A HISTORY OF AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHY: & HOW IT IMPACTS CULTURE
ALM No.71, December 2024
ESSAYS
The cinema of America, its intricate evolution into the film landscape we observe today and her mainstream culture cross-pollinate ideas, taboos and public sentiments, resulting in a symbiotic relationship that presents us with an opportunity to use film as a sample for determining the generalstate of the country. This can be seen in an overview of its history, the ways it can be used for political gain, the ways cinema impacts culture and vice versa.
The emergence of motion pictures and Hollywood, happened slowly but garnered the attention of the American population quickly. We start to see the foundations for motion pictures, and later Hollywood, being laid as far back as the AmericanCivil War with the rise of photographs being more accessible to the general population (Pickford). There were earlier attempts, but therewas a breakthrough in 1895 when, the Lumiere brothers created a 16 frames per second motion picture system (Pickford). By the time we reached the 1920s going to the cinema had become a weekly event for most Americans, garnering 50 million visits per week (Digitalhistory.com). Starting initially in 1908 but continuing predominantly into the 1980s there was a massive migration in the film industry from all around the country into Southern California, mostly because of the readily available cheap land, varied ecological sceneries, and a climate ideal for around the year filming (Digitalhistory.com). Between the early 1900s and the 2020s we had a revolution in the ways that films are made, distributed, marketed and received by the general population (Studiobinder.com) leading to Hollywood today having an estimated valueof over 542 billion dollars (Leaders.com). Cinema isn t only a vehicle for entertainment,historically it s also beenused for much darker purposes.
Cinema can be used as propaganda, and ultimately for political gain. The Oxford Dictionary defines propaganda as Information, especially biassed or misleadinginformation, used to promote or publicise a particular political cause or point of view. (Oxford dictionary). In Soviet Russia filmmaking was entirely funded by the Goskino, the soviet state committee for cinematography, after being nationalised by Vladimir Lenin in 1919. This means that there was a small amount of feature films made there, with most of the Russian filmmaking of the time coming in the form of pro-Soviet short films (Wikipedia.com).One of these short films came out shortly after Russia broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact which meant they were going to war with the Nazis. The Film is called Girl no. 217 and it depicts a young Russian girl being enslaved to her German family, and is supposed to symbolise the discontent the Russian population felt, or should feel, about the treatment of Soviet POWs (Wikipedia.com). Russian Propaganda, from an American perspective, only served to intensify the red scare and growing notions of McCarthyism within the government (History.com). But the Americans engaged in propagandaas well, like in the 1942 to 1945 short film series Why We Fight directedby Frank Capra, which depicts Japanese and German soldiers as inhuman murderers, which was intended to boost a sense of patriotism in the audience(PBS.org). The Doolittle report of 1954 suggested to President Dwight D. Eisenhower that no one should stand in the way of developing an aggressive, covert, psychological and paramilitaryorganisation. (CBC.ca). Both of these examples show that governments are not shy to use cinema as a means of spreading particularpolitical causes, and in that way shaping our dayto day culture.
Cinema is one of the most popular mediums of entertainment, with 41% of Americans saying that they attend the movie theatres frequently (Filmgrail.com), this leads to cinema having a firm sway over the culture of the country. One interesting way this happens is the way that recent generations classify social cliques, with overused stereotypes like jock, nerd, popular girl, cool guy being genuine ways that we classify people, we see these stereotypes in their one dimensionalglory in films like Porky s and Fast Times At Ridgemont High released in 1981 and 1982 respectively (McCullough, 2022). Another way that cinema impacts our culture is the introduction of the celebrity with Flo Lawrence, Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle to name a few (IMDB.com). Cinema also helps perpetuate another growing cultural phenomenon, which is the homogenisation of culture in America. This started in the 1960s when the movie theatre chain AMC started opening theatres nationwide (AMC.com), but was exponentially increased by the introduction of streaming services. Now like never before all Americanshad access to the same themes, settings,characters and stories (Mudskipperpress.com).
Cinema impacts culture insubstantial ways, but the two don t share a one sided relationship, culture also has a profound impact on the cinema it consumes. One of the ways we can observe this is in thechanges of the films over time as a direct response to market demands, this is measurable by the change in popular genres over time, in the 50s there was the spaghetti western like Rio Bravo , followed in the 70s by science fiction like Star Wars , and in the 2000s, superhero and comic book adaptations like The Avengers dominated the box office (Platinaudio.us). Over the decades we ve also seen an increase of the monetization of cinema, the box office revenue, average wage of the actors, and even the market share of the entertainment sector, until very recently, has gone up, irrespective of inflation (Boxofficemojo.com), this can only be explained by a growing increase in demand by the general population. Another profound way a change in culture triggered a changein cinema is the shifting of the overton window, whereas before it may be socially acceptable, or even funny, to see a white actor portray a black actor with the use of blackface, today that would not be acceptable, and so we don t see this and other more abhorrent racial stereotypes in cinema today, this changed happened surprisingly long ago with blackface being largely eliminated from major cinemaproduction in the 1940s (Wikipedia.com).
Therefore given thehistory, the ways it can be used for political gain, the ways cinema impacts culture and vice versa. The cinema of America, its intricate evolution into the film landscape we observe today and her mainstream culture cross-pollinate ideas, taboos and public sentiments, resulting in a symbiotic relationship that presents us with an opportunity to use film as a sample for determining the general state of the country.
References
Pickford, M. The Early History of Motion Pictures. Public Broadcasting Service
The Rise of Hollywood and the Arrival of Sound. Digital History
Heckmann, C. (2023). The History of Film Timeline-All Eras of Film History Explained.
Studio Binder
Hummel, T. (2023). Hollywood s Market Value. Leaders
Oxford Dictionary
Cinema of the Soviet Union. Wikipedia
Girl No. 217. Wikipedia
Onion, A. et al (2010). Red Scare: Cold War & McCarthyism. History
(2006). World War Two Propaganda. Public Broadcast Service
(2020). How Hollywood Became The Unofficial Propaganda Arm of theUS Military.
Canadian Broadcast Corporation
(2024). Cinema Audience Demographics Analysis: Insights & Data. Film Grail
McCullough, JJ. (2022). The History of Cliches of High School. JJ McCullough
Cwalka, F. (2012). First American Movie Stars. Internet Movie Database
The History Of AMC. American Movie Classics
Turner-Tree,S. (2020). The Netflix Road to Home. Mudskipper Press
(2023). The Most Popular Movie Genres By Genre. Platin Audio
(2024). Daily Box Office For 2024. Box Office Mojo
(2024). Blackface. Wikipedia
Benjamin Ross, is a 20 year old student and amateur writer at Seneca Polytechnic, in Toronto, Canada. In the Liberal Arts program, he predominately studies philosophy, psychology and the other humanities. He aims to graduate from York University in Anthropology and Cognitive sciences, in 2028.