The history of motion-pictures is not easily defined by a single invention or inaugural event. While inventors such as Thomas Edison, and early cinema pioneers such as the Lumiére brothers, have become central to legends surrounding the ‘birth of cinema’, the emergence of cinema was the result of a series of technological and entrepreneurial developments that came together in the 1890s. Seeking to capitalise on new capacities of photographic development, the invention of celluloid, and the refinement of machines that could project images in sequence, a number of individuals saw commercial possibilities in projecting moving images to paying audiences. Cinema did not arise as a fully fledged industry with a set of aesthetic norms and conventions in place, but developed as a novelty entertainment, one of a number of emergent visual forms within popular culture at the end of the nineteenth century.

The invention of moving pictures has complex origins that can be traced back to sixteenth-century experiments with the camera obscura and the use of magic lanterns. While the former was a dark chamber in which an image of outside objects could be thrown upon a screen, the latter was a device that enabled images, painted on glass, to be projected by means of an artificial light source. Magic lanterns were used to present a succession of images for the purpose of telling a story, often illustrating and helping to narrate satirical scenes, theatrical tragedies and miracle plays.

If the late 1960s and early 1970s witnessed a fascination with the art cinema within the Hollywood mainstream, the late 1970s is often seen as a ruthless reassertion of the supposed conservatism of commercialism and entertainment. However, it was the new generation of largely college-educated ‘movie brats’ who had been central to the modernist Hollywood of the previous period who were central to the shift from the modernist art cinema to blockbuster fantasies. Furthermore, while this moment is often associated with a nostalgic reference to the Hollywood past, as has already been pointed out, the modernist moment was itself ironically infused with a reverence for the golden age of classical cinema.

Despite this shift, the period from 1975 to 1980 is also distinguished by another feature. The importance of the director as a figure had grown dramatically in the late 1970s and during this period successful directors acquired considerable power. This was also exacerbated by a situation in which the studios were increasingly reliant on a few hit films a year to cover costs. By the end of the decade, though, many directors had developed a reputation for reckless extravagance and self-indulgence.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the overseas market counted for half of the majors' theatrical income and generated an even greater percentage of revenue through home video and television. The development and exploitation of world markets, specifically the rich and densely populated regions of Europe and Asia, led to strategic concerns with the global dimensions of film. This not only included questions about cinematic form, but also had significant implications for production, financing and labour practice.

In terms of the physical labour involved in the production of movies, Hollywood sought increasingly to exploit cheap labour markets during the 1990s. Similar to retail and manufacturing industries that source products using inexpensive factory labour, notably in Asia and South America, the film majors used ‘runaway production’ to keep down labour costs and to avoid troublesome domestic unions. Disney, for example, outsourced much of its animation work to Asia, where inkers and colourists were a lot cheaper to employ. At the same time, English-speaking countries such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom became emerging centres for runaway film production, a combination of tax incentives, currency imbalances and labour bargains meaning that studios could get more for their money using overseas production facilities.

While no big-budget movies were made overseas in 1990, twenty-four were made in 1998. Films such as Titanic (Mexico, 1997), The Matrix (Australia, 1999), Mission: Impossible (United Kingdom, 1996), Mission: Impossible 2 (Australia, 2000), the The Lord of the Rings trilogy (New Zealand, 2001–3), and The Bourne Identity (Czech Republic, 2002) all drew upon offshore labour and studio facilities.

It was not only the film industries associated with totalitarian governments that turned to historical subject matter in the 1930s, and nor was the concern with the common people simply a feature of socialist filmmaking. On the contrary, these preoccupations were also evident in the United States, the United Kingdom and France in the late 1930s as they responded to both the Depression and the growing threat of fascism.

Although the Depression did not really come to an end until the United States entered the war in 1941, the film industry fared better after 1935. Most of the studios had suffered economically during the early 1930s but, by the mid-1930s, they had restructured themselves in response. Also, economic confidence was improving and consumer spending on leisure activities such as cinemagoing was on the increase. The Depression, though, was still a significant issue and Hollywood responded in two apparently contradictory ways. On the one hand, the pressing social problems required that Hollywood display a sense of social responsibility and produce films that tackled the harsh realities of the period. On the other, Hollywood also claimed to offer the exact opposite: a pleasurable escape from these harsh realities.

A glance around the world in the 1920s reveals a heterogeneous film history but one replete with anxieties about American cultural imperialism and the homogenising tendencies of mass culture. The German film industry competed most successfully with America in that its domestic productions outweighed foreign imports in the 1920s and Britain put up a very good fight at the box office, with 1927 its annus mirabilis. However, protectionist measures would characterise a decade in which national cinemas sought to hold their own against Hollywood's incursions into other national cinemas. Audiences in Australia, Canada and India, for example, received a diet of mainly American fare. The American challenge to European and other cinemas was also underwritten by the federal support that the American film industry received from the US Government's Commerce Department, designed to support a developing industry. Nevertheless, the national cinema that produced the highest number of films in the 1920s was Japan's. Japanese cinema was a domestic product, and rarely exported, yet its major studios were highly organised and vertically integrated and directors tended to enjoy more artistic freedom within the evolving studio system. The significance of Japanese cinema may have been ‘discovered’ in the West by Noël Burch in the 1970s but we see the beginnings of Yasuijuro Ozu's career as an auteur in the Japanese cinema of the 1920s.

The 1980s are often thought of as a period defined by excesses of style and consumption, a ‘postmodern’ moment where the aesthetics of consumer culture – typified by the promotional flow of music video on television channels such as MTV – came to the fore. It is in this period that Hollywood film assumed a particular style that movie executives would label ‘high concept’. Responding to key industrial developments in the 1980s, such as the widespread adoption of marketing research and the growth of ancillary markets (such as music soundtracks), high concept movies were often based on pre-sold elements such as a best-selling book or a comic strip, and emphasised a distinctive style, conveyed in sleek images and music, which were integrated with their marketing. According to Justin Wyatt, the marketing ‘hook’ functioned alongside the stylistic ‘look’ within the spectrum of high concept. Whether soundtrack-driven movies such as Flashdance (1983), Top Gun (1986) or Dirty Dancing (1987), teen genre films such as The Lost Boys (1987) or Young Guns (1988), or high-budget blockbusters like Dick Tracy (1990), high concept films mobilised bold images and music, and the marketability of particular stars, to maximise their presence and appeal.

The most significant figures to popularise high concept filmmaking in the 1980s were the producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer. Making a stream of hits for Paramount, their films were defined by a powerful blend of visual imagery and popular music, a rock video style of filmmaking that often relied on extended montage sequences cut to music.

During the 1980s, nearly all the Hollywood majors became subsidiary divisions within giant corporations seeking to diversify their investments. While some film studios remained untouched by this emerging corporate pattern, a new burst of takeovers and buyouts in the mid- to late 1980s saw the remaining studios acquired, often by non-US buyers. In 1985, the News Corporation, owned by Australian publisher Rupert Murdoch, purchased Twentieth-Century Fox; in 1989, the Japanese electronics company Sony bought Columbia Pictures from Coca-Cola; and in 1990, Universal was acquired by Japan's Matsushita Electronic Industrial Company. Only Disney remained autonomous in corporate terms. Amidst this business activity was an emerging picture of consolidation in media industries. Gradually getting rid of non-film and media interests, conglomerates began to streamline their operations and consolidate their power around the core business of entertainment and communications.

One of the most significant examples of media conglomeration came in 1989 when the publishing company Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications Inc. in a $14 billion deal. Followed by subsequent mergers with Turner Broadcasting in 1996 and America Online in 2000, the market worth of the conglomerate had reached $96 billion by the start of 2000. It had combined stakes in publishing, cable, music, film, video, television, the Internet, professional sports teams, retail outlets, studios, cinemas and theme parks. Linking old media and new media, Time Warner was committed to the creative synergy of its multi-media investments and to ever-deepening global market expansion.

The coming of sound was an important phase in the bid for naturalism in the cinema and by the end of the 1920s many filmmakers across different national cinemas were in pursuit of forms of cinematic realism that would convey ‘modernity’. The cinema was one of a number of cultural, technological and political developments, or transformations, that coalesced in the larger formation of modernity. The 1920s would also see the beginnings of an intellectual tradition that read cinema as a self-reflexive medium and a distinctively public phenomenon that might translate, or at the very least comment on, modernity for a mass audience. A burgeoning film culture began to involve critics and reviewers as taste-makers, categorising and theorising about films as art, and film journals and magazines as the forum in which the patrons of film clubs and societies could begin to find the films they enjoyed contextualised.

New documentary styles emerged although the term ‘new’ may seem misleading when it is remembered that Lumière's first frames were actually of workers leaving his factory after their day's work and that early cinema from most national vantage points sought to exploit new technology to find the ‘truth value’ in everyday realities from its beginnings. The cinema was beginning to experiment with realism and its alternatives and by the late 1920s, the term ‘documentary’ was in popular usage and in Hollywood too directors aimed at capturing a level of verisimilitude that would amaze audiences.

The 1950s was a decade of contradictions in society as well as cinema, a decade in which ideals such as a middle-class lifestyle, the model home, and marriage and parenthood were complicated and undermined by anxieties over gender roles and cross-generational tensions. The nuclear family ideal was of particular importance in the postwar period as a site of hope and regeneration. For example, Marty starring Ernest Borgnine was originally a television play but in 1955 it was the Academy's surprise choice for Best Picture. The story of the young man whose loyalty to his elderly mother slowly gives way to love and marriage in a new neighbourhood successfully tapped into a postwar ideology that linked marriage and family with civic virtues. In fact, in 1954 Life magazine aired a special feature on the ‘domestication’ of the American male. However, the rise of suburbia as a phenomenon in the 1950s also meant that middle-class wives expected to stay at home felt ‘lost’ in the suburbs while husbands commuted to the office. The consumer trap put pressure on both men and women to ensure that the home and family would remain perfect – even as children became teenagers in the 1950s. Out of the so-called era of conformity, there emerged an exciting cinema, with films often made by maverick outsiders, such as William Castle, Orson Welles and Roger Corman, outsiders who would come to dominate as independent directors by the end of the decade.

The formation of the major Hollywood studios developed from market struggles between the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) and a group of independents spearheaded by Carl Laemmle. Running the largest American distribution firm, Laemmle was unwilling to pay licence fees to the MPPC. This meant he was restricted from purchasing films to supply his customers, unable to buy titles from Biograph, Vitagraph, Edison, Pathé, or any of the other major affiliated companies. As a result, Laemmle began his own firm, founding the Independent Moving Picture Company (or IMP as it became known) in 1909. This company produced its own films, releasing two reels a week together with reels supplied by Italian companies such as Ambrosio and Itala. This marked a surge of activity in the independent sector, unlicensed producers, distributors and exhibitors allying themselves in ways that would unravel the power of the MPPC.

Together with IMP, a number of independent producers emerged in 1910. This included the Centaur Film Manufacturing Company, the Nestor Company, the Thanhouser Company, and the New York Motion Picture Company. In the same year, the independent producers established a co-operative distribution arm called the Motion Picture Distribution and Sales Company. This would help organise the independent field by regulating release dates and film prices and mirrored the function of the General Film Company, established by the Trust in 1910. Both were attempts to monopolise distribution in the domestic market and set in place a power struggle to control the US film industry.

The enthusiasm that greeted story films in the early 1900s led many studios to shift decisively towards this type of film in meeting popular demand. The five main American production companies – Edison, Biograph, Lubin, Selig and Vitagraph – all moved into fiction filmmaking, as did the major film studios of Europe. From 1905 to 1906, this included the French studios Pathé and Gaumont, the Danish production company Nordisk, as well as the principal film companies of Britain and Italy such as Hepworth and Cines.

If cinema began to flourish in the 1900s, creating a soaring demand for new product, it was linked significantly to the rise of film exchanges. These first emerged in 1903 and had a profound effect on distribution and exhibition practices. Film exchanges enabled film producers to rent rather than sell their films. This had revolutionary implications. On the one hand, film exchanges helped to standardise film and turn it into an interchangeable commodity. On the other hand, they helped decouple the industrial arms of distribution and exhibition. These features would soon become central elements in the organisational structure of the wider film industry. Chicago became the largest centre of film exchanges in the mid-1900s, fifteen of the city's exchanges controlling 80 per cent of the rental business in the United States. These provided new prints to those exhibitors willing to pay a weekly premium.

During the early 1930s, Hollywood faced a series of problems. First, the industry was still adjusting to the introduction of sound and the period saw a series of technical developments in sound recording. Second, the Great Depression followed the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and this seriously affected the industry: as unemployment grew, audiences declined. Finally, opposition to the industry intensified both at home and abroad, and this led to the introduction of the notorious Hays Code in 1934 and the creation of organisations such as the British Film Institute, which were designed to counter the influence of Hollywood overseas.

Although sound created technical problems for filmmakers, its introduction did not significantly change the structure of the industry, which was dominated by eight companies. The ‘Majors’, or Big Five, were Paramount (which had previously been known as Famous Players-Lasky), Loew's (which was better known as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or MGM), Fox, Warner Bros. and Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO), a new company that had been created in order to capitalise on RCA's sound system. Added to the Majors were three ‘Minors’: Universal, Columbia and United Artists. However, their size did not necessarily imply that these were low-budget enterprises, and United Artists in particular was known for its prestige productions. Much the same is also true of some of the small independent companies, such as those run by Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick, which produced lavish prestige features for the major studios.

While the United States had the greatest number of film theatres during the nickelodeon period, the films they played very often came from Europe. Indeed, by the start of the First World War in 1914, France and Italy were the two leading film-producing countries in the world. Although the history of popular film is often associated with Hollywood and the development of the American film industry, this ignores the international scope and status of early cinema, and the particular significance of European production companies.

The prominence of the French film industry was based on the activity of Pathé-Frères. Not only did Pathé films make up to half of those shown in American nickelodeon programmes, the company dominated world markets, exporting its product in areas such as Western and Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Singapore and Japan. Pathé-Frères was a vertically integrated company, one of the first to control simultaneously the different sectors of production, distribution and exhibition. As well as manufacturing its own cameras, projectors and film stock, Pathé produced and distributed film, and in Europe owned the theatres in which they played. By 1909, Pathé had a circuit of 200 cinemas in France and Belgium. This combined with a network of agencies across the globe to administer the sale and rental of its films. By 1907, Pathé-Frères was the largest film company in the world, using mass-production methods to release as many as six film titles a week.

The success of the postwar art cinema reawakened an awareness of the possibilities of cinema, and created a sense of dissatisfaction with established cinematic traditions, particularly those of Hollywood. The second half of the 1960s, therefore, saw a surge in alternative filmmaking around the world. This period also witnessed the growth of left-wing radicalism as revolutionary struggles in the Third World inspired one another and motivated student radicalism in Europe and the United States.

Stylistically, this radicalism manifested itself in two main ways. On the one hand, there was an interest in both realism and documentary, in which filmmakers sought to engage audiences politically by exposing social processes and conditions. On the other hand, there was an interest in avant-garde strategies that were designed to challenge audiences' perceptions and question the ideological workings of cinema itself. While these two trends were often opposed to one another in rhetoric, they were rarely as distinct as this rhetoric might suggest. The realists and documentary filmmakers were often highly experimental while the avant-gardists often tackled overtly political content.

For example, The Battle for Algiers (1965) is often presented as a key impetus in the development of Third World cinema. Although directed by an Italian director, Pontecorvo, it was made by the Algerian government as a way of celebrating its independence from France after a long and bitter struggle.

An examination of art films and adult cinema reveals a changing film industry at the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s as cinema's role as classic family entertainment was lost to television. Films diversified to attract different audiences, including young Americans for whom sci-fi, horror and titillation at the drive-in would guarantee a great evening out, and more specialist ‘art house’ screenings for American audiences for whom European imports held the intellectual high ground. The art house cinema circuit was typically the neighbourhood theatre in big cities where revivals of European classics such as Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game (1939) and appreciation of more recent films such as Hiroshi Inagaki's Samurai (1954) consolidated art house cinema, differentiating it from the mass cultural products that were seen as typical of ‘American’ cinema in the 1950s. The rise of the art house as an outlet for a more diverse cinema product coincided with new cinema movements, or ‘New Waves,’ that would wash through cinema culture and change it.

In the same period, the Production Code largely administered by the studios was no longer easily enforceable. Some independent producers turned to exploitation movies, especially since in 1952 the Supreme Court extended the rights of free speech enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the cinema in order to bring the institution in line with other media such as news.

Despite Hollywood's consolidation of power, and the centrality of the mass-audience blockbuster to the economics and aesthetics of contemporary filmmaking, there remained enough flexibility in the film industry for alternative models of cinema to exist, and in some cases flourish, beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. Similarly, broadcast industries in Europe, such as Channel 4 in Britain and ZDF in Germany, were eager to purchase low-budget niche American films for their burgeoning programming schedules. These provided valuable funding streams for independent film.

At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan were becoming an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. Frequently mixing filmmakers, producers, industry personnel, scholars, journalists, archivists and ordinary fans, film festivals would attract a broad spectrum of participants in a jamboree atmosphere that could make or break new films, especially foreign (meaning non-US), marginal or ‘difficult’ films. Festivals came to represent an alternative distribution network in the 1990s, crucial to the success of movies ranging from Cinema Paradiso (1989) to The Wedding Banquet (1993).

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the United States was torn by internal conflict as divisions between young and old, black and white, and left and right became increasingly polarised. As a result, it is hardly surprising that the Hollywood cinema of this period displayed so many tensions and contradictions. While this can be seen as the period of Hollywood modernism, in which a series of films and filmmakers displayed the influence of the international art cinema, it can also been seen as one in which Hollywood cinema incorporated other cinemas, containing their threat by absorbing that which was threatening. In political terms, this can also be seen as both an era of political radicalism in which a whole series of aspects of American culture and society were criticised and as one of conservatism in which there was an attack on the claims and gains made by the left.

In the mid-1960s, the industry was threatened by a series of costly financial failures such as the musicals Dr Doolittle (1967) and Star! (1968). As a reaction to its declining audiences and in the aftermath of some major hits such as The Sound of Music (1965), the industry had invested heavily in a series of big budget productions many of which seriously underperformed and by 1969, the industry as a whole was in serious financial difficulty. In 1968, MGM even saw itself acquired by Kirk Kerkorian who stripped the company and sold off its assets.