Series ・ 10 parts

A History of Cinema: The World on Screen

At the close of the nineteenth century, humankind gained the power to give motion to still images. Edison's peep-box Kinetoscope, and then, in 1895, the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe, which cast light onto a white cloth in a darkened room. Episode 1 traces the dawn of a new age called cinema, an age that began with a single machine.

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01 The Invention of Moving Pictures ― The Dawn of Cinema At the close of the nineteenth century, humankind gained the power to give motion to still images. Edison's peep-box Kinetoscope, and then, in 1895, the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe, which cast light onto a white cloth in a darkened room. Episode 1 traces the dawn of a new age called cinema, an age that began with a single machine.
02 The Golden Age of Silent Film ― The Birth of Hollywood In an age without voice, cinema made the whole world laugh and weep with gesture and expression alone. The comedy honed by Chaplin and Keaton, the five-cent movie houses called nickelodeons, and the studios that gathered in a small town on the West Coast ― Episode 2 portrays the golden age of silent film and the birth of Hollywood.
03 The Talkie Revolution and the Golden Age In 1927, the screen finally found its voice. The era of the talkie, announced by 'The Jazz Singer,' brought Hollywood its golden age. Giant studios mass-produced films and stars carried the dreams of millions. We trace, neutrally and faithfully to history, both that brilliance and the shadow of the censorship code that bound production behind it.
04 World Cinema as Art — The Creation of Each Nation Cinema was not Hollywood's alone. German Expressionism depicted anxiety with distorted shadows, Soviet montage theory found meaning in editing, and France brimmed with humanity. And then war mobilized cinema into national propaganda. We trace neutrally both the creation of the cinematic art each nation nurtured and the shadow of its entanglement in politics.
05 The Shock of Television — Twilight of the Studios In 1948, a single Supreme Court ruling pried the theaters away from Hollywood's mighty studios. Around the same time, a little box entered every home — television — and the seats in movie houses slowly emptied. A fact-based account of the twilight of the studio system at its height, and the counterattack waged on giant screens.
06 The Age of Auteurs — The New Cinema Revolution Paris, 1960. Young men who had risen from criticism carried their cameras into the streets and overturned the grammar of cinema. The fever of the Nouvelle Vague crossed the ocean and leapt to the New American Cinema. Under the auteur theory, which regarded the director as the author of a work, the world seethed with a revolution of expression. A fact-based account of the 1960s and 70s.
07 The Birth of the Blockbuster Jaws in 1975, Star Wars in 1977. Two young talents, Spielberg and Lucas, established a new formula for the hit: the summer tentpole, the wide simultaneous release, and merchandising. This is a fact-based portrait of late-1970s Hollywood as it steered back from the age of the auteur toward a giant entertainment industry.
08 Japanese Cinema and the World: The Achievement of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Others In 1951, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon won the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival, and Japanese cinema stepped onto the world stage. The serenity of Yasujiro Ozu, the lyricism of Kenji Mizoguchi. This is a fact-based portrait of the golden age of Japanese cinema, when each director's singularity won acclaim across borders.
09 The Digital and CG Revolution — The Dream Painted in Pixels In 1995, the world watched a film in which toys began to move on their own. Computers took over the work of the brush from film, and both shooting and projection turned into numbers. This chapter traces, neutrally and from both its light and its shadows, the roughly two decades in which CG and digital remade the very act of making movies.
10 Cinema in the Streaming Age — Where the Screen Is Headed Cinema spread from the experience of gathering in a dark auditorium to the screen in one's palm. The rise of streaming, the crisis the pandemic forced upon theaters, the contest between cinema and streaming. At the end of a hundred-and-twenty-year journey, this final chapter looks quietly over where cinema is headed, in no hurry for an answer.