The motion picture industry was born in 1895 with the invention of the motion picture camera by Louise Lumiere. The first twenty years saw the making of short silent films, which changed to being longer and more complex by the 1910s. This is when Charlie Chaplin’s silent films were also produced. It is during this time that director D. W. Griffith while searching for an apt location for his film chanced upon a village called “Hollywood”. The first film to be shot in Hollywood was Griffith’s “In Old California”.
In 1915, Griffith used parallel editing for the first time in a film and the with the “Odessa Steps” sequence in the film “Potemkin” the use of special effects was born. Between 1910 and 1935, star-powered American studios like Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Coumbia Pictures etc. came into being and signed contracts with actors to produce film after film. Each studio had its own specialized features. Before the 1930s, when parallel language versions of films were produced for the first time, the American studios’ productions were rejected due to their poor sound and synchronization techniques. After this, however, Hollywood was said to be in its golden age and produced some fascinating western slapstick comedies as also musical animated cartoons. Some of the best films produced in the era were Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, etc. With television being introduced in the late 1940s, the studio system declined.
After this, Hollywood saw a new set of directors with a different thinking who introduced new filming techniques and strategies and improved the existing ones. They came with a new school of thought which independent film making encouraged, and churned out films that were innovative, unconventional and sometimes also contradictory. Films such as Godfather, Jaws, Extra-Terrestrial added a new taste to Hollywood.
In the recent times, Hollywood has evolved new techniques and produced some of the greatest films for the world cinema.
