Hollywood

American film production in the early 1920s was increasingly consolidated around a small number of film studios, all based in Hollywood, which became synonymous with the American film industry. This system of classical Hollywood studio production survived until the 1960s, when it would be challenged by the increasing popularity of television and the rise of independent film production.

Hollywood's first blockbuster of the post-silent era was the 'talkie' The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), as its sporadic lines of spoken dialogue caused an instant sensation. Oskar Messter had produced Tonbilders (films with synchronised sound) in the 1900s, and, while The Jazz Singer may have been technicaly inferior to these earlier experimental sound films, its commercial success led directly to the demise of silent cinema.

During Hollywood's 'golden age', the hardships of the Depression were temporarily replaced by the glamour of Technicolor. Gone With The Wind (produced by David O Selznick for his own studio) and The Wizard Of Oz (from MGM), both directed by Victor Fleming in 1939, are the greatest films of this period, and arguably the most iconic Hollywood films ever made. Both were produced in vivid three-strip Technicolor, following the hand-colouring of the 1900s, the tinting of the 1910s, and the two-strip Technicolor of the 1920s. (The first feature-length Technicolor film, Wray Bartlett Physioc's The Gulf Between from 1917, is no longer extant.)

1930s

The Hollywood studio system, by now at the height of its artistic and commercial success, began more than ever to produce films formulated according to specific genres. For example, many hundreds of westerns (known as 'oaters') were made during the decade, the best of which was John Ford's Stagecoach (1939), starring John Wayne. Ford would continue to make westerns with Wayne for the next thirty years, though he also made the classic western My Darling Clementine with Henry Fonda in 1946.

Universal produced many horror films in the 1930s, notably Frankenstein (1931) and Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), both by British director James Whale, though the most unusual was Edgar G Ulmer's bizarre The Black Cat (1934). Of all the Universal horror films, Bride Of Frankenstein is the most significant, being both a prototypical horror film and a blackly comic parody of the genre's conventions. It is an incredibly subversive film, with barely disguised gay and blasphemous subtexts. (Least notable is Tod Browning's Dracula: its success, in 1931, launched the Universal horror cycle, though the film itself is stilted and creaky.)

Alongside horror, the gangster genre also established itself in the early 1930s. Mervyn Le Roy's somewhat dated Little Caesar (1930) was the first of the cycle, though far more powerful is William Wellmann's The Public Enemy (1931), released shortly afterwards. Both films, made by Universal, were swiftly surpassed, however, by Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) starring Paul Muni, produced by Howard Hughes.

The popularity of horror and gangster pictures was a cause of concern for the Catholic Legion of Decency and the Motion-Picture Producers and Distributors Association. The president of the MPPDA, Will Hays, drew up a Production Code forbidding excessive cinematic sex and violence.

The musicals 42nd Street (Lloyd Bacon), Gold-Diggers Of 1933 (Mervyn Le Roy), and Footlight Parade (Lloyd Bacon), all choreographed by Busby Berkeley for Warner in 1933, were popular with audiences eager for escapism. (They also inspired Brazil's Chanchada musicals such as Carnaval No Fogo by Watson Macedo, 1949.) Berkeley later directed the Technicolor fantasia The Gang's All Here (1943).

The Screwball comedy sub-genre made a star of Cary Grant, who appeared in Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938). Screwball comedies, initiated by Frank Capra's It Happened One Night, 1934, were characterised by their fast-paced dialogue and 'battle of the sexes' humour. Screwball films were essentially frenetic variants of 'rom-com' romantic comedies; traditional rom-coms were regarded, somewhat dismissively, as 'chick flicks' (known in Germany as Frauenfilme), epitomised by the melodramatic Now Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942).

The most popular actress of the period was Swedish icon Greta Garbo, who had been a silent film star since the early 1920s, notably in Flesh And The Devil (Clarence Brown, 1926). She later appeared (and, famously, spoke) in Clarence Brown's Anna Christie (1930) and Edmund Goulding's creaky Grand Hotel (1932), though withdrew from public life in 1941.

1940s

The most important film of the decade was unquestionably Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles in 1941. With its deep-focus photography, stylised lighting, and overlapping dialogue, amongst other innovations, Kane is perhaps America's most significant contribtion to the development of the cinema. Furthermore, it was Welles's cinematic debut, directed when he was a mere twenty-six years old. Previous to Kane, Welles had directed and starred in The War Of The Worlds, often cited as the world's greatest radio production. Although he was given total artistic control over Citizen Kane, his later films (including The Magnificent Ambersons from 1942 and The Lady From Shanghai from 1947) were often re-edited by studios without his supervision.

During World War II, producer Walt Disney's animated features, including Pinocchio (Ben Sharpsteen, 1940), Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941), and Bambi (David Hand, 1942), provided much-needed escapism, as Technicolor had done during the Depression in the 1930s. They consolidated Disney's position at the forefront of animation, following the success of Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). The self-mythologising Disney studio claims Snow White as the first feature-length animated film, however that honour actually belongs to the Argentine film El Apostol by Quirino Cristiani (1917; no longer extant).

Film Noir

After the War, directors turned increasingly towards social realism and reverted to monochrome cinematography. This visually, thematically, and psychologically dark style was known as Film Noir, influenced by German Expressionism, the French Poetic Realism films of the 1930s, and the B-movie Stranger On The Third Floor (Boris Ingster, 1940). Recurrent motifs of Film Noir (and its melodramatic offshoot, Film Gris) include world-weary detectives, sultry femmes fatales, and urban crime narratives. Classic Films Noirs include Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Jacques Tourneur's Out Of The Past (1947), and John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Charles Laughton's lyrical The Night Of The Hunter (1955) is also stylistically a Noir film. Cinematographer John Alton was responsible for some of the most visually stylish Films Noirs, including The Big Combo (Joseph H Lewis, 1955).

Films Noirs were named after a series of French crime novels, and a cycle of German films derives its name from a similar source: Krimi films, including Der Frosch Mit Der Maske (Harald Reinl, 1959) were named after a series of German crime novels. Humphrey Bogart played the archetypal Noir detectives Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) and Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946). Marlowe was also played by Robert Montgomery, in Lady In The Lake (1947, directed by Montgomery); the film was shot entirely from a first-person-perspective, thus Montgomery is only ever seen by the audience when he is reflected by a mirror.

Bogart was perhaps the biggest star of the 1940s, and appeared in Michael Curtiz's perfect wartime romance Casablanca (1942) in addition to his Film Noir roles. Other major stars of the time were James Stewart in Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life (1946) and Cary Grant in Howard Hawks's brilliant Screwball comedy His Girl Friday (1940).

Noir themes such as urban crime were given more naturalistic treatments in a number of films both set in and filmed on the city streets. The first of these documentary-style, 'police procedural' thrillers was The House On 92nd Street (1945) by Henry Hathaway, though the most well-known is Jules Dassin's The Naked City (1948). (Dassin later directed the gangster classic Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes in 1955.) Elia Kazan directed one of the best documentary-style thrillers, Panic In The Streets (1950). Film Noir's most striking antithesis was the Hollywood musical, which Vincente Minnelli reinvented with Meet Me In St Louis (1944) by integrating songs directly into the melodramatic narrative.

1950s

The 1950s were overwhelmed by science-fiction B-movies, some good, some bad, and some so bad they're good: The Thing From Another World (Christian Nyby, 1951; produced by Howard Hawks), The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (Eugene Lourie, 1953), the Japanese Gojira (an exercise in cryptozoology by Ishiro Honda, 1954, spawning the Kaiju-Eiga genre of Japanese monster films), The Incredible Shrinking Man (Jack Arnold, 1956), and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). The cycle was initiated by producer George Pal's Destination Moon (Irving Pichel, 1950), though the exploitative 'mockbuster' Rocketship X-M (Kurt Neumann, 1950) was released before Pal's film.

There are many more examples of these films, featuring deadly alien invasions (with anti-Communist subtexts) and monsters awakened and/or mutated (exploiting anxiety about atomic radiation), though their lurid posters are often more interesting than the films themselves. The most lamentable science-fiction films of the period were directed by Ed Wood, often cited as the world's worst director. Wood's films, including the notorious camp classic Plan Nine From Outer Space (1956), were certainly incompetent, though they were never dull.

MGM made a long series of Technicolor musicals produced by Arthur Freed in the 1940s and 1950s, including Meet Me In St Louis, and, most famously, Singin' In The Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Often acclaimed as the greatest musical film ever made, Singin' In The Rain was a comedy based on Hollywood's transition to sound in the 1920s (a subject which later inspired 2011's silent-film homage The Artist, by Michel Hazanavicius). The other key Hollywood-on-Hollywood film of the era was the Gothic melodrama Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950), which starred two figures from the silent era: actress Gloria Swanson and director Erich von Stroheim.

Alfred Hitchcock relocated from London to Hollywood in the 1940s (his greatest British films being the Expressionist The Lodger: A Story Of The London Fog from 1926 and the espionage thriller The 39 Steps from 1935), and directed several films (including Notorious in 1946) under contract to David O Selznick. Hitchcock directed his most acclaimed films during the 1950s, after extricating himself from the Selznick contract: Rear Window (1956), and Vertigo (1958). Hitchcock's greatest film, the shocking Psycho, was released in 1960, and influenced 'slasher' films such as Bob Clark's Black Christmas (1974), John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), and Wes Craven's self-referential New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996).

The greatest star of the decade was undoubtedly Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the ultimate Hollywood sex symbol. Her renditions of Diamonds Are A Girl's Best Friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) and I Wanna Be Loved By You in Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959) are her career highlights. Monroe died in 1962, after an (either accidental or suicidal) overdose of sleeping pills.

The increasing popularity of television forced Hollywood to introduce numerous technological innovations in order to compete for audiences. The most successful of these innovations were widescreen and 3D formats based, ironically, on experiments conducted since the 1890s.

The first widescreen process of the 1950s, the triptych Cinerama format used for This Is Cinerama (Merian C Cooper, 1952), was directly inspired by the Polyvision system used in the 1920s, though it added a curved screen to provide a feeling of immersive depth. 20th Century Fox's CinemaScope anamorphic widescreen format (The Robe; Henry Koster, 1953), based on Henri Chretien's Hypergonar system, soon replaced the more cumbersome Cinerama.

In order to fully demonstrate the panoramic potential of the new widescreen formats, a number of biblical epics of the 1920s were remade in widescreen Technicolor splendour, including Ben-Hur: A Tale Of The Christ (William Wyler, 1959). Since the 1950s, ultra-wide formats have only rarely been utilised for narrative films, relegated instead to novelty attractions such as IMAX (Tiger Child; Donald Brittain, 1970). These audience-engulfing, large-screen and multi-screen formats were initially proposed by Stan van der Beek in his 1966 essay Culture:Intercom And Expanded Cinema: A Proposal And Manifesto.

Another gimmick used by Hollywood to lure audiences away from TV was 3D, which had been used previously in isolated experimental films and the silent film The Power Of Love (Nat G Deverich and Harry K Fairall, 1922) though was promoted as a mainstream attraction in the 1950s. The success of Bwana Devil (Arch Oboler, 1952), filmed in Natural Vision 3D, led to science-fiction films such as Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954) and It Came From Outer Space (1953), both by Jack Arnold, also receiving 3D releases.

Some of the more esoteric 1950s gimmicks included Psycho-Rama, a process by which images and text appeared subliminally within the horror film My World Dies Screaming (Harold Daniels, 1958). There were also two olfactory gimmicks: Smell-O-Vision (Scent Of Mystery; Jack Cardiff, 1960) and Aroma-Rama (La Muraglia Cinese; Carlo Lizzani, 1959). (A later scent-gimmick utilised scratch 'n' sniff cards: Odorama in 1981 for John Waters's Polyester.) Director William Castle (The Tingler, 1959) was the undisputed king of gimmicks in the 1950s, though his inventive marketing schemes were far more memorable than the films they promoted.

To provide a unique alternative to television, American drive-in cinemas began screening sensationalist, melodramatic exploitation films, from disposable WIP ('women in prison') films such as Caged (John Cromwell, 1949) to more substantial JD ('juvenile delinquent') films such as The Wild One and Rebel Without A Cause.

Though most 1950s exploitation films were low-budget, absurdly moralistic, and instantly out-of-date, there are two clear exceptions: the 'teensploitation' films The Wild One starring Marlon Brando and Rebel Without A Cause starring James Dean. Brando was one of a number of young male actors who starred in juvenile delinquent films about youth rebellion, the prototypical example being Brando's own performance in The Wild One (Laslo Benedek, 1953). James Dean starred in the yet more iconic Rebel Without A Cause (Nicholas Ray) in 1955 (released after Dean had been killed in a car accident). A parallel trend existed in Japanese cinema, with a genre known as Taiyozoku inaugurated by Takumi Furukawa's Taiyo No Kisetsu (1956).

In A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, 1951), Marlon Brando introduced a new acting style to the cinema: the Method. Trained at the Actors' Studio, he brought an unprecedented intensity to screen acting, notably in On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). Director Kazan named names to senator Joe McCarthy during the Communist witch-hunts, and On The Waterfront, in which Brando's character testifies against organised criminals, can be seen as self-justification for Kazan's actions.

The new realism of Brando and Dean's acting style was complemented by a new generation of directors who produced their own films and thus bypassed the studio system. Shadows (1959), by John Cassavetes, was made completely independently in 16mm. Stanley Kubrick also produced his own films, directing independently since the early 1950s (his breakthrough being Paths Of Glory, 1957). Arguably, no other director has matched Kubrick's perfectionism or his consistent genius. In the 1960s, he relocated to England, where he directed the satirical masterpiece Dr Strangelove, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964), the stunning science-fiction epic 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the stylised A Clockwork Orange (1971). (Terrence Malick's The Tree Of Life, from 2011, was one of the few films to equal 2001's epic scope.)

The most determined of the independent producer-directors was Otto Preminger, who released The Moon Is Blue (1953) without Production Code approval. He also directed one of the best documentary-style Noir thrillers, Where The Sidewalk Ends, in 1950.

Hollywood genre cycles from the 1930s were revisited in the 1950s, notably the gangster film and the western. James Cagney starred in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949), equalling and perhaps even exceeding the achievements of his original 1930s classic The Public Enemy. The western underwent considerable revision, influenced by the surprisingly radical High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952). John Wayne, who starred in Howard Hawks's Red River (1948), gave arguably his greatest performance in John Ford's The Searchers (1956), introducing a new psychological complexity to the genre and presenting the traditional western hero as an anachronistic outcast.

The dark and amoral world of Film Noir reached its logical conclusion with the apocalyptic Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955). Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane, began his Noir masterpiece Touch Of Evil (1958) with a sequence that rivals Bronenosets Potyomkin's 'Odessa Steps' as the greatest sequence ever filmed. Its opening shot is a stunning and seemingly never-ending tracking sequence.

1960s

Mainstream American cinema began to embrace the radical counter-culture of underground cinema with subversive films such as The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) and Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969); the increasing radicalisation of the mainstream eventually led to the collapse of the old Hollywood studio system. Compare, for instance, the revitalising innovation of The Graduate with the lavish emptiness of Joseph L Mankiewicz's Cleopatra (1963). Television also played its part, as an increasingly significant medium for film distribution and even production: the first 'telefilm' (made-for-TV film), See How They Run (David Lowell Rich), was broadcast in 1964.

The release of two Hollywood films with unusually violent climaxes, Arthur Penn's Bonnie And Clyde (1967) and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), precipitated the collapse of the Production Code. Bonnie And Clyde's amoral account of a young outlaw couple would later influence Terrence Malick's road movie Badlands (1973).

Director Jonas Mekas wrote increasingly about the new generation of American underground film-makers influenced by the earlier avant-garde films of Maya Deren. He coined the term New American Cinema and wrote The First Statement Of The New American Cinema Group in 1962.

New American Cinema was an umbrella term describing the works of, amongst others, the formalist Michael Snow and the artist Andy Warhol. Snow was a key figure in the Structural film movement, drawing attention to the movement of the camera rather than to any narrative content; his Wavelength from 1967, for example, is a long, slow, continuous zoom. On the fringe of the New American Cinema was Tony Conrad, whose The Flicker (1964) introduced the concept of the Flicker film, a film whose editing is so rapid that its images appear for only a single frame.

The most famous name in 1960s American underground cinema was Andy Warhol, who directed (or at least supervised) a series of long, static films in which motionless subjects were filmed for several hours. Warhol's early films link him to the Minimalist film movement, de-emphasising narrative and technique, and his more ambitious later works (such as The Chelsea Girls, 1966) were actually directed by Paul Morrissey.

In 1965, Warhol borrowed a prototype video camera to make some experimental videos, incorporating some of his early video footage into the film Outer And Inner Space (1965). This was shortly before the 'official' birth of video art, when, also in 1965, Nam June Paik videotaped the Papal procession of Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini. Nam June Paik was originally a Fluxus artist, and produced one of their first Fluxfilms, Zen For Film (1962).

Warhol may be the underground's most famous name, though its most famous film is Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), an orgy of sexual ambiguity. The greatest underground film-maker was the prolific and radical Stan Brakhage, whose most widely-known film is Dog Star Man (1964). Brakhage often painted directly onto strips of celluloid, to create abstract Direct films similar to those pioneered by the Futurists in the 1910s and Len Lye in the 1930s (such as A Colour Box, 1935).

1970s

Films such as Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) dominated the mainstream American box-office, setting new profit records and initiating the now-familiar 'blockbuster'/'event movie' phenomenon. Star Wars, like the later Raiders Of The Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg, 1981), was an updated version of 1930s adventure serials such as Flash Gordon (Frederick Stephani, 1936). (The serial format, with episodic narratives and 'cliffhanger' endings, was introduced by What Happened To Mary? (Charles Brabin) in 1912 and typified by The Perils Of Pauline (Donald MacKenzie and Louis J Gasnier) in 1914.)

Woody Allen with Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), and Martin Scorsese with Taxi Driver (1976), directed arguably their greatest works during this decade. (Allen also directed one of his most misunderstood films, the self-satirising Stardust Memories, in 1980.) Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974) heralded a revival of the Film Noir detective films from the 1940s. More precisely, Chinatown has been cited as an example of Film Soleil, a sub-genre featuring Noir narratives coupled with sun-drenched locations. Plein Soleil (Rene Clement, 1960) may qualify as the original Film Soleil, predating Chinatown by more than a decade, though the film credited with instigating the movement is actually the later Blood Simple.

Method actor Marlon Brando gave his greatest performances since the 1950s, in The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and particularly the breath-taking Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979). His performance in Apocalypse Now has been criticised as incoherent and self-indulgent, though, in fact, such traits are entirely consistent with the character he plays. The long build-up to his character's eventual shadowy appearance evokes The Third Man from the 1940s, and Brando's performance in Apocalypse Now is the equal of Orson Welles's in that earlier film.

Robert de Niro, arguably the greatest screen actor since Brando, starred in several of Scorsese's films, notably Taxi Driver, in what would become one of the greatest actor/director partnerships. He later appeared in Scorsese's gangster epic GoodFellas (1990). Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino were also key actors of the 1970s. Nicholson made exploitation films for Roger Corman throughout the 1960s, though his mainstream breakthrough came with his performance in Easy Rider. Pacino and de Niro both starred in The Godfather II (1974), Coppola's Godfather sequel, though they did not appear together; they had one joint scene decades later in Michael Mann's Heat (1995).

Exploitation Cinema

Exploitation has a long cinematic pedigree, with some of the earliest examples being Aufklarungsfilme (prurient documentaries concerning the facts of life) and Sittenfilme (sexploitation dramas, such as Robert Reinert's Opium). These films were made in Germany only in 1919, during a brief period of relaxed censorship immediately after World War I. The various branches of exploitation cinema are all encompassed by the umbrella term 'paracinema', referring to cinema outside the mainstream.

With the Production Code disposed of, increasingly unrestricted representations of sex and violence were present in counter-culture and exploitation films from the 1960s onwards. Although pornographic Stag reels ('blue movies', 'cooch reels', 'beaver reels', or 'smokers') had existed since the 1890s, it was Russ Meyer's The Immoral Mr Teas (1959) which brought nudity into narrative cinema, initiating a stream of 'roughies', 'kinkies', 'ghoulies', and 'nudie-cuties'. Sexploitation films, known as Bombas (and milder crowd-pleasing Bakyas) would later dominate Filippino cinema in the 1970s. Sexploitation in America became increasingly explicit and violent following Herschell Gordon Lewis's gory Blood Feast (1963) and the Mondo documentary Mondo Cane (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi, 1962), until eventually even hardcore pornography gained mainstream recognition. Deep Throat (1972), by Gerard Damiano, became porn's cross-over hit; it played in mainstream cinemas, with its success being dubbed 'porno chic'. Subsequently removed from public cinemas, pornography is now ubiquitous online and on video; John Stagliano's The Adventures Of Buttman (1989) led to the Verite-style Gonzo porn video sub-genre.

The 'midnight movie' was inaugurated in New York in 1970, when Alexandro Jodorowsky's apocalyptic Spaghetti western El Topo played to capacity audiences every night at midnight. With a complete lack of publicity, the film's popularity derived entirely from word-of-mouth. Pink Flamingos by John Waters received midnight screenings in 1972, though it was the camp horror-musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) which came to epitomise the participatory midnight movie phenomenon, with audiences dressing up as characters from the film and singing along with the soundtrack.

Nick Zedd published a manifesto calling for a new kind of taboo-breaking cinema, which he named the Cinema of Transgression, in 1985. (The Cinema Of Transgression Manifesto was originally attributed to Orion Jeriko, Zedd's pseudonym.) The Cinema of Transgression was an offshoot of No Wave Cinema, a New York underground movement launched by Amos Poe (The Foreigner, 1978) and others. The Punk sensibility of No Wave Cinema later influenced Re-Modernist Cinema, itself a branch of the reactionary Stuckist art group; the short Re-Modernist film Shooting At The Moon, directed by Jesse Richards and Nicholas Watson, was filmed in 1998 though not released until 2003. Nick Zedd made his first underground films in the early 1980s, though his most extreme production is the confrontational, hardcore short film Whoregasm from 1988. The most extreme combination of sex and violence, the Snuff film, is merely an urban myth, despite the false marketing claims of the exploitation film (and 'video nasty') Snuff (Michael Findlay and Carter Stevens, 1976).

Enter The Dragon (Robert Clouse, 1973) cashed in on the 1970s vogue for kung-fu by giving actor Bruce Lee his first American role. Like Rebel Without A Cause, it was released after its main star had died. While Hong Kong kung-fu (or 'chop-socky') stars such as Lee demonstrated impressive though largely realistic martial-arts skills, the stars of another form of martial-arts cinema (Chinese Wuxia Pian films, also known as Mo Hap Pin) were endowed with supernatural and mythological powers. The first Wuxia film was the serial Huo Shao Hong Lian Si (Shichuan Zhang, 1928), though the genre's modern form was established by King Hu's Long Men Ke Zhen (1966).

Airport (George Seaton and Henry Hathaway, 1970) launched a brief genre cycle, the disaster film, featuring fires, earthquakes, and other catastrophies. The key films of the cycle was The Towering Inferno (John Guillermin and Irwin Allen, 1974).

Equally short-lived was the 'blaxploitation' cycle, which emerged with Cotton Comes To Harlem (Ossie Davis, 1970) and included Shaft (1971) directed by Gordon Parks. (Like Stanley Kubrick, Parks was formerly a professional magazine photographer.) Melvin van Peebles critiqued the blaxploitation cycle with his incendiary film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song in 1971. The following year, John Boorman's Deliverance (1972) introduced what became known as 'hixploitation': films with menacing yokels and foreboding backwoods. Other exploitation trends include 'Mexploitation' (Mexican Lucha Libre wrestler-hero films such as Benito Alazraki's Santo Contra Los Zombies from 1961, one of the industry's low-budget Churro films) and 'nunsploitation' (Ken Russell's profane orgy The Devils, 1971).

New Hollywood

A new generation of directors from film-schools, including Scorsese and Coppola, established a New Hollywood following the collapses of the Hays Code and the studio system. Indeed, Coppola established his own studio, American Zoetrope, with George Lucas in 1969 (though he sold it in 1984). The New Hollywood directors also introduced an unprecedented authenticity into American cinema, evident, for example, in the no-holds-barred language and violence of Scorsese's Taxi Driver. This unrestrained attitude, free from the previous Production Code restrictions, was also demonstrated by William Friedkin in his urban crime thriller The French Connection (1971) and his shocking supernatural horror film The Exorcist (1973).

The New Hollywood era of directorial authority was somewhat curtailed in 1980 following the commercial disaster of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, recalling the excesses of Eric von Stroheim in the 1920s. Like von Stroheim, Cimino went substantially over-budget and created a five-hour film which the studio drastically cut. Unlike von Stroheim, however, Cimino's version, or at least an approximation of it, was subsequently released in an (unsuccessful) attempt to recoup costs.

1980s

American cinema in the 1980s, despite producing a glut of bombastic action movies (typified by Rambo in Ted Kotcheff's First Blood from 1982, and John McTiernan's excellent Die Hard from 1988), Hollywood did generate two clear masterpieces: Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) and David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). Raging Bull stars Robert de Niro as a brutal middle-weight boxer, and Blue Velvet examines the corruption behind the immaculate exterior of suburban America. (Lynch's later Mulholland Drive (2001) was also critically acclaimed.) Tim Burton directed a number of modern Gothic films in the 1980s, though his greatest film is the dark fairy-tale Edward Scissorhands (1990), starring Johnny Depp. Depp appeared in many of Burton's subsequent films, including Sleepy Hollow (1999). Woody Allen directed several classic comedies, including the profound Crimes And Misdemeanors (1989). The successes of Spike Lee's independent films She's Gotta Have It (1986) and Do The Right Thing (1989) led to the label New Black Cinema.

The Brat Pack, a group of young American actors (Emilio Estevez, Anthony Michael Hall, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Molly Ringwald, and Ally Sheedy) starred in St Elmo's Fire (Joel Schumacher, 1985) and The Breakfast Club (John Hughes, 1985). These films attracted teenage audiences, in a revival of the Teenpic trend of the 1950s. Subsequently, adolescents became Hollywood's target demographic, with Kidpic films aimed at pre-teen audiences.

Lawrence Kasdan's steamy Body Heat (1981), Joel Coen's debut Blood Simple (1982), James Cameron's Tech Noir The Terminator (1984), and Ridley Scott's dystopian Blade Runner (1982) were all part of a revival of the Film Noir style, known as Neo-Noir or, alternatively, Apres-Noir. Coen, working with his brother Ethan, later directed Fargo (1996), which, with its snow-covered landscapes, is the visual antithesis of Noir. Scott, like many directors of the 1980s, began his career in advertising, and films of the period began discernably to adopt the rapid editing and overt stylisation of advertisements and music videos. This tendency, which came to be known as Cinema du Look, was most evident in Jean-Jacques Beineix's Diva (1981). The high-concept films produced by Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer also share this fast-paced MTV aesthetic; 1980s icon Tom Cruise starred in their blockbuster Top Gun in 1986, directed by Tony Scott.

1990s

A major new studio, Dreamworks SKG, was established in 1994 by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen. After several years of construction delays, Dreamworks began active film production in 1997 and quickly became one of the most successful film studios in Hollywood. Its greatest commercial successes were the digital animations it produced to compete with Pixar, including Shrek (Andrew Adamson, 2001). Shrek was notable for its conscious attempts to appeal to both children and adults, and it also contained several thinly-disguised Disney parodies (following Jeffrey Katzenberg's split with Disney and several Pixar/Disney collaborations). Dreamworks was acquired by Paramount in 2005.

Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), Bryan Singer's The Usual Suspects (1995), and Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia (1999) all weave together complex inter-connected stories, as did Christopher Nolan's reverse-narrative Memento (2001). (Anderson directed the acclaimed There Will Be Blood in 2007.) Narrative convolution was taken to a new level by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999) and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004); Kaufman's directorial debut was Synecdoche, New York (2008).

Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi (1992, known as a Burrito western) was an 'indie' film produced on an ultra-low budget, inspired by Sex, Lies, And Videotape (Steven Soderbergh, 1989) and Slacker (Richard Linklater, 1991). Arguably the first major indie film of the period was Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984). A group of independent films with gay themes (such as Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho, 1991) was defined by critics as New Queer Cinema, a trend that began with the film festival success of Poison (Todd Haynes, 1990). Throughout the decade, indie cinema was dominated by former video-junkie Quentin Tarantino, whose audacious debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) was followed by the highly acclaimed Pulp Fiction (1994). Reservoir Dogs was cited as an example of New Brutalism, an umbrella term for a group of explicitly brutal American films released in the early 1990s.

2000s

Horror films became less supernatural and more graphic, with a trend known as 'torture porn'. This style was largely initiated by Eli Roth, who led a 'splat pack' of horror directors with his gratuitously violent film Hostel (2005).

Several American indie film-makers were accused of selling out, as they directed studio projects alongside independent productions. A new group of intimate, low-budget films, collectively labelled Mumblecore, was hailed as a revival of real independent cinema. Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha (2005) was the first film of the Mumblecore movement.

Digital Cinema

At the turn of the 21st century, cinema was transforming into an increasingly digital medium, converging with the realms of video games and computer graphics. This process effectively began in the 1970s: when home computers were first available, computer motion graphics sequences were programmed as Demoscene clips. It then became possible to record a character's progression through computer game levels, as a demo or replay: filmed demonstrations of fast game-completion were known as Speedruns, the most famous being Quake Done Quick (Matthias Belz, Yonatan Donner, and Nolan Pflug; 1997). The first narrative-based demo was Diary Of A Camper (Matthew van Sickler, 1996), also featuring footage from the game Quake. The game/cinema convergence later intensified, resulting in Machinima films with sustained narratives featuring game characters interacting within 3D graphic environments. The term Machinima was coined by Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey, who released Quad God in 2000, featuring footage from the game Quake III.

In another cinema/computer convergence, webloggers produced online video diaries known as V-Blogs: the first known V-Blogger was Adrian Miles, who started posting his 'vogs' in 2000. Mashup videos, Anime Music Videos, and Songvids were also created online, by re-editing and dubbing existing film footage to ironic effect. The very first example was perhaps Both Sides Now (1980), Kandy Fong's projection of Star Trek slides accompanied by music.

The first Mashup video predates the internet: Apocalypse Pooh (1987), Todd Graham's dubbing of Winnie The Pooh with Apocalypse Now and vice-versa. Cellphones provided new platforms for digital films, known as Microcinema due to the limitations of length and file size imposed by the technology.

American cinema began incorporating digital imagery into its blockbuster films in the early 1990s, notably morphing metal in James Cameron's Terminator II: Judgment Day (1991) and incredible digitally-generated dinosaurs in Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993). The next step, total digital animation, was taken by the Pixar studio with Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995). (The use of computers in film animation began in 1960, when John Whitney founded Motion Graphics and produced abstract animations via an analogue computer he had invented. In 1961, he compiled his earliest films into a showreel titled Catalog.)

Digital effects were also central to The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999), which was concerned with the mutli-layered and illusory nature of reality itself (a more technologically sophisticated version of earlier 'virtual reality' films such as David Cronenberg's Videodrome from 1982). Peter Jackson's epic fantasy The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring (2001) seemlessly integrated digital technology with traditional photographic effects. Jackson's Lord Of The Rings prequel, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), was filmed in 3D at forty-eight frames-per-second, in a process known as High Frame-Rate 3D.

The electronic, non-analogue exhibition of moving images is known by the umbrella term E-Cinema, though E-Cinema was soon eclipsed by high-definition digital projection (D-Cinema). Directors such as Robert Rodriguez, James Cameron, and George Lucas - not uncoincidentally, directors with their own production facilities - led the shift towards digital production and projection. The first film to be screened digitally was The Last Broadcast (Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler, 1998), which was transmitted to cinemas via satellite.

2010s

Online video streaming led to a decline in video sales and rentals, and Hollywood turned once again to 3D as a gimmick to attract cinema audiences. (3D had been employed in the 1950s when Hollywood was challenged by TV; fifty years later, it was the internet that threatened to usurp viewers from both Hollywood and television.) The 3D revival was led by James Cameron's Avatar (2009), which became the most expensive and commercially successful film ever made. As modern 3D required digital cameras and projectors, there was a dramatic shift in film production and distribution from analogue to digital.

Mainstream cinema in the early 21st century became increasingly dependent on franchises, sequels, adaptations, remakes, and reboots, all of which were regarded by the major studios as relatively safe financial investments. In particular, comic-book adaptations became perennial summer blockbusters, with the characters themselves, rather than the stars, becoming the marquee attractions. In this context, Christopher Nolan's Inception (2010) was exceptional as an intelligent yet successful film based on an original script. Nolan was also a lone voice in his opposition to 3D and digital production.