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Film

Also Known As Cinema · Motion Pictures
Media and Time-Based Arts

Film is the art of moving images, recorded and arranged in sequence to tell a story or convey an experience, combining elements of photography, writing, performance, music, and editing into a single medium. It emerged as a technology in the final years of the nineteenth century and matured rapidly into a narrative art over the following decades, developing techniques of editing, camera movement, and sound that had no precedent in the older performing arts. National film industries developed distinct styles, and Japanese cinema in particular, through directors such as Akira Kurosawa, brought a rigorous visual and narrative discipline to international attention in the decades after the Second World War, influencing filmmakers worldwide. Film is often described as a collaborative and industrial art, typically produced by large creative and technical teams and dependent on the equipment and, later, the digital tools of its era, in contrast to the more solitary practice associated with painting or sculpture. Its combination of moving image and recorded sound allows a single work to reach audiences across the world in a way earlier performing arts, tied to a single live performance, could not.

Facts
Medium
Recorded moving images arranged in sequence, combined with sound, on photographic or digital media 1
Signature Technique
Montage: separate pieces of film selected, edited and assembled together to build a new sequence or meaning within a film. 2
Place of Origin
The idea of film as a fine art in its own right, rather than merely a recording technology, is dated to 1911 and Ricciotto Canudo's manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art. 2
Notable Example
Ricciotto Canudo's 1911 manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art, the founding argument for treating film as a fine art alongside painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. 2
Connections

Associated With

Animation, Art Forms
Source Wikipedia

chroma key compositing is a technique of the film art form.

Claymation, Artistic Techniques

Claymation is produced and released as film.

Found Footage, Artistic Techniques

found footage is a technique of the film art form.

Long Take, Artistic Techniques

long take is a technique of the film art form.

Music, Art Forms
Photography, Art Forms
Photography, Art Forms
Rotoscoping, Artistic Techniques

Rotoscoping originated as, and remains, a live-action film technique in addition to animation.

Stop-motion animation is produced and released as film.

Theatre, Art Forms

time lapse photography is a technique of the film art form.

Video Art, Art Forms

Video art grew directly out of the moving-image tradition of film, adapting its techniques to gallery and installation contexts using video technology instead of celluloid.

Movements

Modernism, Movements
Source Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica editors

Practitioners

Source The Films of Akira KurosawaDonald Richie
Orson Welles, Artists
Source Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica editors

Works In This Form

8½, Works
Source Wikipedia
Source Wikipedia
Bicycle Thieves, Works

Landmark Italian Neorealist film.

Casablanca, Works
Source Wikipedia
Citizen Kane, Works
Metropolis, Works
Source Wikipedia
Nosferatu, Works

Silent film by F.W. Murnau.

Film by Ingmar Bergman.

Rashomon, Works
Source Wikipedia
Rome, Open City, Works

Founding film of Italian Neorealism.

Seven Samurai, Works
Source The Films of Akira KurosawaDonald Richie

Silent film by F.W. Murnau.

Source Sunset Boulevard (Wikipedia)
The Godfather, Works
Source Wikipedia

Silent film by Carl Theodor Dreyer.

Tokyo Story, Works
Source Wikipedia
Vertigo, Works
Source Wikipedia
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
  • entry: history of film
  • Movements: Modernism, entry: Modernism
  • Practitioners: Orson Welles, entry: Orson Welles
View the Source
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia Foundation
  • Film, Film Theory section
    The concept of film as an art-form began in 1911 with Ricciotto Canudo's manifest The Birth of the Sixth Art.
  • Associated With: Animation, Animation, lead section
    Animation is a filmmaking technique whereby pictures are created or manipulated and then played in sequence to create the illusion of moving images.
  • Works In This Form: Battleship Potemkin
  • Works In This Form: Metropolis
  • Works In This Form: Vertigo
  • Works In This Form: Tokyo Story
  • Works In This Form: Rashomon
  • Works In This Form: Casablanca
  • Works In This Form: The Godfather
  • Works In This Form: 8½
View the Source
The Films of Akira Kurosawa
Donald Richie, University of California Press
  • Practitioners: Akira Kurosawa, introductory chapters on Kurosawa's life and career
  • Works In This Form: Seven Samurai, chapter on Seven Samurai
Sunset Boulevard (Wikipedia)
WikipediaWorks In This Form: Sunset Boulevard, Lead section, paragraph 1
Quote, Works In This Form: Sunset Boulevard, Lead section, paragraph 1
Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American black comedy film noir directed by Billy Wilder and co-written by Wilder, Charles Brackett, and D. M. Marshman Jr.
View the Source
Frequently Asked Questions

What is considered the birth of cinema?

The Lumiere brothers' first public film screening in Paris in December 1895 is conventionally cited as the birth of cinema.

The Lumiere brothers' first public film screening in Paris in December 1895 is conventionally cited as the birth of cinema, since it was the first paying public exhibition of projected moving pictures. Earlier experiments, including Eadweard Muybridge's motion studies and Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, had already demonstrated moving images, but to individual viewers rather than a projected public audience.

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