Use the interactive timeline below to explore the history of cinema, from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Click on the images and colored pins to discover book chapters and screenplay pages related to notable events in film production, society and culture, and technologies.
An illustration of the craze for spirit photography, showing a spirit photo being faked as well as the possibilities for photographic special effects. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
Thomas Edison poses with his phonograph, invented at his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
ca. 1878
Starting around 1877, Eadweard Muybridge produces his photographic works on animal locomotion, and begins projecting them on a zoopraxiscope, a device he invented. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1870-1879
1882
The French scientist Etienne Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun for taking continuous images of animals in motion. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1880-1889
ca.1885
Photography, photographic motion studies, theatre, and other forms of popular culture help develop the narrative structures of cinema.
A publicity photograph of the English stage actress Lily Langtry, in her role as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Langtry's theatrical celebrity established the possibilities for film stardom thirty years later. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Mark Furness)
L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, which, according to movie mythology, terrified French viewers with its realism.
1896
Thomas Edison's production of The Kiss, featuring Broadway star May Irwin kissing her co-star John Rice, was one of the first commercially exhibited short films.
1896
In Great Britain, the film pioneer Robert W. Paul creates his own camera and projection system, which helps introduce cinema to wide audiences.
William McKinley becomes the first American president to be filmed when cameramen record his inauguration.
1898
The Spanish-American War becomes the first such conflict to be filmed extensively.
ca. 1865
An illustration of the craze for spirit photography, showing a spirit photo being faked as well as the possibilities for photographic special effects. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
Thomas Edison poses with his phonograph, invented at his research laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
ca. 1878
Starting around 1877, Eadweard Muybridge produces his photographic works on animal locomotion, and begins projecting them on a zoopraxiscope, a device he invented. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1870-1879
1882
The French scientist Etienne Jules Marey invented a chronophotographic gun for taking continuous images of animals in motion. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1880-1889
ca.1885
Photography, photographic motion studies, theatre, and other forms of popular culture help develop the narrative structures of cinema.
A publicity photograph of the English stage actress Lily Langtry, in her role as Cleopatra in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. Langtry's theatrical celebrity established the possibilities for film stardom thirty years later. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Mark Furness)
L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, which, according to movie mythology, terrified French viewers with its realism.
1896
Thomas Edison's production of The Kiss, featuring Broadway star May Irwin kissing her co-star John Rice, was one of the first commercially exhibited short films.
1896
In Great Britain, the film pioneer Robert W. Paul creates his own camera and projection system, which helps introduce cinema to wide audiences.
William McKinley becomes the first American president to be filmed when cameramen record his inauguration.
1898
The Spanish-American War becomes the first such conflict to be filmed extensively.
2
1900
This Edison Kineto-Phonograph was just one of the systems, developed by Alice Guy Blaché, Thomas Edison, and other early cinema pioneers, to link images with sound. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
A poster for The Great Train Robbery, one of the early, groundbreaking motion pictures by Edwin S. Porter, that captures some of the film's dynamic action. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Library of Congress)
1900-1909
1902
Georges Méliès' silent movie Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) becomes an international hit.
1907-1908
Spanish filmmaker Segundo de Chómon, greatly influenced by Georges Méliès, directs Le Spectre Rouge (1907) and El hotel eléctrico (1908).
1908
American filmmaker D.W. Griffith directs his first film, The Adventures of Dollie.
1901
The assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York.
The Russo-Japanese war is filmed by international motion picture crews.
1905-1907
The failed Russian revolution that will be memorialized in Sergei Eisenstein's 1925 film, Battleship Potemkin.
1909
American social reformer Jane Addams publishes The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, featuring a scathing critique of movies and the nickel theatre.
1909
Florence Lawrence, The Biograph Girl, becomes the first movie performer to be named consistently in publicity, beginning a new era in film stardom.
1905
The first nickelodeon, a building designed specifically for showing films, opens in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1906
Founding of the Nordisk Film company, which will become the leading studio in Denmark during the silent period.
6
1913
The American poster for Quo Vadis, the Italian epic directed by Enrico Guazzoni that became an international sensation. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/Library of Congress)
ca. 1915
The Danish actress Asta Nielsen, who made her first film in 1910, becomes one of the greatest stars in the world in the period before 1920. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1914
In his second film, Kid Auto Races at Venice, Charles Chaplin, shown here in the outfit he made famous, makes his first appearance as The Tramp. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1915
Director Cecil B. DeMille's drama The Cheat makes Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa an international star. (Credit: Mary Evans/Pharcide)
1915
This Heath Robinson cartoon in the British periodical The Strand, showing a very do-it-yourself Zeppelin raid, pokes fun at the craze for re-enacted documentaries during World War One. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1918
The German star Pola Negri as Carmen in Gypsy Blood, which she made for director Ernst Lubitsch, and which solidified the international reputations of both the actress and the filmmaker. (Credit: Mary Evans/SZ Photo/Scherl)
1910-1919
1911
Russian stop-motion animator Wladyslaw Starewicz makes one of his first motion pictures, a puppet film using dead insects, The Beautiful Leukanida.
1912
Paramount Pictures releases its first film, Queen Elizabeth, featuring the great French stage star Sarah Bernhardt.
1914
The international release of the Italian epic Cabiria, directed by Giovanni Pastrone.
1915
D.W. Griffith releases his racist epic of the American Civil War, The Birth of a Nation, which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force. The film led to protests across the United States against its White Supremacist message.
ca. 1915
With the foundation of the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Motion Picture Service, the United States government gets into the business of making movies.
With the outbreak of World War One, most of the great powers involved send film crews to the front.
1914
Emilie Altenloh of the University of Heidelberg completes her doctoral dissertation, A Sociology of the Cinema: The Audience, one of the first signficant studies of filmgoing.
1915
In the case of Mutual Film Corporation v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court rules that free speech protections do not extend to motion pictures.
1916
German-American Psychologist Hugo Munsterberg publishes The Photoplay: A Psychological Study, one of the first works that can be identified as film theory.
1919
Ciné-Pour-Tous begins publication as probably the first French film journal, and almost certainly one of the first in the world.
ca.1910
Movie companies around the world move increasingly from short to feature-length films.
Carl Laemmle opens Universal City, home of the vast Universal Studios, which will become the model of the American movie studio.
1916
In the US, the merger of Famous Players Film Copmany, the Lasky Company, and Paramount Pictures begins the movement towards vertically integrated film companies, owning actors and directors, production studios, distribution networks and cinema chains.
1917
In Germany, the founding of Ufa, a vertically integrated film company.
11
1920
A publicity photo of German director F.W. Murnau, around the time he and others made Weimar cinema the most innovative and important in the world. (Credit: Mary Evans / Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
A movie postcard of Anna May Wong, who starred in the Technicolor Company's The Toll of the Sea, a 1922 film designed to advertise the possibilities of color. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1926
An advertisment in Mon Ciné for French director's Abel Gance's six-hour nationalist epic Napoleon, which would be released in 1927. (Credit: Mary Evans / Jazz Age Club Collection)
1926
The American actor Douglas Fairbanks (center) meets the great Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (right) and his cameraman Eduard Tisse (left) in Moscow. Eisenstein subsequently visited Hollywood and signed a contract to make a movie for Paramount Pictures, but his projects did not make it into production. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
Al Jolson, in blackface, as he appeared in the Warner Bros. movie The Jazz Singer, which helped show the possibilities for, and popularize, the film with recorded sound. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1927
In Germany, Walter Ruttman makes Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Great City), pioneering the genre of the city film. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
1927
In London, British inventor John Logie Baird (standing, far right) demonstrates his television, which is showing an image transmitted from Glasgow, Scotland. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1927
A poster advertising Buster Keaton in The General. The silent comedy, which Keaton co-directed as well as starred in, is widely considered to be his masterpiece. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
The Czech actress Anny Ondra, directed by Alfred Hitchcock in Blackmail, his first sound film, and one of the first sound films made in the UK. (Credit: Mary Evans / Imagno)
The Austrian-German director Fritz Lang on set of his film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon), with the actress Margaret Kupfer. Lang, who directed the classics Metropolis (1927) and M (1931) fled Germany for Hollywood after the Nazis came to power. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
1920-1929
1921
James B. Leong produces and directs Lotus Blossom, the only film completed by his Los Angeles-based Chinese film company, the Wah-Ming Motion Picture Co.
1922
Lois Weber, the leading director at Universal Studios, directs The Blot, her great film about class and gender.
1920
African-American writer and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, working independently, releases his first important film, Within Our Gates.
1922
German director F.W. Murnau, who had begun making films in 1919, releases Nosferatu, his expressionist vampire film.
French filmmaker Germaine Dulac directs her pioneering feminist film, and one of the classics of avant garde cinema, La Souriante Madame Beudet (The Smiling Madame Beudet).
1926
Fox Film Corporation releases F.W. Murnau's first American film, Sunrise, shot with recorded sound on the new Fox sound system.
1927
In Japan, Yasujirō Ozu, who will come to be acclaimed as one of the great masters of cinema, directs his first film, Blade of Penitence.
Anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston travels through the Southern United States, filming African-American life there.
1929
Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapić, and Gregg Toland produce The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, an early example of the Los Angeles avant garde.
1929
Dziga Vertov makes his avant garde documentary, Man With a Movie Camera, an example of the Kino-Eye movement in the USSR
The formation of C.A.S.A., the Club des amis du septième art, (Club of friends of the seventh art) probably the first French ciné-club, and perhaps the first in Europe.
1920-1925
The globalization of postwar cinema, and the international dominance of American cinema.
The French government used cinema as a tool for promoting an ideal of French national identity, particularly in relation to its colonies in North Africa and South-East Asia.
In Hollywood, the founding of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that will administer the annual Academy Awards.
1927
The founding of the British film journal Close Up, devoted to film art and published until 1933, edited by Kenneth Macpherson, the novelist Bryher and the poet H.D.
1929
The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 marked the beginning of the global economic depression.
1925
Following the example of the United States and Europe, the Japanese film industry begins to develop a studio system.
Most film companies in the US and Europe begin the shift to panchromatic film, much more sensitive to shade and color than the previous standard, orthochromatic film.
1926-1929
Film industries around the world begin the transition to making movies with recorded sound.
Walt Disney releases the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, Steamboat Willie, his first film with synchronized sound.
1929
In Britain, the first films with recorded sound to be released are Kitty, directed by Victor Saville, and Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
1929
The first film with recorded sound to be made in Germany is Melodie der Welt (Melody of the World), directed by Walter Ruttmann.
1929
In France, La Collier de la reine (The Queen's Necklace) which has a recorded score, some sound effects, and brief moments of dialogue, is the country's first sound film.
11
1930
Nazis protesting in Vienna against screenings of the anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, which had been released by Universal Studios and would become one of the first great international sensations of the sound era. (Credit: Mary Evans/IMAGNO / Austrian Archives (S))
1930
A postcard of German actress Dorothea Wieck, one of the stars of Madchen in Uniform, Leontine Sagan's film about Prussian militarism and female desire, a controversial hit in Europe and the United States. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1931
Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, directed by James Whale, which, along with Dracula (1931), was one of Universal's first great horror films of the sound era. (Credit: Mary Evans / Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo)
In Germany, Leni Riefenstahl, an actress before she became a propagandist, stars in Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), one of the very popular mountain films, which she also co-wrote and directed with Béla Balázs. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
Walt Disney at his desk, around the time he made the short cartoon Flowers and Trees, his first film in Technicolor. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
1933
Fay Wray in the grasp of King Kong, in RKO's great horror and special effects film. (Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection/Mary Evans)
A publicity photo of Katharine Hepburn in Christopher Strong, a film made by one of the few women directors in 1930s Hollywood, Dorothy Arzner. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
ca. 1935
Georges Méliès (left), who thirty years before had revolutionized cinema with films like A Trip to the Moon (1902), posing with the great French animator Emile Cohl. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
1935
The Berlin premiere of Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), Leni Riefenstahl's propaganda film about the 1934 Nazi congress in Nuremberg. (Credit: Mary Evans / Imagno)
Adriana Caselotti, the voice of Snow White in the English language version of Walt Disney's first feature-lengh animated film. (Credit: Mary Evans / Imagno)
Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, the first great German sound film success, introduces Marlene Dietrich to a global audience.
1931
Marcel Pagnol establishes his studio in Marseille, away from the center of French filmmaking, Paris, and releases Marius, the first film in his Marseille Trilogy.
1934
French director Jean Vigo makes the last of his four films, L'Atalante, before his death at 29 that same year.
1934-1935
Argentine singer Carlos Gardel stars in El tango en Broadway (Tango on Broadway) (1934) and Tango Bar (1935), two US-made Spanish language musicals for a global Spanish-speaking audience.
1936-1939
American anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson produce the ethnographic documentary, Trance and Dance in Bali.
1937
French director Jean Renoir's pacifist La Grande Illusion (Great Illusion), set in a World War One P.O.W. camp, becomes an international hit.
1939
John Ford's Stagecoach helps introduce a new era of Adult Westerns.
1929-1932
Research studies sponsored by the Payne Fund in the United States examined the effects of motion pictures on children.
Protesting Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's surrealist L'Age d'or (The Golden Age), fascists in Paris destroyed the screen and lobby at the Studio 28 cinema, where the film opened.
1930
Hollywood adjusts to the self-censorship system of the Production Code, a set of moral guidelines for motion pictures, popularly known as the Hays Code after its author Will W. Hays.
1934
John M. Stahl's melodrama Imitation of Life depicts the tragic narrative of a mixed-race character, Peola, able to 'pass' as white. Peola was notably played by a mixed-race actress, Fredi Washington.
Margaret Farrand Thorp publishes America at the Movies, a sociological study of the film audience and film industry, the first of its kind in the United States.
1939
World War Two begins in Europe.
1930
European and American film and sound companies cooperate in the Paris Agreement in order to regulate the global use of sound technology.
ca.1930
Global film companies begin adjusting to the new social and technological demands of sound.
India produces its first all-talking film, the Hindi-language Alam Ara (Beauty of the World)
1935
Three-color Technicolor is used for the first time to make a feature-film, Becky Sharp, from Pioneer Pictures Corporation in the United States.
ca.1935
The sound era complicates international movie stardom, as silent stars' voices did not always match their screen personae, or were deemed unappealing to movie audiences.
Alfred Hitchcock, having secured an international reputation, around the time he left the UK for the United States, where he would make films for the producer David O. Selznick. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
ca. 1940
As these women on vacation demonstrate, the era's development of light, handheld movie equipment made filmmaking available to ever wider populations. (Credit: Mary Evans/Classic Stock/H. Armstrong Roberts)
Actor-director Orson Welles as the title character in Citizen Kane, his Hollywood debut and the film that would revolutionize cinematic narrative and visual style. (Credit: Mary Evans / SZ Photo / Scherl)
The Nazis, occupying Paris and much of France, establish the production company Continental Films to make films in French for French audiences.
1943
American avant garde filmmaker Maya Deren completes Meshes of the Afternoon, which will become one of the best-known experimental films made in the US.
1943
To celebrate its 25th anniversary, the German Ufa studio releases the technicolor epic Münchhausen, offering a spectactular vision of a pastoral Germany.
1945
In March, Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert's Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise) premieres in Paris.
1940
After the French surrender to Germany on 22 June 1940, the Nazi Occupation of Paris and Northern France begins.
The first Cannes Film Festival, after a seven-year delay because of World War Two.
1946
The Blum-Byrnes agreement is signed between the US and France, wiping out much French debt but also giving the advantage in France to films from Hollywod.
1946
The beginning of the first war in Indochina, or the French War, between the French colonial forces and their Viet Minh opponents, that would last until 1956.
1947
In Washington, D.C., the House Committee on Un-American Activities opens hearings into Communism in Hollywood.
1947
In the aftermath of independence, India begins a fifteen-year Golden Age of cinema.
1948
In the case of United States v. Paramount Pictures, the Supreme Court rules that vertically integrated Hollywood studios are in violation of anti-trust laws.
ca.1940
Alternative exhibition sites, such as art house cinemas and outdoor drive-in theaters, flourish throughout the US and Europe.
Singer-actor Harry Belafonte, raised in Jamaica, who helped redefine international stardom during the post-World War Two era, when traditional European markets needed rebuilding, and new ones were developing. (Credit: Mary Evans/Toscani Archive/Alinari Archives Management)
James Stewart and Grace Kelly in Rear Window, Alfred Hitchcock's classic voyeuristic melodrama, a movie that has come to be understood as a metaphor for cinema. (Credit: Mary Evans/Interfoto)
Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson in a still from Giant, directed by George Stevens and also starring James Dean, an epic drama that follows the lives of a Texan family from youth to old age. (Credit: Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans)
A photo of John Wayne around the time he starred in The Searchers, considered by many to be the greatest of John Ford's westerns. (Credit: Mary Evans/Interfoto Agentur)
1958
One of the posters for Vertigo, Alfred Hitchcock's classic film about obsessive desire, and the last of the director's three films with James Stewart. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library/ONSLOW AUCTIONS LIMITED)
Director Yasujirō Ozu's masterpiece Tokyo Story explores themes of family, ageing and inter-generational change through the story of an elderly couple's visit to their grown children in Tokyo.
Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman directs another great filmmaker, Victor Sjöstrom, and also Bibi Andersson, in Wild Strawberries.
1958-1960
Release of three of the earliest films of the French New Wave, Claude Chabrol's Le Beau Serge (1958), François Truffaut's Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows) (1959), and Jean-Luc Godard's À bout de souffle (Breathless) (1960).
1951
André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca found the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, in Paris.
1954
In Cahiers du Cinéma, François Truffaut publishes his polemic, Une certaine tendance du cinéma francais (A certain tendency in French cinema), in which he coins the term politique des auteurs, arguing for a mode of film criticism that sees the director or filmmaker as the prime creative force or 'author' of the film.
1954
The eight-year Algerian war for independence from France begins.
1955
The beginning of the Second Indochina War, or Vietnam War, between the US-backed South Vietnamese government and communist North Vietnamese forces, which will last for twenty years.
ca. 1955
The French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) begins, a movement that will revolutionize global cinema.
Alain Resnais' documentary short Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) was one of the first films to show the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust. The film was controversial in France because it suggested official complicity in the mass deporation of French Jews to the concentration camps.
In France, Edgar Morin publishes Les Stars, one of the first, extended studies of movie stardom.
1957
Journalist Françoise Giroud, writing in L'Express, coins the term La Nouvelle Vague, (the New Wave), to describe the postwar generation of young people in France.
1958
In the United States, the first issue of the journal Film Quarterly, which since 1945 had been published as the Hollywood Quarterly.
1952
Systems for 3D moviemaking had been around for a long time, but 1952 marked the release of the first color 3D feature film, the U.S. adventure movie Bwana Devil.
1952
The widescreen process Cinerama, invented by Fred Waller, becomes commercially viable and is showcased in the movie This is Cinerama.
1959
Experiments in color television had been going on internationally for decades, but with the Western show Bonanza, American network NBC begins national color broadcasting.
2
1965
An American department store displays color television, about five years after NBC became the first national network In the US to broadcast in color, with the western Bonanza. (Credit: Mary Evans / Classicstock / H. ARMSTRONG ROBERTS)
1968
Peter Butterworth, Charles Hawtrey and Joan Sims in Carry on Up the Khyber, one of a series of popular comedies that used innuendo and low humour to satirise British customs and institutions - in this case, the British Raj, with the title playing on Cockney Rhyming Slang: Khyber Pass = arse. (Credit: Courtesy Everett Collection / Mary Evans)
In France, Chris Marker direts one of the most influential of all short films, La Jetée.
1964
Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb stars Peter Sellers as a deranged American general intent on blowing up the world, in a dark Cold War satire on fears of a nuclear conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Release of The Battle of Algiers, by Italian filmmaker Gilles Pontecorvo, financed by an Algerian film company, a fictionalized documentary about Algeria's struggle for independence from France.
1966
Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene releases his first feature film, La Noire de … (Black Girl).
1967
Jean-Luc Godard's Deux ou Trois choses que je sais d'elle (Two or Three Things I Know About Her), the director's loose narrative about 24 hours in the life of a member of the French bourgeoisie.
Release of two of the most important Cuban films of the period, Humberto Solás' Lucía and Tomás Guitiérez Alea's Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment).
ca. 1960
The rise of the cinema verité aesthetic, which emphasised the importance of a naturalistic style and subject matter, in documentary film production.
Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a still from Badlands, Terrence Malick's feature-length debut. Malick was part of the 'New Hollywood' movement of filmmakers influenced by European art cinema, the avant garde and documentary techniques. (Credit: Ronald Grant / Mary Evans / WARNER BROS)
Italian filmmaker Lina Wertmüller, shown here during an interview, has an international success with the comedy-drama Swept Away. (Credit: Mary Evans/Team/Alinari)
1975
A poster advertising Steven Spielberg's thriller Jaws, which ushered in a new era of Hollywood blockbusters. (Credit: Getty Images/Universal History Archive/Contributor)
A still from Nicolas Roeg's science fiction drama The Man Who Fell to Earth. David Bowie's otherworldly star persona adds an extra-textual meaning to his portrayal of the alien visitor Thomas Newton. (Credit: Mary Evans Picture Library)
Release of Claire's Knee, the fifth of French director Eric Rohmer's Six Moral Tales, films, each inspired by F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, that made him internationally famous.
West German filmmakers Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlöndorff co-direct The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, a film depicting the climate of panic in response to the Red Army Faction's campaign of anti-state terrorism.
1975-1980
Hollywood studios develop the 'Teen Slasher Film,' marketed to a young adult audience.
Tony Badham's Saturday Night Fever, starring John Travolta as Tony Manero, becomes a surprise hit, tapping into the disco boom to attract a youth market as well as an older audience.
Cahiers du Cinéma publishes the collectively-authored text, John Ford's 'Young Mr. Lincoln,' helping introduce semiotically-influenced ideological analysis to film theory.
1975
Laura Mulvey's Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, perhaps the most important essay in film theory of the last fifty years, is published in Volume 16, #3 of Screen.
ca.1975
In Europe and the United States, the heyday of the exploitation film, characterized by low-budgets, niche genres, and lurid content.
Game machines had existed for decades, but the American company Atari successfully exploited the global market for games, producing arcade cabinets, consoles for home gaming, and games for home computers, with popular games such as Pong (1972) and Space Invaders (1978).
1973
Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is used for the first time in a feature film, in Westworld, a science fiction Western thriller written and directed by Michael Crichton.
1975
The invention and early use of the Steadicam, allowing for long, smooth tracking shots.
1975-1977
The introduction of home computers, with Apple introducing a computer with floppy drive support in 1977.
4
1980
The celebrated French actor Alain Delon, around the time he made his first American film in almost fifteen years, The Concorde … Airport '79. Delon was a huge star in Europe, working with directors including Visconti, Godard, Clément and Antonioni, but never achieved the same success in Hollywood (Credit: Getty Images / Michel GINFRAY / Contributor)
Arnold Schwarzenegger stars as the cyborg killing machine in James Cameron's science fiction thriller The Terminator. (Credit: Getty Images/Universal Images Group/Contributor)
Clint Eastwood starring in the film Pale Rider, which he also produced and directed. This was one of a number of Westerns directed by Eastwood, part of a late 20th century revival of the genre. (Credit: Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives/Stringer)
On the set of Akira Kurosawa's film Ran, an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear, widely considered by critics to be the Japanese director's greatest work. (Credit: Getty Images/Kurita KAKU/Contributor)
Stephen Frears directs My Beautiful Laundrette, from a script by Hanif Kureishi, depicting the relationship of Omar, a young British Pakistani, and his white boyfriend Johnny.
Stephen Frears directs Prick Up Your Ears, from a screenplay by Alan Bennett, about British playwright Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. The film was notable in its depiction of gay life in a period before the decriminalisation of homosexuality, in the same year as Orton's death.
1988
British director Mike Figgis makes his first motion picture, Stormy Monday, a noirish thriller, notable for its jazz soundtrack, set in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
Spike Lee writes and directs Do the Right Thing, the story of tensions between African-American and Italian-American communities in Brooklyn, New York. Lee was a key figure in the New Black Cinema movement of the late 1980s and 1990s.
The modern Batman franchise begins, with Tim Burton's first of two films in the series, starring Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as The Joker.
Julia Roberts starring as the prostitute Vivian Ward in the romantic comedy Pretty Woman, initially conceived as a much darker tale of the perils of sex work. (Credit: Getty Images / Hulton Archive / Handout)
Poster advertising the release of The Big Lebowski, written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, and starring Jeff Bridges as Jeffrey The Dude Lebowski, which soon becomes a cult classic. (Credit: Getty Images / Buyenlarge / Contributor)
Liv Tyler at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The festival was closely associated with the flourishing of American Independent Cinema in the 1990s. (Credit: Getty Images / Fred Hayes / Contributor)
Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami's hugely influential documentary-fiction hybrid Close Up explores questions of reality, creativity and identity through the true story of a young man arrested for impersonating the well-known filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf.
Release of director Julie Dash's film about Gullah culture off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia, Daughters of the Dust.
1993-1994
Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue (1993) White (1994) and Red (1994), corresponding to the colours of the French flag, and loosely based on the ideals of the French Republic: liberty, equality, fraternity.
Alan Bennett's screenplay, adapted from his own play, for The Madness of King George, directed by Nicholas Hytner, depicts the political crisis engendered by the illness of King George III.
1995
Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg found the Dogme 95 movement, asserting an auterist approach to filmmaking and a focus on story, acting, and theme over special effects and computer-generated imagery. Vinterberg's Festen (The Celebration) (1998) and von Trier's Idioterne (The Idiots) (1998) were two early outcomes of the movement.
Pixar Studios releases its first film, Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated movie.
1999
Kimberley Pierce's movie Boys Don't Cry tells the true story of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank), a trans man living in Falls City, Nebraska, whose relationship with an aspiring singer, Lana (Chloë Sevigny) ends in terrible violence.
Release of The Matrix, the first in a trilogy of dystopian science fiction films written and directed by The Wachowskis, exploring themes of simulation and reality and the nature of humanity in an age of machines.
Ongoing developments in digital special effects with films like The Abyss (1989) and Jurassic Park (1993)
1990-1993
The development of the Worldwide Web begins the era of the internet.
4
2001
Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone and 'Frank' in Richard Kelly's science fiction fantasy Donnie Darko, which, despite a lackluster box office performance on its release, went on to become a cult classic. The movie was also notable for its soundtrack, which featured a cover version of Tears for Fears' Mad World by Gary Jules and Michael Andrews. (Credit: PANDORA CINEMA / FLOWER FILMS / ADAM FIELDS PRODUCTIONS / GA / Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans)
Documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock promoting his film Super Size Me, exploring the disastrous impact of the fast food industry, at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Credit: Getty Images / Randall Michelson Archive / Contributor)
A poster advertising the US premiere of Steven Spielberg's science fiction thriller War of the Worlds, starring Tom Cruise, at the Ziegfeld Theater, New York City. (Credit: Getty Images / Patrick McMullan / Contributor)
Actress Zoe Saldana attends the premiere of James Cameron's science fiction epic Avatar at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles. Avatar won rave reviews on its release and is one of the highest grossing films of all time. (Credit: Getty Images / ROBYN BECK / Staff)
Mexican director Guillermo del Toro's dark fantasy film El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth) addresses the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the violent repression of Franco's Spain.
Poster advertising the release of The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson's film starring Ralph Fiennes as the legendary concierge Gustave M. (Credit: Getty Images / Bertrand Rindoff Petroff / Contributor)
The British actor, writer and director Richard Ayoade hosts The London Evening Standard British Film Awards at Claridge's Hotel in London. Ayoade's directorial debut Submarine (2010) and its follow up The Double (2013) were associated with a resurgence of British cinema in the early 21st Century. (Credit: Getty Images / David M. Benett / Contributor)
Director Danny Boyle and some of the cast of T2 Trainspotting, a sequel to the 1996 film based on Irvine Welsh's eponymous novel, at a screening in New York City. (Credit: Getty Images / Noam Galai / Contributor)
Christopher Nolan, director of the World War Two epic Dunkirk, depicting the evacuation of Allied troops from the beaches of Northern France, attends a photocall at Cinémathèque Française in Paris. (Credit: Getty Images / Bertrand Rindoff Petroff / Contributor)
Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained sparks controversy in its depiction of African-American slavery. The film combined tropes from the Spaghetti Western and blaxploitation cinema with extreme violence.
The hashtag #OscarsSoWhite expressed widespread dismay at the absence of actors of color in the 20 nominees for best actor at the Academy Awards.
2017
The #MeToo hashtag, used by activist Tarana Burke, and taken up by actress Alyssa Milano, raised awareness of widespread harrassment and assault against women in the entertainment industry, with producer Harvey Weinstein among high-profile figures named as perpetrators.
ca.2010
Digital cinematography starts to replace film as the industry standard for making movies.
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