Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology Online

Extract

Film emerged as one of the first mass-produced cultural forms of the twentieth century and cinema became one of its distinctive and highly influential industries. Based on new technologies of mechanical reproduction that made possible simulations of the real and the production of fantasy worlds, cinema provided a novel mode of culture that changed patterns of leisure activity and played an important role in social life. Early films were the inventions of technicians and entrepreneurs like the Lumière brothers and Méliès in France and the Edison Corporation in the US.The first silent films ranged from the documentaries and quasi-documentary realist fictions produced by the Lumières and Edison to the fantasy fictions of Méliès. The genres that would characterize Hollywood film began to appear during the first decades of the century with Westerns like The Great Train Robbery (1903), the melodramatic social dramas of D. W. Griffith, costume and historical dramas like Ben Hur (the first of several versions appeared in 1899), horror films, and comedies by Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others.From the beginning, cinema was bound up with the vicissitudes of modernity. Film was a modern, technologically mediated art form, and it captured the novelties of modern life. Cinema's motion pictures depicted the faster pace of contemporary life, showing railroads and trains, ... log in or subscribe to read full text