How cinema changed us

Ian Christie, Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck, University of London, examines how cinema has changed us.

Ian Christie

Professor of Media History

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Ian Christie

Professor of Media History

15 Aug 2021

Key Points

Cinema connects us to the rest of the world.
Early Soviet films elevated cinema to an art form.
People were very attached to the idea of cinema as something analogue, something material, something you could see and hold; but, finally, they accepted digital.
There is space for minority cultures and languages within the global industry.

One fine day, immortality arrived...

Photo by Tattoboo

It’s impossible for us today to understand what the 19th century was like before cinema. We can reach back and try to get some sense, but it’s more a sense of what’s missing, because cinema has played such a large part in our lives – whatever age we are – right through the 20th and the 21st century. If you look back at the very beginnings of film, you can see what it brought that was new. The very first comments, interestingly, were that immortality had arrived. People were struck, literally the day that cinema made its public appearance in Paris, in 1895. The newspapers said: ‘From today, people don’t die. We can continue to see them, even after their death.’ So, that promise of immortality was already planted in people’s minds.

I think the other thing was film’s ability to transport people to places other than where they were sitting. Of course, you could do that all through the 19th and even the 18th century, through magic lantern shows, through the stereoscope, through all the devices that preceded cinema; but, with film somehow, sitting in a chair in front of a screen, you were transported in a different way.

A sense of being part of an interconnected world

The first thing we have to remember is that it was not the Lumière brothers who created cinema, despite a great deal of French propaganda, which continues to this day. The Lumières started moving pictures in a very precise, rather limited way. The people who created cinema were Thomas Edison and Robert Paul in Britain and a host of other people who saw that film was good for entertainment. The Lumières had no interest in entertainment at all, so they got out of moving pictures very quickly. Cinema was entertainment! It was a way of bringing entertainment to people and entertainment that you couldn’t see otherwise. You could be sitting in a small town anywhere in the world and, very quickly, something that would never visit your town would arrive on a screen. That sense of being part of an interconnected world, I think was tremendously important.

That network of connections that film meant was really important at the beginning, in 1896, but people were not too sure that it would last as an attraction. There’s a real sense right through 1896 of the pioneers saying, will it last? Are people going to get bored with it? Remember, X-rays were invented in the same year as film, and X-rays were much bigger news to most people than film. X-rays quickly took their place in medicine. Film took its place in entertainment, and it very quickly became something which occupied large amounts of people’s time.

Technological advances

The strange thing about cinema in terms of a technology is that some parts of it have remained very similar to the way they were 120 years ago. The idea of going to sit in the dark, more or less, to watch something on a screen, that hasn’t really changed. People were actually doing that back in the 19th century. However, the quality, the texture, the verisimilitude of what people are watching has continued to improve all the time. We know now that the old idea that the cinema was silent until 1929 is complete rubbish. The cinema always had speech associated with it, whether it was somebody standing beside the screen or somebody playing a gramophone record or any of the many devices that preceded 1929. So, the idea that you had to have sound with the image was there right from the start.

There was a hope amongst the pioneers, the Lumières and many others, that cinema had to be in 3D. The history of 3D is a curious one. So many people believe that cinema had to have been in 3D because stereoscope was very common in the 19th century, yet somehow it never took off. There have been various attempts to bring 3D into the cinema, and it’s getting better all the time. Digital 3D is a wonderful technology, but, strangely, the majority of filmmakers don’t know what to do with it. So, the promise of cinema as an immersive experience has been there for a long time, but it’s failed to really capitalise on these new technologies of anamorphic and, of now, digital 3D.

The most old-fashioned aspect of cinema

Photo by worradirek

The transition from a ribbon of celluloid passing through the camera and then through the projector, which really was the most old-fashioned aspect of cinema, lasted until early this century, and only gave way to digital round about 2009. That was a strange, very good, example of the marriage between old technology and new cinema. People clung onto the old celluloid technology right to the bitter end, even though everything else in the world had turned digital. There was a lot of resistance to that. People were very attached to the idea of cinema as something analogue, something material, something you could see and hold, but finally they accepted digital. Now, it’s really only a few die-hards who say, no, cinema has got to be celluloid.

This is a new art!

There was a lot of debate in the early years of cinema about whether it could be considered an art. The verdict in many areas was no: it was too mechanical. The idea that cinema is mechanical had a long life, right into the 20th century. France was probably the very first country that decided that cinema could be an art, and French writers and poets and others were talking about it as an art long before others were. Gradually, the idea gained strength. When Soviet cinema emerged in the late 1920s it had a really decisive effect. People looked at the new Soviet films of Eisenstein, Kuleshov and Pudovkin, and said, ‘This is a new art! It’s something we’ve never seen before. Something that’s only possible in cinema.’ I think that had a really electrifying effect on attitudes to film, which rolled on into the future of cinema.

Cinema is a strange business

The film industry is a strange animal. In Britain, we tend to use this peculiar phrase, ‘the creative industries’, for talking about cinema, television and popular music. It’s a funny mixture: ‘creative’ on the one hand and ‘industry’ on the other. Cinema is a business. It was André Malraux, the great French culture minister, who said it’s an art, but it’s also an industry. Never forget that the two go hand in hand. It’s because cinema is an industry that it’s always on the lookout for new markets, capturing audiences and holding onto their attention. It’s because of this industrial quality that, particularly American, cinema has the hold, the reach, that it does.

American studios were created at the very end of the teens of the last century. They very quickly captured the global market. An American scholar worked out that basically America grabbed hold of the total world film trade around 1916 and it’s never let go since. So, the things we call studios are actually a new kind of industry that has captured the attention of a global audience and has to some extent homogenised that audience. People in every country in the world will watch a new Disney film, and Disney knows very well that they’re making their films for that global audience. But at the same time, a very small industry in a small country with a minority language can also get attention on the world stage through making a film that somehow finds its way into circulation. There is space for minority cultures and interests to enter into the global system, but essentially it’s a global system run by very serious corporations that don’t want to let go of their monopoly of attention.

Homegrown cinema in India

Photo by Testing

The case of India is interesting. If you think about cinema as an industry, the one exception to the domination of the studios, which are culturally American, is India. India still has a thriving domestic film industry. There are reasons for that to do with language and there are reasons to do with a very particular genre that India developed its own version of: the musical. Indian films are, above all, musical dance constructions. What we call Bollywood today, which is only a part of Indian cinema, is essentially a variety form that combines song and dance and star appeal in a way that Indian audiences feel very close to. It’s almost like a kind of closed world. Bollywood films are popular in other parts of the world, too, but they radiate out from their place of origin. It’s really the only example right now of a major film industry of continental scale that has managed to hold its own and keep its own cultural identity – and it’s not just one cultural identity, for there are a number of cultural identities inside Indian cinema.

It’s interesting to see that Chinese cinema has assimilated a lot of mainstream studio filmmaking, but it’s beginning to inflect it in its own direction. I think in the coming decades Chinese cinema will get bigger, more important and more confident. We may also see a kind of inflection of international studio style towards Chinese idioms. That’s just beginning to happen today. My prediction for the future is that we will see Chinese cinema developing in the way that Indian cinema has, by keeping its cultural identity.