Hannibal´s screenwriting page - The history of film

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The history of film

It never hurts to know a little bit about what happened before you. But you don´t want to spend hours in the library searching for information about the history of TV and the movies. So here´s a condensed version:

In the beginning

The very first films were documentaries, or rather moving photographs with focus on the feel of a place. They weren´t very long - a minute or so - but they sure had impact on people. There are reports of people rushing out of theaters to avoid being run over by a movie of a locomotive, although those reports are probably exaggerated.

Soon, however, filmmakers started to tell simple stories, and the first ones used comedy. Since there was no sound, they had to rely on visual comedy, with a broad movement pattern. Slap-stick comedy, as it would be known (from the rubber stick used to hit one another over the head with), quickly became popular. Many of them had no scripts, and was improvised by the players.

The first movies had no end titles, and no star billings. (The film companies didn´t want stars, since stars would demand higher salaries. Something to go back to perhaps?) If you wanted to write to someone you had seen in a movie, you would have to adress it to "The flower girl in the ice skating scene" c/o the company.

After a couple of years, though, stars started to emerge. Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Oliver and Hardy, the Keystone Kops, Mary Pickford, and many more. Lots of their films are still watchable today. No, really, they are.

The common denominators for many of the early films are that they were short (usually one reel each, which equals 10-15 minutes), and so they entered the story quickly. The style was often absurd, with amazing stunts (some not surpassed until the entrance of computer generated environments) and sudden comical appearences. The films also often dealt with a person in war against the machines and other phenomenon of the new world, as in Chaplin´s "Modern Times" (1936).

Expressionism and other early styles

Slap-stick were not the only genre of the 1920s and 1930s. Already in 1903 came the first action film of sorts, "The Great Train Robbery", and in 1915 came the historical drama, "The Birth of a Nation" by DW Griffith. Both films have influenced many a director since then. "The Great Train Robbery", for example, used cuts between parallel stories to create tension, a technique still used.

But around the world other film styles were developed, even earlier than that. In 1895, French filmmaker George Méliés considered film art. And in art in general, the style at the turn of the century was expressionism, which was trying to express feelings and thoughts, as twisted as they may be, through art. Murnau, the German director, used this to make a haunting rendition of the Dracula myth in "Nosferatu" (1922) (copyright prevented him from using the name Dracula), with distorted colours, jump cuts, long shadows and theatrical gestures. Many European films from this period were about conflicts between persons and the state, as in Fritz Lang´s grandios story "Metropolis" (1927)

Russia, which was at the front of early filmmaking, had a film school in the middle of the 1920s, where Sergei Eisenstein taught how the montage and various other filmic storytelling techniques worked. In short, he believed that one picture plus another picture could create a third meaning in the audience. The famous Odessa step sequence from his "Battleship Potemkin" (1925), also featured early close-ups to focus the audience´s attention.

Avant garde, film noir and the B-movies

If expressionism tried to capture what the artist was feeling, then impressionism is about trying to capture what the artist is experiencing, what impressions he has of the outer world. This style would mostly influence the films of the 1930s, and even though it began in France, it would flourish in the US, and continue to develop.

The most famous style of this period, still used, but more often parodied, is the film noir, as "The Maltese Falcon" (1941) and "Double Indemnity" (1944), which gave the impression that the world was a dark place, full of deceit, tragedy and cynicism. But film noir was also an off-spring of the highly American genre, the gangster movie, which fed off of the depression and poverty, and had an outsider as the hero.

During this time, you could often get two movies for the price of one. One which were a gangster movie or a film noir, a streamlined product with high production values and stars and a big audience, and another which was more cheap - no star actors, no famous directors, and almost no lights (which was the most expensive part of filmmaking). It was the emergence of the B-movie. Those B-movies weren´t streamlined. They could take chances, be more artful, and experimental, even if the stories often revolved around farcical subjects, or frightful monsters.

Also, during this period, romance was a usual subject, both as a story, and as ideology. "Tarzan" (1920s and 1930s) and "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1923, 1939), as well as an entire series of films about Chinese Detective Charlie Chan (1925 onwards). Soon, the pirate movies would make their debut, with Errol Flynn as the major attraction.

Back in Europe, the situation was another, even if film noir were made here also. The trend that developed during the late 1950s, again in France, was called the New Wave. It was a reaction to the post-war mentality and the oncoming TV expansion. Many movie theatres closed as audience grew smaller. And so, directors tried to expand upon the existing formats: longer takes, less traditional plots, and seeing teenagers as a group for the very first time in history. This rebellion was led by among others Truffaut and Godard, and it cleared the way for British director Alfred Hitchcock.

Hitchcock´s career spanned a staggering five decades, but he has continued to influence directors to this day. His films were psychological, without being talky. Instead we were taken into the mind of different unique persons. "The Birds" (1963) gave us perspective into a woman haunted by animals, "Vertigo" (1958) let us experience what it feels like to be afraid of heights, and "Psycho" led us further down the road to insanity than we´ve ever been before. All done in long, steady shots, with symbols, and using the entire Cinemascope screen.

Action movies and blockbusters

The action movie as we know it today (or the thriller) was developed in part by Alfred Hitchcock (and his writers), and in part from the spy stories of the World War II, as in "The Bridge on the River Kwai" (1957). But there have been action sequences far longer than that, with roots all the way back to the comic adventures of the Keystone Kops, and the western heist in "The Great Train Robbery". (The old West has probably been a better source of material than any other in film history.)

But during the 1950s and 1960s this type of story would experience a boom after the creation of James Bond by Ian Fleming. Although first intended as a somewhat real depiction of how a spy works, the films soon became more and more fantastic, and increasingly comic. During the 1970s the films had virtually nothing to do with Fleming´s books. But the audience loved the films, for their unique rich man panache style and their futuristic gizmos. Filmmakers tried their own versions - and flooded the market with spy stories of every kind.

After the Bondmania had settled down, in the 1970s, other action heroes emerged in a more realistic and everyday setting. The world of "Get Carter" (1971), "Shaft" (1971) and "The French Connection" (1971) seemed more violent (conveniently forgetting that the Bond films were condemned for their violence only a decade earlier), yet more familiar. ("Shaft" even started a revolution with its almost all-black cast. Several films followed, when movie companies saw how big audience they created. And blaxploitation was born.)

During the 1970s Asian martial arts were beginning to play a role in American movies in a bigger way than before. Bruce Lee from "Fists of Fury" (1971/1972) and "Enter the Dragon" (1973) are probably the most famous, and although he died in 1973, he would show the way for other Asian actors.

The reruns of the TV show "Star Trek" and the Apollo mission to the moon had caused more interest in science fiction, and then George Lucas released "Star Wars" in 1977, which had a massive audience, and which changed the way film companies look at filmmaking: The blockbuster was born. The entire 1980s seemed to contain one blockbuster after another: "Raiders of the lost ark" (1981), "E.T" (1982), "Gremlins" (1984), and "Back to the future" (1985) - all of which include some science fiction element, and all of which are produced by Steven Spielberg.

The hit movie "Die hard" (1988), about a siege in a highrise, was released quite modestly, with an unknown TV actor as the lead, but it has since spawned an entire genre, that just waits to put out another "Die hard on a ..." (train, boat, Air Force one, etc), all without the prominent class struggle of the original film. "Lethal weapon" (1987) had a different effect. Since it came out, featuring a black family father and a suicidal white single guy as the odd coupled cops, all movie hero couples would be mismatched, often one black, one white.

But it is James Cameron´s "The Terminator" (1984, with a sequel in 1991), that would change the genre the most. Its dystopic themes (seen again in "Aliens" in 1986 and "The Abyss" in 1989) contrasted highly with the very impressive computer generated special effects, created by Industrial Lights & Magic. The doomsday was near and the humans would be extinct or fighting for their survival.

A more down-to-earth action genre was put forth by Quentin Tarantino, in "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and "Pulp Fiction" (1994) - basically a more violent form of the gangster movies of the 1930s and 1940s, but with a more complex narrative structure. Time was no longer linear, even in mainstream movies. (Such experiments have of course been an integral part of more "arty" movies for a long time.)

After such a display of outward action, some directors turned inward to try to invoke fear and shock. "The Silence of the Lambs" (1991), "Se7en" aka "Seven" (1995) and "Scream" (1996) had the result that every other movie had a serial killer with a personal pattern. But by the end of the millenium, even the half-parody "Scream" was parodied ad nauseaum.

Enter the super-heroes and the fantastical. The "Harry Potter"-books were filmed, the five year old movie "Buffy" was resurrected for TV, and a string of Marvel comics would find their way to the big screen: "Spider-Man" in 2002 and "Hulk" and "Daredevil" in 2003, certainly with more on the way. And "The Lord of the Rings"-trilogy broke all records, possibly starting a new fantasy-trend, after the gap since "Willow" and "The Never-Ending Story" in the 1980s. Audiences were hungry for something not of this world.

Drama

After the New Wave had started to ebb, and the musical trend of "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) and "Singing in the Rain" (1952) was down to an echo, and "Some like it hot" (1959) had lost its temperature, the trendsetters looked at the current state of affairs: drugs, rebels, and the war in Vietnam. From there the step to "Easy rider" (1969), "Taxi driver" (1976) and "Raging Bull" (1980) is not far, with their outsider view of the world, and as gritty a picture as is possible. This bleak outlook can also been seen in the films of Stanley Kubrick, from the ultra-violent and rebellious "A Clockwork Orange" (1971), to the dehumanized war movie "Full Metal Jacket" (1987). But two films with the same theme same rejecting the social roles we are given - "An officer and a gentleman" (1982), and "The Graduate" (1967) - had a totally different style - clear colours and an upbeat musical track, and still got their points across.

As the political 1970s drew at an end, the focus shifted to the surface and to money in such films as in "Wall Street" (1987) and "Cocktail" (1988). The big drama hits of the 1980s however, were as profound as any in the 1970s, as "Rain Man" (1988) (about autism and egoism), "Born on the Fourth of July" (1989) (about Vietnam veterans) and "Mississippi Burning" (1980) (about racism and the KKK) all can testify to.

The 1990s started an historical trend as well. Steven Spielberg´s "Schindler´s list" hit the theatres in 1993. Its faithful recreation of WWII death camps and ways of thinking made a deep impact on the Academy Awards´ jury (7 Oscars). As did Coppola´s "Bram Stoker´s Dracula" (1992) (3 Oscars) James Cameron´s "Titanic" (1997) (11 Oscars), "Shakespeare in love" (1998) (7 Oscars), and "Gladiator" (2000) (5 Oscars), all historical stories, but with a twist.

As of lately, the self-referential film has returned for real. The violent anti-social credo "Fight Club" (1999) and the salute to writers, "Adaptation" (2002) are two examples, but also "Scream" (1996), "The Truman Show" (1998) and "Pleasantville" (1998), where the knowledge of being inside a film affects the story and the way the story is told. (Similar things happen all the time on "The Simpsons" and various other TV shows on a smaller scale.)

Comedies and the rom com

Film comedies, as well as theatres, vaudevilles and skits, often contain pairs, one comedian and one straight man. During the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps the most famous were Bud Abbott/Lou Costello, Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis, and George Burns/Gracie Allen. Their first films were merely adaptations of their vaudeville performances, but soon comedies would go back to be stories instead of funny dialogues. Abbott and Costello, for example, had their comeback when they had Boris Karloff reprise his role of the monster from the Frankenstein movies, starting off a long line of parodies of popular hits. Later this genre would be visited many times by writer/director Mel Brooks in such films as "Blazing Saddles" (1974) (Westerns), "Young Frankenstein" (1974) (horror movies), and "High anxiety" (1978) (Hitchcock).

The genre of parody would get a vitamin injection in the 1980s by the Zucker brothers, beginning with "Airplane" (1980), and then "The Naked Gun" (1988) and "Hot shots!" (1991), by combining total deadpan humour, puns and slapstick in the background with more films parodied per minute than ever before.

During the 1960s and 1970s, however, two other comedians had much success:

First, Peter Sellers, who got his big breakthrough in "The Pink Panther" (1964) playing the bumbling French Inspector Closeau, and in Stanley Kubrick´s nuclear war comedy "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964), where he has four different parts. In the late 1960s his films would accept the style set by The Beatles and others, with big flowers and drug-altered realities.

Then there´s Woody Allen, who had even more influence on film history, and a longer career. Starting out as a writer, he soon got roles himself, and is now an institution in New York filmmaking. His style is neurotic and intellectual with jazz undertones, and as contrast, absurdist gags, a style that has been with him since the 1960s.

The comedy in the 1980s were generally both gritty and glossy at the same time, as in the smash hit from 1983, "Trading Places" starring Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd. Murphy would shift into action comedies (a career move that was usual then), as "Beverly Hills Cop" (1984), while Aykroyd went on to "Ghost Busters" (1984), with friends from the National Lampoon group, responsible for many vulgar comedies, such as "Animal House" (1978), "The Blues Brothers" (1980) and "Vacation" (1983), where also Steve Martin was a member. Martin was the lead in among others the modernisation of "Cyrano de Bergerac", "Roxanne" (1987), a comedy set in a small town - a setting which was becoming more and more usual in the 1980s and 1990s, see for example "Grumpy Old Men" (1993).

At the start of the 1990s, another group from the Saturday Night Live show on TV, was making their feature film debuts. Not many of them were successful, but here are some that were: "Wayne´s world" (1992), "Austin Powers" (1997), both starring Mike Myers, and "Happy Gilmore" (1996), starring Adam Sandler. A lot of guy jokes, references to modern films and people, and quite a bit of camp, or sequences that are supposed to be amateurish.

Jim Carrey, who started out as a stand-up, was to be the next big comedy hit. Although some reacted to his over-flexible body language and facial expressions in "Ace Ventura" and "The Mask" (both 1994), they were surprised by his dramatic talents as well, in "The Truman Show" (1998) and "Man on the Moon" (1999) (where he played another comedian, Andy Kaufmann). (This reaction was the same as comedic genius Robin Williams faced when "going serious" after the hilarious movie "Good Morning Vietnam" (1987) and equally chaotic TV series "Mork & Mindy" (1978-82).)

Around the same time, the British moviemaking industry was having a boom with its special type of working class comedies. This was a break from "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994), the first British comedy success since the Monty Python films. It had featured a much more luxurious setting and storyline. The contrast was perhaps most noticable in "The Full Monty" (1996) in which out-of-work workers form a variant of the Chippendales strippers. A similiar but different idea is expressed in "Brassed off" (1996) about a brass orchestra threatened by lay-offs. And the setting in the Cinderella story of "Little Voice" (1998) is equally modest. It would be 2001 before the movie made from the highly successful column-turned-novel about Bridget Jones´ diary would return to some of the flair of "Four Weddings...".

The screwball comedy was one of the first genres created in Hollywood. It contrasted the romantic story with the battle of the sexes, and added witty dialogue, as in "Dinner at Eight" (1933), "Bringing up Baby" (1938), and "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940). Originally, the genre´s escapist style was a good way to fight the Depression-reality, but it also served to portray women with jobs - because women with power gives more conflict to the story. Sadly, screwball comedies went out of vogue some time around the end of World War II, but it has come back now and again, for example in Woody Allen´s neurotic "Annie Hall" (1977), and "Tootsie" (1982), featuring Dustin Hoffman in drag to get a job - both films very typical of their times.

Since then, the entire screwball genre has evolved into the romantic comedy. 1989 came "When Harry met Sally..." - about two friends who falls in love, while intellectualising the relationship. It was followed by many others: "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993), which dealt with loving after a partner´s death, "My Best Friend´s Wedding" (1997), also about loving a friend, and the British "Four Weddings and a Funeral" (1994), "Notting Hill" (1999) and "Love Actually" (2003) - all about the stiff Brits versus the flashy Americans.

The romantic comedy, or rom com, has sometimes been critisised for being too sweet, with too little substance, but the ones trying to be "realistic" have not done very well at the box office. Perhaps love should be unrealistic?

One cannot tell the history of comedies without touching upon the Disney phenomenon. Starting off with short animated films (the most famous being "Steamboat Willy" in 1928 which introduced Mickey Mouse), Disney made the first American feature length animated film, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937) - a big gamble at the time. But the gamble payed off, and Walt Disney´s company could go on making movies out of fairy tales or fables, averaging a movie a year, with many hits throughout the years, as "Peter Pan" (1953), "The Lady and the Tramp" (1955), "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), "The Jungle-Book" (1967), "Robin Hood" (1973), and "The Lion King" (1994), all with animals in big roles, and until "The Lion King", drawn with thin lines, almost no shadows and clear colours. But when computer drawing became more easily available in the 1990s, and the Disney films began to appear on VHS, DVD and TV, the animation was developed significantly, for example with magnificent 3D-scenes, as in the start of "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" (1996).

Disney´s empire was relatively unthreatened in animation (they also have normal films on their repertoire) until the late 1990s, when the production company DreamWorks started doing animated films. They started out with "Antz" in 1998, while featuring animals as the main characters, contrasted with the Disney films through a much darker and three-dimensional animation style, and through the absence of musical numbers. The age of the target audience was also slightly higher, which allowed Antz to get away with more verbal/intellectual humour and violence than the normal Disney feature.

The success with "Antz" was followed up by among others "The Road to El Dorado" (2001), "Chicken Run" (2000), and "Shrek" (2001), which clearly spoofed some of the more silly features of the Disney movies, for example by using the above-mentioned self-references, and by turning the expectations from the Disney movies on its ear(s).

Not all of Disney´s film were of the same type though. The most atypical films came from Disney-owned company, Pixar, for example "Toy Story" (1995), the first fully computer-generated film. Or the rival to "Antz": "A Bug´s Life" (1998), also featuring ants, and unusually free of musical numbers. Or "Monsters Inc" (2001), which takes us to a strange new world (Monstropolis), and breaks some of the clear identification so present in almost every other Disney movie, leaving the audience as curious guests.

Surely, this competion has done the Disney corporation a lot of good, by challenging the sugar-sweetness of the "normal" Disney films. The development is not linear, however, and "Finding Nemo (2003) while being a funny movie, it is a classic Disney movie. Perhaps DreamWorks will have to work harder to really change the paradigm.

Mainstream and indie-films - and Europe

The spreading of the videocamera in the 1980s, and the digital camera in the 1990s, increased the ease with which ordinary people could make their own films and small companies could make movies with high quality. This led to a greater division between Hollywood and the New York companies´ output and the independent companies´ films. While not many "indie films", as they became known, was seen by the larger audiences, some were.

The most famous example is without doubt the low-budget movie "The Blair Witch Project" (1999). It was the tenth biggest grossing movie of the year mostly due to an inventive PR campaign over the Internet. Essentially a traditional horror story, the film´s style of a fake documentary inspired more directors to experiment with form.

Another example of this form-experiment trend is the 2001 movie "Moulin Rouge". Although a mainstream movie (which is the slightly pejorative term for movies made by the established film companies), it contains jump cuts, juxtapositions of visual and musical styles, fantasies and sequences with higher speed than normal, as well as the above-mentioned self-references. Such bridges between mainstream and independent film are legio, but the differences are obvious: the indie films have lower budgets (and less marketing), are seldom shown at the larger cinemas, and have their own festivals (Sundance etc). But the differences are also inside the films. They tend to be more character-driven, more political, more personal and autobiographical, and more detail-oriented - if properly handled, and "kitchen sink-realism" if badly handled. This division is more or less similar to the A-movie/B-movie system of the 1940s and 1950s.

The very first movies were largly international in nature - Chaplin´s movies did very well worldwide, for example. But after World War II, the American movie business has dominated the film history at large. With two very important exceptions. Those exceptions are:

First, if you only count the mainstream movies. Europe has become a great place to make art-movies, or movies with a little more depth than the typical American movie. There are of course as many European movies that are typically American, as there are American that are typically European, but the overview is clear.

"Through a Glass Darkly" (1961) by Swedish writer/director Ingmar Bergman is an example of this. The film is a character study as much as it is a story, and it doesn´t shy away from painting an almost documentary view of schizofrenia. On the other hand, Federico Fellini´s "8 1/2" (1963), as well as Luis Buñuel´s "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972), are more up-tempo and chaotic, but still European in their depth and pathos. But don´t let that discourage you from watching them. They´re really quite good.

More popular, almost blockbusters, are Krzysztof Kieslowski´s coincidence-driven trilogy about the French society "Blue" (1993), "White" (1994) and "Red" (1994), almost anything by controversial Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar - "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" (1988), "All about my Mother" (1999), and "Talk to Her" (2002) for example - and Roberto Benigni´s comedy set in a death camp "Life is Beautiful" (1998). So, art isn´t necessarily difficult and introverted.

The second exception to the American dominance is if you don´t count the output of Bollywood (the film industry in India) and the Asian movie industry at large, which only have some small successes in the Western hemisphere. The sheer number of movies made in Asia are much higher than the combined efforts of the rest of the world. Unfortunally, they don´t get much attention outside Asia. (The African, the East European, and the South American films plus the films that originate in the Oceania, are even less represented on American and European cinemas.) There is, of course, some evidence to the oppposite:

Two of the highest grossing films of all time are the Japanese Anime movie "Spirited Away" (2001) - a fairytale with magic and many a plot twist - and Chinese/Taiwanese/American collaboration "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" (2000) - inspired by the Ninja traditions, told in a slow (but not boring) way, with the computer generated effects made famous in "The Matrix" (1999). Ang Lee, director of "Crouching Tiger...", also directed "Eat Drink Man Woman" (1994), which chronicles the clash between modern and ancient Asia, the biggest Taiwanese film export to date.

But those exceptions - and perhaps a handful others - only highlight how Americanised the film market has become. Is this all bad? And if so, what do we do about it? Can we do anything about it? Well, the Internet has not proved to be the savior for the independent film that some people had hoped it would be, with "free" information flow. The problem lies rather in marketing, and the money to get plenty of marketing. But nontheless, some foreign films get Academy Awards each year, and if you´re honest about wanting to end the American film "monopoly" you should take your time watching them at your nearest theatre.

Women and the movies

When a new film is going into production, the gender issue always comes up. Almost all films are geared more towards one sex than the other, with action being considered a male genre, while drama and foreign films are seen as largely drawing a female audience. Is this intrinsically so? And how many people go to movies being directed towards the other sex? Hard questions. Most assume that women are more prone to go to male oriented films than men are to go to a "chick flick", but still the action genre has made little effort to take care of the female audience - with scantily clad women and fully dressed men, gadgets instead of emtions, and boyish comedy. And still women go to that kind of film...

This has lead to feminists (and others) to ask why women in action films are portrayed either as bimbos or butches. An interesting example is Linda Hamilton´s character in the "Terminator" films: In the first film, she is shy, emotional and low-status, even working as a waitress, while she in the second film has turned into the other stereotype, with oiled muscles, a macho attitude and a casual relationship to big guns. (Naturally, the same question could be put about the male characters´ stereotypes: either highly violent low-brow Rambos or skirt-chasing Don Juans with a fear of commitment. But it isn´t.)

The simple reason is of course that production companies, as in every other business, have a gender bias at the executive level. Men talk more easily with men, and so fewer women directors, writers and producers reach prominent positions.

Still, ever since the 1950s, the emancipation of women has created some of the most influential movies: "Adam´s Rib" (1959), "Nine to Five" (1980) and "Working Girl" (1988), all about women in the workplace.

More importantly, there has also been some controversial films, which have put the feminist question in new lights. One such film is "Pretty woman" (1990), which were critized as depicting prostitution in a fairytale light, but which others saw merely as a Cinderella story, albeit in a somewhat strange setting.

A more modern story, "Thelma & Louise" (1991), written by Callie Khorie, had the two female leads on a trip through the violent and unfair male world - and typically ending in triumphant tragedy. The films was in some circles seen as male-bashing, which others thought was well overdue.

The view on the sexy but independant woman was the topic in "Erin Brokovich" (2000). Can a woman fill both roles simultaneously? And still have time to care for her family? The answer seemed to be that it depended on having a foul-mouth, to deal with the fact that all men are sexists.

These types of discussions - in reality questioning how progress is made - is also usual in criticism of "black films", such as those made by Spike Lee (for example "Jungle Fever" (1991). The thesis of oppression is met by the antithesis of wanting to overthrow the system, and hopefully, some time later, the synthesis, and a new equilibrium. Perhaps in time, the anti-thesis to the sexist films - and indeed sexist society - of the 1940s will turn into a synthesis. Until then, we will probably have to fight the division of movies into "guy flicks" and "chick flicks".

Conclusion

Although this history lesson may seem long, I have been forced to concentrate on the major trends and the most influential films. But I would still like to look at what we can learn from film history:

Film is a mirror of society.
Movies are influenced by the changes that society goes through. For instance, during the depression of the 1930s, there were many films designed to let people escape life, through romance, adventure and strange settings. For every major hit, there is some part of it that reflects life at that point in time better than every other film. That´s why remakes, although based on the same material, always turn out different from the original. And that´s also why you should always make sure to include some element in your stories that is extremely contemporary. What is going on right this minute?
History evolves by knowledge of the past.
Hitchcock knew very well about the French New Wave. That´s how he created the new look for his thrillers. He combined an existing style with another existing genre, and created something new. And "Chicken Run" (2000) was written as a parody on and parallel to "The Great Escape" (1963), using entire sequences from the original film but with chickens instead of soldiers. Instant hit.
Genres and styles are always evolving.
Since the screwball comedy was created, Hollywood has combined several other genres and got lots of subgenres: action + comedy = the action comedy, comedy + tragedy = the black comedy, gangster + epic = mob family stories, romance + historical = historical romance, etc, etc. Nowadays, you can almost never describe a film as simply a comedy, you´d have to add scifi-, or western- or romantic. The same goes for styles. You could probably do a gritty animal comedy, or a witty horror western, or a glossy film noir, or any combination you can think of. But what will be fruitful next?
Some of the best lessons come from the misses, not the hits.
Why are some movies successful, while others flop? You should go see the film that everybody hates. For example, what was so bad about "The Postman" (1997), "1941" (1979), or "Howard the Duck" (1986)? Film history is not only about the hits, but about the films everyone loves to scoff. Ed Wood is one example, but why are his movies so bad?
There will always be unexpected hits and unexpected failures.
Noone can really say with 100% accuracy why "The Blair Witch Project" (1999) was a success. You can guess, but it´s only going to be a guess. Or as William Goldman put it: "Nobody knows anything". But that doesn´t mean that you shouldn´t learn history. Most of the films in the box office top are based on these four components: a great concept, a top-notch production, the right casting, and luck. Some of these elements you can´t guarantee during a film production, but the one thing you can do something about is the concept. And the concept has everything to do with history.
History gives you tools.
History is a great inspiration. There´s so many movies out there, that there´s bound to be some film that´s similar to your story. If you can´t think of a way to write yourself out of the mess you´ve gotten yourself into, just think of how it was done in for example "The Maltese Falcon" (1941), or in "The Waterboy" (1998). Just find a sequence that is like your scene in some way, and let yourself be influenced by it. You may borrow things, as long as you do it with flair.

So what will be the next trend? The most anyone can say with certainty is that some trends will continue - for example the synergy between films (adaptations, sequels and remakes), books (novelisations, tie-ins, fact books and "behind the scenes of"-books), merchandise, TV (spin-off shows), games (movies made into and from games), and records (soundtracks, music videos, featuring artists in cameos). Other trends will die or just fade away. And it´s your job to stay ahead of the curve.

You can´t learn to stay ahead of the curve, or even film history from this article. You´ll have to actually watch (study) films to do that, to really get what realistic means, and how that differs from documentary, and how absurd the absurd films really are. And you´ll have to research what will come next, by sifting through magazines and newspapers. But it´ll be fun and rewarding. In fact, I think you´ll be pleasently surprised.

By Lennart Guldbrandsson

Chapters
In the beginning