was introduced in the late 1920s, a constant speed was required for the sound head. 24 frames per second was chosen because it was the slowest (and thus cheapest) speed which allowed for sufficient sound quality. Improvements since the late 19th century include the mechanization of cameras – allowing them to record at a consistent speed, quiet camera design – allowing sound recorded on-set to be usable without requiring large "blimps" to encase the camera, the invention of more sophisticated filmstocks and lenses, allowing directors to film in increasingly dim conditions, and the development of synchronized sound, allowing sound to be recorded at exactly the same speed as its corresponding action. The soundtrack can be recorded separately from shooting the film, but for live-action pictures many parts of the soundtrack are usually recorded simultaneously.

As a medium, film is not limited to motion pictures, since the technology developed as the basis for photography. It can be used to present a progressive sequence of still images in the form of a slideshow. Film has also been incorporated into multimedia presentations, and often has importance as primary historical documentation. However, historic films have problems in terms of preservation and storage, and the motion picture industry is exploring many alternatives. Most movies on cellulose nitrate base have been copied onto modern safety films. Some studios save color films through the use of separation masters: three B&W negatives each exposed through red, green, or blue filters (essentially a reverse of the Technicolor process). Digital methods have also been used to restore films, although their continued obsolescence cycle makes them (as of 2006) a poor choice for long-term preservation. Film preservation of decaying film stock is a matter of concern to both film historians and archivists, and to companies interested in preserving their existing products in order to make them available to future generations (and thereby increase revenue). Preservation is generally a higher concern for nitrate and single-strip color films, due to their high decay rates; black-and-white films on safety bases and color films preserved on Technicolor imbibition prints tend to keep up much better, assuming proper handling and storage.

Some films in recent decades have been recorded using analog video technology similar to that used in television production. Modern digital video cameras and digital projectors are gaining ground as well. These approaches are preferred by some moviemakers, especially because footage shot with digital cinema can be evaluated and edited with non-linear editing systems (NLE) without waiting for the film stock to be processed. Yet the migration is gradual, and as of 2005 most major motion pictures are still shot on film.

Independent[link]

Independent filmmaking often takes place outside of Hollywood, or other major studio systems. An independent film (or indie film) is a film initially produced without financing or distribution from a major movie studio. Creative, business, and technological reasons have all contributed to the growth of the indie film scene in the late 20th and early 21st century.

The Lumière Brothers

On the business side, the costs of big-budget studio films also leads to conservative choices in cast and crew. There is a trend in Hollywood towards co-financing (over two-thirds of the films put out by Warner Bros. in 2000 were joint ventures, up from 10% in 1987).^[6] A hopeful director is almost never given the opportunity to get a job on a big-budget studio film unless he or she has significant industry experience in film or television. Also, the studios rarely produce films with unknown actors, particularly in lead roles.

Before the advent of digital alternatives, the cost of professional film equipment and stock was also a hurdle to being able to produce, direct, or star in a traditional studio film.

But the advent of consumer camcorders in 1985, and more importantly, the arrival of high-resolution digital video in the early 1990s, have lowered the technology barrier to movie production significantly. Both production and post-production costs have been significantly lowered; today, the hardware and software for post-production can be installed in a commodity-based personal computer. Technologies such as DVDs, FireWire connections and non-linear editing system pro-level software like Adobe Premiere Pro, Sony Vegas and Apple's Final Cut Pro, and consumer level software such as Apple's Final Cut Express and iMovie, and Microsoft's Windows Movie Maker make movie-making relatively inexpensive.

Since the introduction of DV technology, the means of production have become more democratized. Filmmakers can conceivably shoot and edit a movie, create and edit the sound and music, and mix the final cut on a home computer. However, while the means of production may be democratized, financing, distribution, and marketing remain difficult to accomplish outside the traditional system. Most independent filmmakers rely on film festivals to get their films noticed and sold for distribution. The arrival of internet-based video outlets such as YouTube and Veoh has further changed the film making landscape in ways that are still to be determined.

Open content film[link]

An open content film is much like an independent film, but it is produced through open collaborations; its source material is available under a license which is permissive enough to allow other parties to create fan fiction or derivative works, than a traditional copyright. Like independent filmmaking, open source filmmaking takes place outside of Hollywood, or other major studio systems.

Fan film[link]

A fan film is a film or video inspired by a film, television program, comic book or a similar source, created by fans rather than by the source's copyright holders or creators. Fan filmmakers have traditionally been amateurs, but some of the more notable films have actually been produced by professional filmmakers as film school class projects or as demonstration reels. Fan films vary tremendously in length, from short faux-teaser trailers for non-existent motion pictures to rarer full-length motion pictures.

Distribution[link]

When it is initially produced, a feature film is often shown to audiences in a movie theater or cinema. The identity of the first theater designed specifically for cinema is a matter of debate; candidates include Tally's Electric Theatre, established 1902 in Los Angeles,^[7] and Pittsburgh's Nickelodeon, established 1905.^[8] Thousands of such theaters were built or converted from existing facilities within a few years.^[9] In the United States, these theaters came to be known as nickelodeons, because admission typically cost a nickel (five cents).

Typically, one film is the featured presentation (or feature film). Before the 1970s, there were "double features"; typically, a high quality "A picture" rented by an independent theater for a lump sum, and a "B picture" of lower quality rented for a percentage of the gross receipts. Today, the bulk of the material shown before the feature film consists of previews for upcoming movies and paid advertisements (also known as trailers or "The Twenty").

Historically, all mass marketed feature films were made to be shown in movie theaters. The development of television has allowed films to be broadcast to larger audiences, usually after the film is no longer being shown in theaters.^{[citation needed]} In 1967, videocassettes of movies became available to consumers to watch in their own homes.^[10] Recording technology has since enabled consumers to rent or buy copies of films on VHS or DVD (and the older formats of laserdisc, VCD and SelectaVision – see also videodisc), and Internet downloads may be available and have started to become revenue sources for the film companies. Some films are now made specifically for these other venues, being released as a television movie or direct-to-video movies. The production values on these films are often considered to be of inferior quality compared to theatrical releases in similar genres, and indeed, some films that are rejected by their own movie studios upon completion are distributed through these markets.

The movie theater pays an average of about 50-55% of its ticket sales to the movie studio, as film rental fees.^[11] The actual percentage starts with a number higher than that, and decreases as the duration of a film's showing continues, as an incentive to theaters to keep movies in the theater longer. However, today's barrage of highly marketed movies ensures that most movies are shown in first-run theaters for less than 8 weeks. There are a few movies every year that defy this rule, often limited-release movies that start in only a few theaters and actually grow their theater count through good word-of-mouth and reviews. According to a 2000 study by ABN AMRO, about 26% of Hollywood movie studios' worldwide income came from box office ticket sales; 46% came from VHS and DVD sales to consumers; and 28% came from television (broadcast, cable, and pay-per-view).^[11]

This section requires expansion with: optical disc distribution.

Animation[link]

Animation is the technique in which each frame of a film is produced individually, whether generated as a computer graphic, or by photographing a drawn image, or by repeatedly making small changes to a model unit (see claymation and stop motion), and then photographing the result with a special animation camera. When the frames are strung together and the resulting film is viewed at a speed of 16 or more frames per second, there is an illusion of continuous movement (due to the persistence of vision). Generating such a film is very labor intensive and tedious, though the development of computer animation has greatly sped up the process.

Because animation is very time-consuming and often very expensive to produce, the majority of animation for TV and movies comes from professional animation studios. However, the field of independent animation has existed at least since the 1950s, with animation being produced by independent studios (and sometimes by a single person). Several independent animation producers have gone on to enter the professional animation industry.

Limited animation is a way of increasing production and decreasing costs of animation by using "short cuts" in the animation process. This method was pioneered by UPA and popularized by Hanna-Barbera, and adapted by other studios as cartoons moved from movie theaters to television.^[12]

Although most animation studios are now using digital technologies in their productions, there is a specific style of animation that depends on film. Cameraless animation, made famous by moviemakers like Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, is painted and drawn directly onto pieces of film, and then run through a projector.

Future state[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

While motion picture films have been around for more than a century, film is still a relative newcomer in the pantheon^{[clarification needed]} of fine arts. In the 1950s, when television became widely available, industry analysts^[who?] predicted the demise of local movie theaters.^{[citation needed]} Despite competition from television's increasing technological sophistication over the 1960s and 1970s^{[citation needed]} such as the development of color television and large screens, motion picture cinemas continued. In fact with the rise of television's predominance, film began to become more respected as an artistic medium by contrast due the low general opinion of the quality of average television content.^{[citation needed]} In the 1980s, when the widespread availability of inexpensive videocassette recorders enabled people to select films for home viewing, industry analysts again wrongly predicted the death of the local cinemas.^{[citation needed]}

In the 1990s and 2000s, the development of DVD players, home theater amplification systems with surround sound and subwoofers, and large LCD or plasma screens enabled people to select and view films at home with greatly improved audio and visual reproduction.^{[citation needed]} These new technologies provided audio and visual that in the past only local cinemas had been able to provide: a large, clear widescreen presentation of a film with a full-range, high-quality multi-speaker sound system. Once again industry analysts predicted the demise of the local cinema. Local cinemas will be changing in the 21st century and moving towards digital screens, a new approach which will allow for easier and quicker distribution of films (via satellite or hard disks), a development which may give local theaters a reprieve from their predicted demise.^{[citation needed]} The cinema now faces a new challenge from home video by the likes of a new high definition (HD) format, Blu-ray, which can provide full HD 1080p video playback at near cinema quality.^{[citation needed]} Video formats are gradually catching up with the resolutions and quality that film offers; 1080p in Blu-ray offers a pixel resolution of 1920×1080, a leap from the DVD offering of 720×480 and the 330×480 offered by the first home video standard, VHS.^{[citation needed]} Ultra HD, a future digital video format, will offer a resolution of 7680×4320. However, the nature and structure of film prevents an apples-to-apples comparison with regard to resolution.^[13] The resolving power of film, and its ability to capture an image which can later be scanned to a digital format, will ensure that film remains a viable medium for some time to come.^{[citation needed]} Currently the super-16 format is seeing use as a capture medium, with digital scanning and post-production providing good results.^[14][15] Despite advances in digital capture, film still offers unsurpassed ability to capture fine detail beyond what is possible with digital image sensors. A 35 mm film frame, with proper exposure and processing, still offers an equivalent resolution in the range of 500 mega pixels.^[13]

Despite the rise of all-new technologies, the development of the home video market and a surge of online copyright infringement, 2007 was a record year in film that showed the highest ever box-office grosses. Many^[who?] expected film to suffer as a result of the effects listed above but it has flourished, strengthening film studio expectations for the future.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

• Genre
• Fiction film basic genre
• Documentary basic genre
• Docufiction hybrid genre

• Lists

Film portal

• List of film awards
• List of film festivals
• List of film journals and magazines
• List of film topics
• List of video-related topics
• List of years in film
• Lists of films

Related topics

• Cinematic techniques
• Digital cinema
• Lost film
• Web film

Notes[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

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