Презентация "Cinema of the United Kindom"

Cinema of the United Kingdom

The  United Kingdom  has had a significant film industry for over a century. The first moving picture was shot in  Leeds  by  Louis Le Prince  in 1888 and the first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in  Hyde Park, London  in 1889 by  William Friese Greene , a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890.

The first people to build and run a working  35 mm   camera  in Britain were  Robert W. Paul  and  Birt Acres . They made the first British film Incident at Clovelly Cottage in February 1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent. Soon several British film companies had opened to meet the demand for new films, such as  Mitchell and Kenyon  in  Blackburn .

In 1920 the short-lived company Minerva Films was founded in London by the actor  Leslie Howard  (also producer and director) and his friend and story editor  Adrian Brunel . Some of their early films include four written by  A.A.Milne  including The Bump, starring  Aubrey Smith ; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms .

By the mid-twenties the British film industry was losing out to heavy competition from the United States, which was helped by its much larger home market - in 1914 25% of films shown in the UK were British, but by 1926 this had fallen to 5%. The biggest star of the silent era, English comedian  Charlie Chaplin , was  Hollywood  based. The  Cinematograph Films Act 1927  was passed in order to boost local production, requiring that cinemas show a certain percentage of British films. The act was technically a success, with audiences for British films becoming larger than the quota required. But it had the effect of creating a market for poor quality, low cost films, made in order to satisfy the quota. The 'quota quickies', as they became known, are often blamed by historians for holding back the development of the industry. However, later important British film-makers learnt their craft making such films, including Michael Powell .

Alfred Hitchcock 's  Blackmail  (1929) is often regarded as the first British sound feature. It was a part-talkie with a synchronised score and sound effects. With the advent of sound films, many foreign actors in less demand with English  received pronunciation  commonly used;  Anny Ondra  voice inBlackmail was substituted by an off-camera  Joan Barry  during Ondra's scenes. Later the same year, the first all-talking British feature,  The Clue of the New Pin  (also 1929) was released.

The  British New Wave  film makers attempted to produce  social realist  films (see also ' kitchen sink realism ') attempted in commercial feature films released between around 1959 and 1963 to convey narratives about a wider spectrum of people in Britain than the country's earlier films had done. These individuals, principally  Karel Reisz ,  Lindsay Anderson  and  Tony Richardson , were also involved in the short lived Oxford film journal  Sequence  and the ' Free Cinema ' documentary film movement. The 1956 statement of Free Cinema, the name was coined by Anderson, asserted: "No film can be too personal.

As the 1960s progressed, American studios returned to financially supporting British films, especially those which capitalised on the " swinging London " image propagated by  Time  magazine in 1966. Films like  Darling ,  Alfie ,  Georgy Girl , and  The Knack …and How to Get It  all explored this phenomenon. Blowup  (1966), and later  Women in Love  (1969), showed female and then male full-frontal nudity on screen in mainstream British films for the first time.

Film technology

In the 1970s and 1980s, British studios established a reputation for great special effects in films. From the 1990s to the present day, there has been a progressive movement from traditional film opticals to an integrated  digital film  environment, with special effects, cutting, colour grading, and other post-production tasks all sharing the same all-digital infrastructure. 

THANK YOU!