Read The Oxford History of World Cinema Online
Authors: Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
The Oxford History of World Cinema (2 page)
The Arab World ROY ARME
S
661
The Cinemas of Sub-Saharan Africa P. VINCENT MAGOMB
E
667
Iranian Cinema HAMID NAFICY
672
India: Filming the Nation ASHISH RAJADHYAKSHA
678
Indonesian Cinema DAVID
HANAN
690
China After the Revolution ESTHER Y
AU
693
Popular Cinema in Hong Kong LI CHEUK-TO
704
Taiwanese New Cinema JUNE YIP
711
The Modernization of Japanese Film HIROSHI KOMATSU
714
New Australian Cinema STEPHEN CROFTS
722
New Zealand Cinema BILL ROUTT
731
Canadian Cinema / Cinéma Canadien JILL MCGREAL
731
New Cinemas in Latin America MICHAEL
CHANAN
740
New Concepts of Cinema GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMIT
H
750
The Resurgence of Cinema GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMIT
H
759
BIBLIOGRAPHY
767
INDEX
785
PICTURE SOURCES
823
Special Features
Chantal
Akerman 755
Tomás Gutiérrez
Alea 744
Robert Altm
an 470 -1
Michelangelo Anton
ioni 568 -9
Arlett
y 347
Fred A
staire 296 -7
Brigitte
Bardot 492
Yevgeny Baue
r 160 -1
Ingmar Berg
man 572 -3
Ingrid Berg
man 230 -1
Bernardo Berto
lucci 593
Frank Borzage
64 -5
Luis
Buñuel 432 -3
Bugs Bun
ny 269
Youssef
Chahine 664
Charlie Chapl
in 84 -5
Maurice Chevalier
246
Raoul Coutard
487
Franco Cristald
i 595
David Cronenber
g 736
George
Cukor 282
Anatole
Dauman 571
Bette Dav
is 222 -3
Alain Delo
n 579
Cecil B. DeM
ille 34 -5
Gérard
Depardieu 585
Vittorio De Sica
360
'Don'ts and Be Ca
refuls' 239
Carl Theodor
Dreyer 102 -3
Clint Eas
twood 472 -3
Sergei Eisenste
in 168 -9
Douglas
Fairbanks 60
Rainer Werner
Fassbinder 618 -19
Federico Fellin
i 587
Louis Feui
llade 108 -9
Gracie Field
s 366 -7
Jodie
Foster 478 -9
Karl
Freund 314 -15
Jean Gab
in 307
Greta
Garbo 190 -1
Ritwik Gha
tak 686 -7
Dorothy andLillian G
ish 40 -1
Jean-Luc G
odard 752 -3
Sid
Grauman 52
D. W. Grif
fith 30 -1
Yilmaz
Güney 659
William S
. Hart 68
Howard Haw
ks 278 -9
Will
Hays 238
Robert Herl
th 148 -9
Werner
Herzog 620 -1
Alfred H
itchcock 310 -1
1
James W
ong Howe 200 -1
John Hu
ston 448 -9
Daisuke
Ito 180
Joris
Ivens 331
Humphrey Jenning
s 328 -9
Alfred J
unge 380 -1
Buster Keat
on 80 -1
Burt Lancaster
452 -3
Fritz Lan
g 196 -7
Spike
Lee 508
Val Lewto
n 318 -19
Max Linder
117
The Loop and the M
altese Cross 7
Joseph Lo
sey 606 -7
Ernst Lu
bitsch 184 -5
Chris Marker
530 -1
Joseph P. Ma
xfield 213
William Cameron M
enzies 232 -3
Oscar M
icheaux 499
Vincente Minnel
li 302 -3
Kenji M
izoguchi 418 -19
Marilyn M
onroe 256 -7
Ivan Mosj
oukine 166
F. W. M
urnau 146 -7
Nar
gis 404
Jack Nichol
son 510 -1
1
Asta Niel
sen 26
Manoel de Oliveira
602 -3
Max Ophu
ls 252 -3
Nagisa Oshim
a 718
Yasujiro
Ozu 420 -1
Pier Paolo Pasolin
i 494 -5
Mary Pickford
56 -7
Erich Pommer
145
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressbur
ger 368 -9
M. G. Ramachandran
406 -7
Jean
Renoir 338 -9
Paul Robeso
n 341
Glauber Rocha
742
Roberto Rosselli
ni 438
Jean
Rouch 529
Joe S
chenck 49
Arnold Schwarzenegger
517
Martin
Scorsese 764 -5
Sembene Ousmane
668 -9
Victor Sjöström
156 -7
Steven Spielber
g 520 -1
Barbara
Stanwyck 284
Ladislas Starewi
tch 76
Josef von Sternber
g 216 -17
Erich von Stroheim
54 -5
Andrei Tarko
vsky 646 -7
Jacques Ta
ti 351
Gregg To
land 262 -3
To
tb 356
Alexandre T
rauner 346
Rudolph Valenti
no 44 -5
Agnés V
arda 757
Conrad Ve
idt 140
Dziga V
ertov 92 -3
Luchino Viscon
ti 440 -1
Andrzej Wajda
634
Andy W
arhol 544 -5
John W
ayne 290
Orson W
elles 454 -3
Wim W
enders 624 -5
Shirley Y
amaguchi 410
Zhang Y
imou 702
General Introduction
GEOFFREY NOWELL-SMITH
The cinema, wrote the documentarist Paul Rotha in the 1930s, 'is the great unresolved
equation between art and industry'. It was the first, and is arguably still the greatest, of the
industrialized art forms which have dominated the cultural life of the twentieth century.
From the humble beginnings in the fairground it has risen to become a billiondollar
industry and the most spectacular and original contemporary art.
As an art form and as a technology, the cinema has been in existence for barely a hundred
years. Primitive cinematic devices came into being and began to be exploited in the
1890s, almost simultaneously in the United States, France, Germany, and Great Britain.
Within twenty years the cinema had spread to all parts of the globe; it had developed a
sophisticated technology, and was on its way to becoming a major industry, providing the
most popular form of entertainment to audiences in urban areas throughout the world, and
attracting the attention of entrepreneurs, artists, scientists, and politicians. As well as for
entertainment, the film medium has come to be used for purposes of education,
propaganda, and scientific research. Originally formed from a fusion of elements
including vaudeville, popular melodrama, and the illustrated lecture, it rapidly acquired
artistic distinctiveness, which it is now beginning to lose as other forms of mass
communication and entertainment have emerged alongside it to threaten its hegemony.
To compress this complex history into a single volume has been, needless to say, a
daunting task. Some developments have to be presented as central, while others are
relegated to the margins, or even left out entirely. Certain principles have guided me in
this work. For a start, this is a history of the cinema, not of film. It does not deal with
every use of the film medium but focuses on those which have concurred to turn the
original invention of moving images on celluloid into the great institution known as the
cinema, or 'the movies'. The boundaries of cinema in this sense are wider than just the
films that the institution produces and puts into circulation. They include the audience, the
industry, and the people who work in it-from stars to technicians to usherettes -- and the
mechanisms of regulation and control which determine which films audiences are
encouraged to see and which they are not. Meanwhile, outside the institution, but
constantly pressing in on it, is history in the broader sense, the world of wars and
revolution, of changes in culture, demography, and life-style, of geopolitics and the global
economy.
No understanding of films is possible without understanding the cinema, and no
understanding of the cinema is possible without recognizing that it -- more than any other
art, and principally because of its enormous popularity-has constantly been at the mercy
of forces beyond its control, while also having the power to influence history in its turn.
Histories of literature and music can perhaps be written (though they should not be)
simply as histories of authors and their works, without reference to printing and recording
technologies and the industries which deploy them, or to the world in which artists and
their audiences lived and live. With cinema this is impossible. Central to the project of
this book is the need to put films in the context without which they would not exist, let
alone have meaning.
Secondly, this is a history of cinema as, both in its origins and in its subsequent
development, above all popular art. It is popular art not in the old-fashioned sense of art
emanating from the 'people' rather than from cultured élites, but in the distinctively
twentieth-century sense of an art transmitted by mechanical means of mass diffusion and
drawing its strength from an ability to connect to the needs, interests, and desires of a
large, massified public. To talk about the cinema at the level at which it engages with this
large public is once again to raise, in an acute form, the question of cinema as art and
industry -- Paul Rotha's 'great unresolved equation'. Cinema is industrial almost by
definition, by virtue of its use of industrial technologies for both the making and the
showing of films. But it is also industrial in a stronger sense, in that, in order to reach
large audiences, the successive processes of production, distribution, and exhibition have
been industrially (and generally capitalistically) organized into a powerful and efficient
machine. How the machine works (and what happens when it breaks down) is obviously
of the greatest importance in understanding the cinema. But the history of the cinema is
not just a history of this machine, and certainly cannot be told from the point of view of
the machine and the people who control it. Nor is industrial cinema the only sort of
cinema. I have tried to give space in this volume not only for cinema as industry but also
for divergent interests, including those of film-makers who have worked outside or in
conflict with the industrial machinery of cinema.
This involves a recognition that in the cinema the demands of industry and art are not
always the same, but neither are they necessarily antithetical. It is rather that they are not
commensurate. The cinema is an industrial art form which has developed industrialized
ways of producing art. This is a fact which traditional aesthetics has had great difficulty in
coming to terms with, but it is a fact none the less. On the other hand, there are many
examples of films whose artistic status is dubious to say the least, and there are many
examples of films whose artistic value is defined in opposition to the values of the
industry on which they depended in order to be made. There is no simple answer to
Rotha's equation. My aim throughout the book has been to maintain a balance between
the values expressed through the market-place and those which are not.
Thirdly, this is a history of world cinema. This is a fact of which I am particularly proud
and which is true in two senses. On the one hand the book tells the history of the cinema
as a single global phenomenon, spreading rapidly across the world and controlled, to a
large degree, by a single set of interlocking commercial interests. But it also, on the other
hand, tells the history of many different cinemas, growing in different parts of the world
and asserting their right to independent existence often in defiance of the forces
attempting to exercise control and to 'open up' (that is to say, dominate) the market on a
global scale.
Finding a way to relate the two senses of the phrase world cinema', and to balance the
competing claims of the global cinema institution and the many different cinemas which