Flikipedia A branching dictionary of the moving image

film history

noun

The chronological development of the moving image as a medium, from the optical toys that preceded projection through the silent, sound, color, and digital eras.

  1. Cinema The chronological account of the moving image as a technology and an art, tracing its instruments, techniques, industries, and forms from the nineteenth century to the present.

  2. Scholarship The academic discipline that studies this development, drawing on surviving films, trade records, patents, and archival documents.

Origins and the first films

The moving image was preceded by nineteenth-century optical devices, among them the phenakistoscope, zoetrope, and praxinoscope, which produced the illusion of motion from a rapid succession of drawn images. The development of flexible photographic film in the 1880s made it possible to record sequential exposures of live action. Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, introduced in the early 1890s, presented such footage to a single viewer through a peephole, while the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe combined camera, printer, and projector and gave public projected screenings in 1895. These competing systems mark the conventional beginning of cinema as a projected medium.

The silent era and the coming of sound

For roughly three decades films were exhibited without synchronized sound, typically accompanied by live music and supplemented by printed intertitles. This period saw the establishment of narrative conventions, the growth of studios, and the emergence of feature-length storytelling. Synchronized sound reached commercial audiences around 1927, and within a few years spoken dialogue, recorded effects, and scored music became standard. The transition reshaped production practices, performance, and the international circulation of films, since dialogue tied a work more closely to a single language.

Color, widescreen, and postwar movements

Color processes were used experimentally from the medium’s earliest years, but subtractive systems such as three-strip color film spread through mainstream production from the 1930s onward, and color became predominant by the 1960s. In the 1950s studios introduced widescreen and large-format systems that altered the aspect ratio of the projected image. The decades after the Second World War were marked by a series of national film movements and New Waves, in which filmmakers in Italy, France, Japan, and elsewhere developed distinctive approaches to narrative, editing, and location shooting.

The digital transition

From the 1990s through the 2010s the medium moved progressively from photochemical film to digital technologies. Digital effects broadened what could be composited and rendered; electronic image sensors displaced film in acquisition; and digital projection replaced release prints in most theaters. The change affected each stage of production, distribution, and exhibition, and altered how films are archived and restored.

See also

  • cinema— Motion pictures collectively — as an art form, a medium of expression, and an industry; also, chiefly in British use, a venue where films are shown.
  • sound— The recorded audio element of a motion picture, comprising dialogue, sound effects, and music, and the crafts of recording, editing, and mixing them.
  • color film— Photographic film that records the colors of a scene as well as its brightness, most commonly by stacking three emulsion layers sensitized to blue, green, and red light.
  • image sensor— The electronic component that captures a digital image, converting light into electrical charge at a grid of photosites — the digital counterpart to photographic emulsion.

Sources

  1. David Bordwell & Kristin Thompson, Film History: An Introduction
  2. Kristin Thompson & David Bordwell, Film Art: An Introduction
  3. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE)

Last revised: September 18, 2026