Mr. Smith Goes to WashingtonJames Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), directed by Frank Capra.� 1939 Columbia Pictures Corporation; photograph from a private collection

Howard, John; Grant, Cary; Hepburn, Katharine; Stewart, James; The Philadelphia Story(From left) John Howard, Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story (1940).Courtesy of United Artists CorporationBetween 1930 and 1945, the studio system produced more than 7,500 features, every stage of which, from conception through exhibition, was carefully controlled. Among these assembly-line productions are some of the most important American films ever made, the work of gifted directors who managed to transcend the mechanistic nature of the system to produce work of unique personal vision. These directors include Josef von Sternberg, whose exotically stylized films starring Marlene Dietrich (Shanghai Express, 1932; The Scarlet Empress, 1934) constitute a kind of painting with light; John Ford, whose vision of history as moral truth produced such mythic works as Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), My Darling Clementine (1946), and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); Howard Hawks, a master of genres and the architect of a tough, functional �American� style of narrative exemplified in his films Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), and The Big Sleep (1946); British �migr� Alfred Hitchcock, whose films appealed to the popular audience as suspense melodramas but were in fact abstract visual psychodramas of guilt and spiritual terror (Rebecca, 1940; Suspicion, 1941; Shadow of a Doubt, 1943; Notorious, 1946); and Frank Capra, whose cheerful screwball comedies (It Happened One Night, 1934) and populist fantasies of good will (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939) sometimes gave way to darker warnings against losing faith and integrity (It�s a Wonderful Life, 1946). Other significant directors with less-consistent thematic or visual styles were William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, 1939; The Little Foxes, 1941), George Cukor (Camille, 1936; The Philadelphia Story, 1940), Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937; Going My Way, 1944), Preston Sturges (Sullivan�s Travels, 1941; The Miracle of Morgan�s Creek, 1944), and George Stevens (Gunga Din, 1939; Woman of the Year, 1942).

The most extraordinary film to emerge from the studio system, however, was Orson Welles�s Citizen Kane (1941), whose controversial theme and experimental technique combined to make it a classic. The first of six films Welles had contracted to produce for RKO with his Mercury Theater radio ensemble company, Citizen Kane made radically innovative use of sound and deep-focus photography as it examined the life of Charles Foster Kane, a character based on the press baron William Randolph Hearst. The film employs a complicated flashback structure in which Kane�s friends and associates give their accounts of the man after his death, paradoxically revealing not greatness or might but pathetic insecurity and emptiness. In creating this portrait of a powerful American who could bend international politics to his will but never fathom human love, Welles stretched the technology of image and sound recording beyond its contemporary limits. Using a newly available Eastman film stock with increased sensitivity to light, plastic-coated wide-angle lenses opened to smaller-than-normal apertures, and high-intensity arc lamps, cinematographer Gregg Toland achieved a photographic depth of field that approximated the perceptual range of the human eye and enabled Welles to place the film�s characters in several different planes of depth within a single scene. These deep-focus sequence shots are complemented throughout the film by the techniques of ambient and directional sound that Welles had learned from radio. Most important of all, the resonance of the film�s narrative matches the technical brilliance of its presentation, functioning on several levels at once: the historical, the psychological, and the mythic. Although recognized by many critics as a work of genius, Citizen Kane was a financial failure on its release, and Welles directed only three other films under his RKO contract. Citizen Kane remains, nevertheless, one of the most influential films ever made and is widely considered to be one of the greatest.

Orson Welles in Citizen Kane (1941).RKO Radio Pictures Inc.International cinema

Having created large new markets for their sound-recording technologies in the United States, Western Electric and RCA were eager to do the same abroad. Their objective coincided with the desire of the major American film studios to extend their control of the international motion-picture industry. Accordingly, the studios began to export sound films in late 1928, and ERPI and RCA began installing their equipment in European theatres at the same time. Exhibitors in the United Kingdom converted the most rapidly, with 22 percent wired for sound in 1929 and 63 percent by the end of 1932. Continental exhibitors converted more slowly, largely because of a bitter patents war between the German cartel Tobis-Klangfilm, which controlled the European rights to sound-on-film technology, and Western Electric. The dispute was finally resolved at the 1930 German-American Film Conference in Paris, where Tobis, ERPI, and RCA agreed to pool their patents and divide the world market among themselves. The language problem also delayed the conversion to sound on the Continent. Because dubbing was all but impossible in the earliest years of the transition, films had to be shot in several different languages (sometimes featuring a different cast for each version) at the time of production in order to receive wide international distribution. Paramount therefore built a huge studio in the Paris suburb of Joinville in 1930 to mass-produce multilingual films. The other major American studios quickly followed suit, making the region a factory for the round-the-clock production of movies in as many as 15 separate languages. By the end of 1931, however, the technique of dubbing had been sufficiently perfected to replace multilingual production, and Joinville was converted into a dubbing centre for all of Europe. Great Britain

Because of the lack of a language barrier, the United Kingdom became Hollywood�s first major foreign market for sound films. The British motion-picture industry was protected from complete American domination, however, by the Cinematograph Films Act passed by Parliament in 1927. The act required that a certain minimum proportion of the films exhibited in British theatres be of domestic origin. Although most of the films made to fulfill this condition were low-budget, low-standard productions known as �quota quickies,� the British cinema produced many important film artists (most of whom were soon lured to Hollywood). One of the first major British talents to emerge after the introduction of sound was Alfred Hitchcock, who directed a series of stylish thrillers for British International Pictures and Gaumont British before he moved to Hollywood in 1939. His first sound film, Blackmail (1929), marked the effective beginning of sound production in England. The film was already in production as a silent when the director was ordered to make it as a �part-talkie.� It was especially noted for the expressive use of both naturalistic and nonnaturalistic sound, which became a distinguishing feature of Hitchcock�s later British triumphs (The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1934; The Thirty-nine Steps, 1935; Sabotage, 1936), as well as of the films of his American career. Among the significant British filmmakers who remained based in London were the Hungarian-born brothers Alexander, Zolt�n, and Vincent Korda, who founded London Films in 1932 and collaborated on some of England�s most spectacular pre-World War II productions (e.g., The Private Life of Henry VIII, 1933; Rembrandt, 1936; Elephant Boy, 1937; The Four Feathers, 1939), and John Grierson, who produced such outstanding documentaries as Robert Flaherty�s Industrial Britain (1933) and Basil Wright�s Song of Ceylon (1935) for the Empire Marketing Board Film Unit and its successor, the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit. France

In France during the 1920s, as a result of the post-World War I decline of the Path� and Gaumont film companies, a large number of small studios leased their facilities to independent companies, which were often formed to produce a single film. This method of film production lent itself readily to experimentation, encouraging the development of the avant-garde film movement known as Impressionism (led by Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Marcel L�Herbier, and Fernand L�ger) and the innovative films of Abel Gance (La Roue, 1923; Napol�on vu par Abel Gance, 1927) and Dmitri Kirsanoff (M�nilmontant, 1926). Because the French film industry had evolved no marketable technology for sound recording, however, the coming of sound left producers and exhibitors alike vulnerable to the American production companies at Joinville and to the German Tobis-Klangfilm, which had been purchasing large studios in the Paris suburb of Epinay since 1929. In the face of this threat, the French industry attempted to regroup itself around what was left of the Path� and Gaumont empires, forming two consortia�Path�-Natan and Gaumont-Franco-Film-Aubert�for the production and distribution of sound films. Although neither group was financially successful, they seem to have created an unprecedented demand for French-language films about French subjects, reinvigorating the country�s cinema. Between 1928 and 1938, French film production doubled from 66 to 122 features, and, in terms of box-office receipts, the French audience was considered to be second only to the American one.

Many filmmakers contributed to the prominence of French cinema during the 1930s, but the three most important were Ren� Clair, Jean Vigo, and Jean Renoir. Clair was a former avant-gardist whose contributions to the aesthetics of sound, although not so crucial as Hitchcock�s, were nevertheless significant. His Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris, 1930), frequently hailed as the first artistic triumph of the sound film, was a lively musical comedy that mixed asynchronous sound with a bare minimum of dialogue. Clair used the same technique in Le Million (1931), which employed a wide range of dynamic contrapuntal effects. � nous la libert� (Freedom for Us, 1931) was loosely based on the life of Charles Path� and dealt with more serious themes of industrial alienation, although it still used the musical-comedy form. The film�s intelligence, visual stylization, and brilliant use of asynchronous sound made it a classic of the transitional period.

Jean Vigo completed only two features before his early death: Z�ro de conduite (Zero for Conduct, 1933) and L�Atalante (1934). Both are lyrical films about individuals in revolt against social reality. Their intensely personal nature is thought to have influenced the style of poetic realism that characterized French cinema from 1934 to 1940 and that is exemplified by Jacques Feyder�s Pension mimosas (1935), Julien Duvivier�s P�p� le Moko (1937), and Marcel Carn�s Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se l�ve (Daybreak, 1939). Darkly poetic, these films were characterized by a brooding pessimism that reflected the French public�s despair over the failure of the Popular Front movement of 1935�37 and the seeming inevitability of war.

Jean Renoir, the son of the Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, made nine films before he directed the grimly realistic La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931) and La Nuit du carrefour (Night at the Crossroads, 1932), his first important essays in sound. Renoir subsequently demonstrated a spirit of increasing social concern in such films as Boudu sauv� des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932), a comic assault on bourgeois values; Toni (1934), a realistic story of Italian immigrant workers; Le Crime de Monsieur Lange (The Crime of Monsieur Lange, 1935), a political parable about the need for collective action against capitalist corruption; and La Vie est � nous (�Life Is Ours�; English title The People of France, 1936), a propaganda film for the French Communist Party that contains both fictional and documentary footage. The strength of his commitment is most clearly expressed, however, by the eloquent appeal he makes for human understanding in his two pre-World War II masterworks. La Grande Illusion (Grand Illusion, 1937), set in a World War I prison camp, portrays a civilization on the brink of collapse because of national and class antagonisms; in its assertion of the primacy of human relationships and the utter futility of war (the �grand illusion�), the film stands as one of the greatest antiwar statements ever made. In La R�gle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), set in contemporary France, the breakdown of civilization has already occurred. European society is shown to be an elegant but brittle fabrication in which feeling and substance have been replaced by �manners,� a world in which �the terrible thing,� to quote the protagonist Octave (played by Renoir), �is that everyone has his reasons.� In both films Renoir continued his earlier experiments with directional sound and deep-focus composition. His technical mastery came to influence the American cinema when he immigrated to the United States to escape the Nazis in 1940.

Erich von Stroheim (left) and Pierre Fresnay in La Grande Illusion (1937), directed by Jean Renoir.� R�alisation d'art cin�matographique; photograph from a private collectionGermany and Italy

Because of its ownership of the Tobis-Klangfilm patents, the German film industry found itself in a position of relative strength in the early years of sound, and it produced several important films during that period, including Josef von Sternberg�s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), G.W. Pabst�s two antiwar films, Westfront 1918 (1930) and Kameradschaft (1931), and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht�s Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1931). The most influential of the early German sound films, however, was Fritz Lang�s M (1931), which utilized a dimension of aural imagery to counterpoint its visuals in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock�s Blackmail. M has no musical score but makes expressive use of nonnaturalistic sound, as when the child murderer (played by Peter Lorre) is heard to whistle a recurring theme from Grieg�s Peer Gynt before committing his crimes offscreen.

Marlene Dietrich in Der blaue Engel (1930; The Blue Angel), directed by Josef von Sternberg.Universum Film A.G.; photograph from a private collection

After Adolf Hitler took power in 1933, the German film industry came under the complete control of the Nazi Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. Its head, Joseph Goebbels, believed ideological indoctrination worked best when conveyed through entertainment, so Nazi cinema put forth its political propaganda in the form of genre films such as comedies, musicals, and melodramas. The most famous and controversial films produced in Nazi Germany were documentaries by Leni Riefenstahl, whom Hitler recruited to record a Nazi party rally for Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935) and the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin for Olympia (1938).

The situation was similar in Italy, where popular genre films as well as historical epics carried the messages of the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Italy also sought to strengthen its film culture during this era by establishing a national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (founded 1935; �Experimental Centre of Cinematography�), and a major new studio complex in Rome, Cinecitt� (opened 1937). Both of these institutions continued in operation after World War II and played a significant role in subsequent film history. Soviet Union

Although the Soviet engineers P.G. Tager and A.F. Shorin had designed optical sound systems as early as 1927, neither was workable until 1929. Sound was slow in reaching the Soviet Union: most Soviet transitional films were technically inferior to those of the West, and Soviet filmmakers continued to make silent films until the mid-1930s. As in Germany and Italy, however, sound reemphasized film�s propaganda value, and, through the authoritarian government�s policy of Socialist Realism, the Soviet cinema became an instrument of mass indoctrination as never before. The filmmakers most affected by the new policy were the great montage artists of the 1920s. Each of them made admirable attempts to experiment with sound�Lev Kuleshov�s The Great Consoler (1933), Dziga Vertov�s Symphony of the Donbas (1931) and Three Songs About Lenin (1934), Sergey Eisenstein�s Bezhin Meadow (1935; terminated by Boris Shumyatsky in midproduction), Vsevolod Illarionovich Pudovkin�s A Simple Case (1932) and Deserter (1933), and Aleksandr Dovzhenko�s Ivan (1932)�but their work was ultimately suppressed or defamed by the party bureaucracy. Only Eisenstein was powerful enough to reassert his genius: in the nationalistic epic Alexander Nevsky (1938), whose contrapuntal sound track is a classic of its kind, and in the operatically stylized Ivan the Terrible, Parts I and II (1944�46), a veiled critique of Stalin�s autocracy. Most of the films produced at the time were propaganda glorifying national heroes. Japan

In Japan, as in the Soviet Union, the conversion to sound was a slow process: in 1932 only 45 of 400 features were made with sound, and silent films continued to be produced in large numbers until 1937. The main reason for the slow conversion was that Japanese motion pictures had �talked� since their inception through the mediation of a benshi, a commentator who stood to the side of the screen and narrated the action for the audience in the manner of Kabuki theatre. The arrival of recorded sound liberated the Japanese cinema from its dependence on live narrators and was resisted by the benshi, many of whom were stars in their own right and possessed considerable box-office appeal. In the end, however, Japan�s conversion to sound was complete.

As in the United States, the introduction of sound enabled the major Japanese film companies (Nikkatsu, founded 1912; Shochiku, 1920; Toho, c. 1935) to acquire smaller companies and form vertical monopolies controlling production, distribution, and exhibition. Production procedures were standardized and structured for the mass production of motion pictures, and the studios increased their efficiency by specializing in either jidai-geki, period films set before 1868 (the year marking the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, 1868�1912, and the abolition of the feudal shogunate), or gendai-geki, films of contemporary life, set any time thereafter. Although, as a matter of geopolitical circumstance, there was hardly any export market for Japanese films prior to World War II, the domestic popularity of sound films enabled the Japanese motion-picture industry to become one of the most prolific in the world, releasing 400 films annually to the nation�s 2,500 theatres. Most of these films had no purpose other than entertainment, but in the late 1930s, as the government became increasingly expansionist and militaristic, Japan�s major directors turned to works of social criticism called �tendency� films, such as Ozu Yasujirō�s Hitori musuko (The Only Son, 1936) and Mizoguchi Kenji�s Naniwa hika (Osaka Elegy, 1936) and Gion no shimai (Sisters of the Gion, 1936). In response the government imposed a strict code of censorship that was retained throughout the war. India

In India, sound created a major industrial boom by reviving a popular 19th-century theatrical form: the folk-music drama based on centuries-old religious myths. Despite the fact that films had to be produced in as many as 10 regional languages, the popularity of these �all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing� mythologicals or historicals played an enormous role in winning acceptance for sound throughout the subcontinent and in encouraging the growth of the Indian film industry. An average of 230 features were released per year throughout the 1930s, almost all for domestic consumption. The war years and post-World War II trends Decline of the Hollywood studios

During the U.S. involvement in World War II, the Hollywood film industry cooperated closely with the government to support its war-aims information campaign. Following the declaration of war on Japan, the government created a Bureau of Motion Picture Affairs to coordinate the production of entertainment features with patriotic, morale-boosting themes and messages about the �American way of life,� the nature of the enemy and the allies, civilian responsibility on the home front, and the fighting forces themselves. Initially unsophisticated vehicles for xenophobia and jingoism with titles such as The Devil with Hitler and Blondie for Victory (both 1942), Hollywood�s wartime films became increasingly serious as the war dragged on (Fritz Lang�s Hangmen Also Die, Jean Renoir�s This Land Is Mine, Tay Garnett�s Bataan, all 1943; Delmer Daves�s Destination Tokyo, Alfred Hitchcock�s Lifeboat, Lewis Milestone�s The Purple Heart, all 1944; Milestone�s A Walk in the Sun, 1946). In addition to commercial features, several Hollywood directors produced documentaries for government and military agencies. Among the best-known of these films, which were designed to explain the war to both servicemen and civilians, are Frank Capra�s seven-part series Why We Fight (1942�44), John Ford�s The Battle of Midway (1942), William Wyler�s The Memphis Belle (1944), and John Huston�s The Battle of San Pietro (1944). The last three were shot on location and were made especially effective by their immediacy.

When World War II ended, the American film industry seemed to be in an ideal position. Full-scale mobilization had ended the Depression domestically, and victory had opened vast, unchallenged markets in the war-torn economies of western Europe and Japan. Furthermore, from 1942 through 1945, Hollywood had experienced the most stable and lucrative three years in its history, and in 1946, when two-thirds of the American population went to the movies at least once a week, the studios earned record-breaking profits. The euphoria ended quickly, however, as inflation and labour unrest boosted domestic production costs and as important foreign markets, including Britain and Italy, were temporarily lost to protectionist quotas. The industry was more severely weakened in 1948, when a federal antitrust suit against the five major and three minor studios ended in the �Paramount decrees,� which forced the studios to divest themselves of their theatre chains and mandated competition in the exhibition sector for the first time in 30 years. Finally, the advent of network television broadcasting in the 1940s provided Hollywood with its first real competition for American leisure time by offering consumers �movies in the home.�

The American film industry�s various problems and the nation�s general postwar disillusionment generated several new film types in the late 1940s. Although the studios continued to produce traditional genre films, such as westerns and musicals, their financial difficulties encouraged them to make realistic small-scale dramas rather than fantastic lavish epics. Instead of depending on spectacle and special effects to create excitement, the new lower-budget films tried to develop thought-provoking or perverse stories reflecting the psychological and social problems besetting returning war veterans and others adapting to postwar life. Some of the American cinema�s grimmest and most naturalistic films were produced during this period, including those of the so-called social consciousness cycle, which attempted to deal realistically with such endemic problems as racism (Elia Kazan�s Gentleman�s Agreement, 1947; Alfred Werker�s Lost Boundaries, 1949), alcoholism (Stuart Heisler�s Smash-Up, 1947), and mental illness (Anatole Litvak�s The Snake Pit, 1948); the semidocumentary melodrama, which reconstructed true criminal cases and was often shot on location (Kazan�s Boomerang, 1947; Henry Hathaway�s Kiss of Death, 1947); and the film noir, whose dark, fatalistic interpretations of contemporary American reality are unique in the industry�s history (Tay Garnett�s The Postman Always Rings Twice, 1946; Orson Welles�s The Lady from Shanghai, 1947; Jacques Tourneur�s Out of the Past, 1947; Abraham Polonsky�s Force of Evil, 1948).

Robert Mitchum and Virginia Huston in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947).RKO/Kobal Collection/Shutterstock.comThe fear of communism

Film content was next influenced strongly by the fear of communism that pervaded the United States during the late 1940s and early �50s. Anticommunist �witch-hunts� began in Hollywood in 1947 when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) decided to investigate communist influence in motion pictures. More than 100 witnesses, including many of Hollywood�s most talented and popular artists, were called before the committee to answer questions about their own and their associates� alleged communist affiliations. On November 24, 1947, a group of eight screenwriters and two directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were sentenced to serve up to a year in prison for refusing to testify. That evening the members of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, which included the leading studio heads, published what became known as the Waldorf Declaration, in which they fired the members of the Hollywood Ten and expressed their support of HUAC. The studios, afraid to antagonize already shrinking audiences, then initiated an unofficial policy of blacklisting, refusing to employ any person even suspected of having communist associations. Hundreds of people were fired from the industry, and many creative artists were never able to work in Hollywood again. Throughout the blacklisting era, filmmakers refrained from making any but the most conservative motion pictures; controversial topics or new ideas were carefully avoided. The resulting creative stagnation, combined with financial difficulties, contributed significantly to the demise of the studio system, although, paradoxically, the actions that the studios took between 1952 and 1965, including the practice of blacklisting, can be viewed as an attempt to halt the industry�s decline. The threat of television

The film industry believed that the greatest threat to its continued success was posed by television, especially in light of the Paramount decrees. The studios seemed to be losing their control of the nation�s theatres at the same time that exhibitors were losing their audiences to television. The studios therefore attempted to diminish television�s appeal by exploiting the two obvious advantages that film enjoyed over the new medium�the size of its images and, at a time when all television broadcasting was in black and white, the ability to produce photographic colour. (In the 1952�53 season, the ability to produce multiple-track stereophonic sound joined this list.) In the late 1940s, fewer than 12 percent of Hollywood features were produced in colour, primarily because of the expense of three-strip Technicolor filming. In 1950, however, a federal consent decree dissolved the Technicolor Corporation�s de facto monopoly on the process, and Kodak simultaneously introduced a new multilayered film stock in which emulsions sensitive to the red, green, and blue parts of the spectrum were bonded together on a single roll. Patented as Eastmancolor, this �integral tri-pack� process offered excellent colour resolution at a low cost because it could be used with conventional cameras. Its availability hastened the industry�s conversion to full colour production. By 1954 more than 50 percent of American features were made in colour, and the figure reached 94 percent by 1970.

The aspect ratio (the ratio of width to height) of the projected motion-picture image had been standardized at 1.33 to 1 since 1932, but, as television eroded the film industry�s domestic audience, the studios increased screen size as a way of attracting audiences back into theatres. For both optical and architectural reasons this change in size usually meant increased width, not increased height. Early experiments with multiple-camera wide-screen (Cinerama, 1952) and stereoscopic 3-D (Natural Vision, 1952) provoked audience interest, but it was an anamorphic process called CinemaScope that prompted the wide-screen revolution. Introduced by Twentieth Century�Fox in the biblical epic The Robe (1953), CinemaScope used an anamorphic lens to squeeze a wide-angle image onto conventional 35-mm film stock and a similar lens to restore the image�s original width in projection. CinemaScope�s aspect ratio was 2.55 to 1, and the system had the great advantage of requiring no special cameras, film stock, or projectors. By the end of 1954, every Hollywood studio but Paramount had leased a version of the process from Fox (Paramount adopted a nonanamorphic process called VistaVision that exposed double-frame images by running film through special cameras and projectors horizontally rather than vertically), and many studios were experimenting with wide-gauge film systems (e.g., Todd-AO, 1955; Panavision-70, 1960) that required special equipment but eliminated the distortion inherent in the anamorphic process.

Like the coming of sound, the conversion to wide-screen formats produced an initial regression as filmmakers learned how to compose and edit their images for the new elongated frame. Sound had promoted the rise of aurally intensive genres such as the musical and the gangster film, and the wide-screen format similarly created a bias in favour of visually spectacular subjects and epic scale. The emergence of the three- to four-hour wide-screen �blockbuster� in such films as War and Peace, Around the World in Eighty Days, and The Ten Commandments in 1956 coincided with the era�s affinity for safe and sanitized material. Given the political paranoia of the times, few subjects could be treated seriously, and the studios concentrated on presenting traditional genre fare�westerns, musicals, comedies, and blockbusters�suitable for wide-screen treatment. Only a director like Hitchcock, whose style was oblique and imagist, could prosper in such a climate. He produced his greatest work during the period, much of it in VistaVision (Rear Window, 1954; The Man Who Knew Too Much, 1956; Vertigo, 1958; North by Northwest, 1959; Psycho, 1960; The Birds, 1963).

Grace Kelly and James Stewart in Rear Window (1954).� 1954 Paramount Pictures Corporation

In spite of the major film companies� elaborate strategies of defense, they continued to decline throughout the 1950s and �60s. Because they could no longer dominate the exhibition sector, they faced serious competition for the first time from independent and foreign filmmakers. �Runaway� productions (films made away from the studios, frequently abroad, to take advantage of lower costs) became common, and the Production Code was dissolved as a series of federal court decisions between 1952 and 1958 extended First Amendment protection to motion pictures. As their incomes shrank, the major companies� vast studios and backlots became liabilities that ultimately crippled them. The minor companies, however, owned modest studio facilities and had lost nothing by the Paramount decrees because they controlled no theatres. They were thus able to prosper during this era, eventually becoming major companies themselves in the 1970s. Cinema around the worldItaly

World War II physically and economically devastated the film industries of the Soviet Union, Japan, and most European nations. Italy�s early surrender, however, left its facilities relatively intact, enabling the Italian cinema to lead the post-World War II film renaissance with its development of the Neorealist movement. Although it had roots in both Soviet expressive realism and French poetic realism, Neorealism was decidedly national in focus, taking as its subject the day-to-day reality of a country traumatized by political upheaval and war.

Most of the major figures in the Neorealist movement had studied at Mussolini�s Centro Sperimentale, but they vigorously rejected the stagy, artificial style associated with the telefono bianco films in favour of a Marxist aesthetic of everyday life. The first identifiable Neorealist film was Luchino Visconti�s Ossessione (1942; Obsession), a bleak contemporary melodrama shot on location in the countryside around Ferrara. It was suppressed by the fascist censors, however, so international audiences were first introduced to the movement through Roberto Rossellini�s Roma, citt� aperta (1945; Open City), which was shot on location in the streets of Rome only two months after Italy�s surrender. The film featured both professional and nonprofessional actors and focused on ordinary people caught up in contemporary events. Its documentary texture, postrecorded sound track, and improvisational quality became the hallmark of the Neorealist movement. Rossellini followed it with Pais� (1946; Paisan) and Germania, anno zero (1947; Germany, Year Zero) to complete his �war trilogy.� Visconti�s second contribution to Neorealism was La terra trema (1948; The Earth Trembles), an epic of peasant life that was shot on location in a Sicilian fishing village. In many respects it is more exemplary of the movement than Ossessione, and it is widely regarded as a masterpiece. Neorealism�s third major director was Vittorio De Sica, who worked in close collaboration with scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini, the movement�s major theorist and spokesman. De Sica�s films sometimes tend toward sentimentality, but in Sciusci� (1946; Shoeshine), Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), and Umberto D. (1952), he produced works central to the movement.

Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)Lamberto Maggiorani (centre) and Enzo Staiola (right) in Ladri di biciclette (1948; The Bicycle Thief), directed by Vittorio De Sica.From a private collection

Neorealism was the first postwar cinema to reject Hollywood�s narrative conventions and studio production techniques, and, as such, it had enormous influence on future movements such as British Social Realism, Brazilian Cinema N�vo, and French and Czech New Wave. It also heralded the practices of shooting on location using natural lighting and postsynchronizing sound that later became standard in the film industry. Despite its influence, in the 1950s Neorealism disappeared as a distinct national movement, together with the socioeconomic context that had produced it, as the Marshall Plan began to work its �economic miracle� in Europe. Italian cinema nevertheless remained prominent through the films of several gifted directors who began their careers as Neorealists and went on to produce their major work during the 1960s and �70s.

Federico Fellini had worked as a scriptwriter for Rossellini before directing in the 1950s an impressive series of films whose form was Neorealist but whose content was allegorical (I vitelloni [The Loafers], 1953; La strada [The Road], 1954; Le notti di Cabiria [Nights of Cabiria], 1956). During the 1960s Fellini�s work became increasingly surrealistic (La dolce vita [The Sweet Life], 1960; Otto e mezzo [8¹/₂], 1963; Giulietta degli spiriti [Juliet of the Spirits], 1965; Fellini Satyricon, 1969), and by the 1970s he was perceived to be a flamboyant ironic fantasist�a reputation that sustained him through such serious and successful films as Fellini Roma (1972), Amarcord (1974), and E la nave va (1983; And the Ship Sails On).

Otto e mezzo (8 1/2)Scene from Otto e mezzo (1963; 8 1/2), directed by Federico Fellini.� 1963 Embassy Pictures Corporation; photograph from a private collection

Michelangelo Antonioni had also collaborated with Rossellini. Accordingly, his first films were Neorealist documentary shorts (Gente del Po [People of the Po], 1947), but during the 1950s he turned increasingly to an examination of the Italian bourgeoisie in such films as Cronaca di un amore (1950; Story of a Love Affair), La signora senza camelie (1953; Camille Without Camellias), and Le amiche (1955; The Girlfriends), and in the early 1960s Antonioni produced a trilogy on the malaise of the middle class that made him internationally famous. In L�avventura (1959; The Adventure), La notte (1960; The Night), and L�eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), he used long-take sequence shots equating film time with real time to create a vision of the reverberating emptiness of modern urban life. Antonioni then began to use colour expressionistically in Deserto rosso (1964; Red Desert) and Blow-Up (1966) to convey alienation and abstraction from human feeling, and all of his later works in some way concerned the breakdown of personal relationships (Zabriskie Point, 1970; Identificazione di una donna [Identification of a Woman], 1982) and of identity itself (Professione: Reporter [The Passenger], 1975).

Monica Vitti (far left) in L'eclisse (1962; The Eclipse), directed by Michelangelo Antonioni.Cineriz/Interopa Film/Paris Film; photograph from a private collection

While Fellini and Antonioni were putting Italy in the vanguard of modernist cinema, the country�s second post-World War II generation of directors emerged. Ermanno Olmi (Il posto [The Job], 1961; Un certo giorno [One Fine Day], 1968; L�albero degli zoccoli [The Tree of Wooden Clogs], 1979) continued the Neorealist tradition in his tales of ordinary people caught up in systems beyond their comprehension. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who had worked as a scriptwriter for Fellini, achieved international recognition for Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964; The Gospel According to St. Matthew), a brilliant semidocumentary reconstruction of the life of Christ with Marxist overtones. Pasolini went on to direct a series of astonishing, often outrageous films that set forth a Marxist interpretation of history and myth�Edipo re (1967; Oedipus Rex), Teorema (1968; Theorem), Porcile (1969; Pigsty), Medea (1969), Sal� (1975)�before his murder in 1975. Like Pasolini, Bernardo Bertolucci was a Marxist intellectual whose films attempt to correlate sexuality, ideology, and history; his most successful films were Il conformista (1970; The Conformist), a striking dissection of the psychopathology of fascism, Ultimo tango a Parigi (1972; Last Tango in Paris), a meditation on sex and death, and Novecento (1976; 1900), a six-hour epic covering 50 years of Italian class conflict. Other important Italian filmmakers include Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano, 1962), Marco Bellocchio (La Cina � vicina [China Is Near], 1967), Marco Ferreri (La Grande Bouffe [Blow-Out], 1973), Ettore Scola (Una giornata speciale [A Special Day], 1977), Vittorio Taviani " class="md-crosslink">Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani (Padre padrone [Father and Master], 1977), Franco Brusati (Dimenticare Venezia [To Forget Venice], 1979), and Lina Wertm�ller (Pasqualino settebellezze [Seven Beauties], 1976).

Beginning in the 1970s, the declining European economy compelled many Italian directors to make coproductions with American, French, German, and Swedish companies. In order to maximize profits, several such films featured international stars in leading roles. This dependence on world markets�as well as the increased popularity of television throughout Italy�often led to the loss of national identity in Italian films, although such filmmakers as Roberto Benigni, Carlo Verdone, and Maurizio Nichetti were able to use the new situation to good advantage. Perhaps the most individual voice in Italian cinema during the 1990s was Nanni Moretti, whose humourous, satiric works, such as Caro diario (1994; Dear Diary), critique the social values of the late 20th century. Moretti�s family drama La stanza del figlio (The Son�s Room) won the top award at the 2001 Cannes film festival. France

French cinema of the occupation and postwar era produced many fine films (Marcel Carn�s Les Enfants du paradis [The Children of Paradise], 1945; Jean Cocteau�s La Belle et la b�te [Beauty and the Beast], 1946; Ren� Cl�ment�s Jeux interdits [Forbidden Games], 1952; Jacques Becker�s Casque d�or [Golden Helmet], 1952; Henri-Georges Clouzot�s Le Salaire de la peur [The Wages of Fear], 1953), but their mode of presentation relied heavily on script and was predominantly literary. There were exceptions in the austere classicism of Robert Bresson (Le Journal d�un cur� de campagne [The Diary of a Country Priest], 1950; Un Condamn� � mort s�est �chapp� [A Man Escaped], 1956), the absurdist comedy of Jacques Tati (Les Vacances de M. Hulot [Mr. Hulot�s Holiday], 1953; Mon oncle [My Uncle], 1958), and the lush, magnificently stylized masterworks of the German �migr� Max Oph�ls, whose La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952), Madame de� (1953), and Lola Mont�s (1955) represent significant contributions to world cinema. An independent documentary movement, which produced such landmark nonfiction films as Georges Rouquier�s Farrebique (1948), Georges Franju�s Le Sang des b�tes (1949; The Blood of the Beasts), and Alain Resnais�s Nuit et brouillard (1956; Night and Fog), also emerged at this time. It provided a training ground for young directors outside the traditional industry system and influenced the independent production style of the movement that culminated in the French postwar period of renewal�the Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave.

La RondeSimone Signoret and G�rard Philipe in La Ronde (1950), directed by Max Oph�ls.Svanfilm; photograph from a private collection

The most important source of the New Wave lay in the theoretical writings of Alexandre Astruc and, more prominently, of Andr� Bazin, whose thought molded an entire generation of filmmakers, critics, and scholars. In 1948 Astruc formulated the concept of the cam�ra-stylo (�camera-pen�), in which film was regarded as a form of audiovisual language and the filmmaker, therefore, as a kind of writer in light. Bazin�s influential journal Cahiers du cin�ma, founded in 1951, elaborated this notion and became the headquarters of a group of young cin�philes (�film lovers�)�the critics Fran�ois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer�who were to become the major directors of the New Wave. Bazin�s basic principle was a rejection of montage aesthetics�both radical Eisensteinian cutting and Hollywood-style continuity, or invisible, editing�in favour of the long take and composition in depth, or what he called mise-en-sc�ne. Borrowed from the theatre, this term literally means �the placing in the scene,� but Bazin used it to designate such elements of filmic structure as camera placement and movement, the lighting of shots, and blocking of action�that is, everything that precedes the editing process.

The Cahiers critics embraced mise-en-sc�ne aesthetics and borrowed the idea of authorship from Astruc. In proposing la politique des auteurs (�the policy of authors�), christened the auteur theory by the American critic Andrew Sarris, they maintained that film should be a medium of personal artistic expression and that the best films are those imprinted with their makers� individual signature. As a logical consequence of this premise, the Cahiers critics rejected mainstream French cinema and its �tradition of quality� in favour of the classic mise-en-sc�ne tradition (exemplified in the films of Louis Feuillade, F.W. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, Renoir, Welles, and Oph�ls), the films of Hollywood studio directors who had transcended the constraints of the system to make personal films (Howard Hawks, Josef von Sternberg, Hitchcock, and Ford), and the low-budget American B movie in which the director usually had total control over production.

The first films of the New Wave were independently produced dramatic shorts shot in 16-mm by the Cahiers critics in 1956�57, but 1959 was the year that brought the movement to international prominence, when each of its three major figures made their first features. Truffaut�s Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), Resnais�s Hiroshima, mon amour, and Godard�s � bout de souffle (Breathless) were all in their different ways paradigms of a fresh new style based on elliptical editing and location shooting with handheld cameras. This style was both radically destructive of classic Hollywood continuity and pragmatically suited to the New Wave�s need to make its films quickly and cheaply. Its ultimate effect was to deconstruct the narrative language that had evolved over the previous 60 years and to create a reflexive cinema, or meta-cinema, whose techniques provided a continuous comment on its own making.

The critical and commercial success of the first New Wave features produced an unprecedented creative explosion within the French industry. Between 1960 and 1964, literally hundreds of low-budget, stylistically experimental films were made by cin�philes with little or no experience. Many of these ended in failure, and the New Wave as a collective phenomenon was over by 1965. But the three figures who had initiated the movement, and a small group of sophisticated and talented filmmakers�Chabrol, Rivette, Rohmer, Louis Malle, Agn�s Varda, and Jacques Demy�dominated French cinema until well into the 1970s, and several continued to make significant contributions into the next century.

Fran�ois Truffaut was the most commercially successful of the original New Wave group, and, through such films as Jules et Jim (1961) and the autobiographical �Antoine Doinel� series, which began with Les Quatre Cents Coups, he acquired a reputation as a romantic ironist. Truffaut�s range also extended to parodies of Hollywood genres (Tirez sur le pianiste [Shoot the Piano Player], 1960), homages to Hitchcock (La Mari�e �tait en noir [The Bride Wore Black], 1967), historical reconstructions (L�Enfant sauvage [The Wild Child], 1970), reflexive narratives (La Nuit am�ricaine [Day for Night], 1973), and literary adaptations (L�Histoire d�Ad�le H. [The Story of Adele H.], 1975; Le Dernier M�tro [The Last Metro], 1980).

Jean-Luc Godard was the most stylistically and politically radical of the early New Wave directors. Some of his early films were parodies of Hollywood genres (Une Femme est une femme [A Woman Is a Woman], 1961; Alphaville, 1965; Pierrot le fou, 1965), but the majority of them treated political and social themes from a Marxist, and finally Maoist, perspective (Le Petit Soldat [The Little Soldier], 1960; Vivre sa vie [My Life to Live], 1962; Les Carabiniers [The Riflemen], 1963; Bande � part [Band of Outsiders], 1964; Une Femme mari�e [A Married Woman], 1964). With Masculin f�minin (1966), Godard turned from narrative to cinema verit�-style essay, and his later films became increasingly ideological and structurally random (Made in U.S.A., 1966; Deux ou trois choses que je sais d�elle [Two or Three Things I Know About Her], 1967; La Chinoise, 1967; Week-end, 1967; One Plus One [also called Sympathy for the Devil], 1968). During the 1970s, Godard made films for the radical Dziga Vertov production collective (Pravda, 1969; Le Vent d�est [Wind from the East], 1969; Letter to Jane, 1972) and experimented with combinations of film and videotape (Num�ro deux [Number Two], 1975; La Communication, 1976). In the 1980s Godard returned to theatrical filmmaking, purified of ideology but no less controversial for it, with such provocative features as Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1980; Every Man for Himself), Passion (1982), Je vous salue, Marie (1986; Hail Mary), and �loge de l�amour (2001; In Praise of Love).

Jean-Pierre L�aud and Anne Wiazemsky in La Chinoise (1967), directed by Jean-Luc Godard.Leacock Pennebaker, Inc.; photograph from a private collection

Alain Resnais was slightly older than the Cahiers group, but he identified with the New Wave through style and theme. His most famous film is the postmodern mystery L�Ann�e derni�re � Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), which questions the processes of thought and memory�central concerns in Resnais�s work. Muriel (1963), La Guerre est finie (1966; The War Is Over), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977), and Mon oncle d�Am�rique (1978; My American Uncle) are all in various ways concerned with the effects of time on human memory from both a historical and a personal perspective.

(From far left) Ellen Burstyn, Sir John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, and David Warner in Providence (1977), directed by Alain Resnais.Cinema 5; photograph from a private collection

Other important New Wave figures with lasting influence are Claude Chabrol, whose entire career can be seen as an extended homage to Hitchcock; Louis Malle, a master of film types who relocated to the United States; Eric Rohmer, whose �moral tales,� including Ma nuit chez Maud (1968; My Night at Maud�s) and Le Genou de Claire (1970; Claire�s Knee), established the ironic perspective on human passion that he maintained in later films; Agn�s Varda, famed for her improvisational style; Jacques Demy, whose best films are homages to the Hollywood musical; and Jacques Rivette, the most austerely abstract and experimental of the Cahiers group.

Few national movements have influenced international cinema as strongly as the French New Wave. By promoting the concept of personal authorship, its directors demonstrated that film is an audiovisual language that can be crafted into �novels� and �essays�; and, by deconstructing classic Hollywood conventions, they added dimensions to this language that made it capable of expressing a new range of internal and external states. In the process, the New Wave helped to reinvigorate the stylistically moribund cinemas then found in Britain, West Germany, and the United States; it created a current of �second waves� and �third waves� in the already flourishing Italian, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, and Japanese cinemas.

The New Wave made France the leading centre of Modernist and postmodern film and film theory, a position it continued to hold for many years. By the 1990s France had followed the lead of other European countries in assimilating into the world market. The influence of the New Wave was still evident, but increased demands for commercial fare resulted in several crime thrillers and period costume dramas, genres that were often specialties of young directors.

Unique among European filmmakers, however, many French directors remained unfettered by commercial demands. At the turn of the 21st century, Chabrol was still a dominant force, with films such as La C�r�monie (1995; Judgment in Stone) demonstrating his continued mastery of the psychological thriller. Prominent young directors included Manuel Poirier, who specialized in affectionate, offbeat romances and �buddy pictures,� such as Western (1997); Claire Simon, who, after several years of directing documentaries, adapted her characteristic ironic humour to such fiction films as Sinon, oui (1997; A Foreign Body) and �a c�est vraiment toi (2000; That�s Just like You); and Robert Gu�diguian, a writer-producer-director known for works such as Marius et Jeannette (1997) and � la place du coeur (1998), which effectively blend affectionate character studies with biting social satire. Great Britain

In Great Britain the post-World War II cinema was even more literary than in France, relying heavily on the adaptation of classics in the work of such directors as Laurence Olivier (Henry V, 1944; Hamlet, 1948; Richard III, 1955), David Lean (Great Expectations, 1946; Oliver Twist, 1948), and Anthony Asquith (The Importance of Being Earnest, 1952). Even less-conventional films had literary sources (Carol Reed�s Outcast of the Islands, 1951; Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger�s The Red Shoes, 1948, and The Tales of Hoffman, 1951). There were exceptions to this trend in a series of witty, irreverent comedies made for Michael Balcon�s Ealing Studios (Kind Hearts and Coronets, 1949; The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951; The Man in the White Suit, 1951), most of them starring Alec Guinness, but, on the whole, British postwar cinema was elitist and culturally conservative.

Great ExpectationsMartita Hunt in Great Expectations (1946), directed by David Lean.� 1946 Universal International Pictures; photograph from a private collection

In reaction, a younger generation of filmmakers led by Lindsay Anderson, Czechoslovak-born Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson organized the Free Cinema movement in the mid-1950s. Its purpose was to produce short low-budget documentaries illuminating problems of contemporary life (Anderson�s O Dreamland, 1953; Richardson�s Momma Don�t Allow, 1955). Grounded in the ideology and practice of Neorealism, Free Cinema emerged simultaneously with a larger social movement assailing the British class structure and calling for the replacement of bourgeois elitism with liberal working-class values. In the cinema this antiestablishment agitation resulted in the New Cinema, or Social Realist, movement signaled by Reisz�s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), the first British postwar feature with a working-class protagonist and proletarian themes. Stylistically influenced by the New Wave, with which it was concurrent, the Social Realist film was generally shot in black and white on location in the industrial Midlands and cast with unknown young actors and actresses. Like the New Wave films, Social Realist films were independently produced on low budgets (many of them for Woodfall Film Productions, the company founded in 1958 by Richardson and playwright John Osborne, one of the principal Angry Young Men, to adapt the latter�s Look Back in Anger), but their freshness of both content and form attracted an international audience. Some of the most famous were Richardson�s A Taste of Honey (1961) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), John Schlesinger�s A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963), Anderson�s This Sporting Life (1963), and Reisz�s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966).

These films and others like them brought such prestige to the British film industry that London briefly became the production capital of the Western world, delivering such homegrown international hits as Richardson�s Tom Jones (1963), Schlesinger�s Darling (1965), Richard Lester�s two Beatles films, A Hard Day�s Night (1964) and Help! (1965), Schlesinger�s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967), and Anderson�s If� (1968), as well as such foreign importations as Roman Polanski�s Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), Truffaut�s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Antonioni�s Blow-Up (1966), and American Stanley Kubrick�s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971). This activity inspired a new, more visually oriented generation of British filmmakers�Peter Yates, John Boorman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg, and Ridley Scott�who would make their mark in the 1970s; but, as England�s economy began its precipitous decline during that decade, so too did its film industry. Many British directors and performers defected to Hollywood, while the English-language film market simultaneously experienced a vigorous and unprecedented challenge from Australia. In the 1980s, amid widespread speculation about the collapse of the film industry, British annual production reached an all-time low.

Albert Finney in Tom JonesAlbert Finney in Tom Jones.Courtesy of United Artists Corporation

Great Britain�s film industry, however, has a long history of rebounding from periods of crisis. A major factor in the revival of British cinema during the late 20th century was the founding in 1982 of Channel 4, a television network devoted to commissioning�rather than merely producing�original films. Its success led to the establishment of a subsidiary, FilmFour Ltd., in 1998. Internationally acclaimed films produced or coproduced under either the Channel 4 or the FilmFour banner include A Room with a View (1986), The Crying Game (1992), Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Trainspotting (1996), Secrets and Lies (1996), The Full Monty (1997), and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997). Also contributing to the resurgence of British film was the National Lottery, which, after its establishment in 1994, annually contributed millions of pounds to the film industry. Germany

Germany�s catastrophic defeat in World War II and the subsequent partitioning of the country virtually destroyed its film industry, which had already been corrupted by the Nazis. Rebuilt during the 1950s, the West German industry became the fifth largest producer in the world, but the majority of its output consisted of low-quality Heimatfilme (�homeland films�) for the domestic market. When this market collapsed in the 1960s because of changing demographic patterns and the diffusion of television, the industry was forced to turn to the federal government for subsidies. In recognition of the crisis, 26 writers and filmmakers at the Oberhausen film festival in 1962 drafted a manifesto proclaiming the death of German cinema and demanding the establishment of a junger deutscher Film, a �young German cinema.� The members of this Oberhausen group became the founders of Das Neue Kino, or the New German Cinema, which was brought into being over the next decade through the establishment of the Kuratorium Junger Deutscher Film (1965; Young German Film Board, a grant agency with funding drawn from the cultural budgets of the federal states), the Filmf�rderungsanstalt, or FFA (Film Subsidies Board, which generated production funds by levying a federal tax in part on theatre tickets), and the independent distributing company Filmverlag der Autoren (1971; Authors� Film-Publishing Group), with additional funding from the two West German television networks.

These institutions made it possible for a new generation of German filmmakers to produce their first features and established a vital new cinema for West Germany that attempted to examine the nation�s unbew�ltige Vergangenheit, or �unassimilated past.� The first such films, which were deeply influenced by the New Wave, especially by the work of Godard, included Volker Schl�ndorff�s Der junge T�rless (1966; Young Torless) and Alexander Kluge�s Die Artisten in der Zirkuskuppel: ratlos (1968; The Artists Under the Big Top: Disoriented). In the 1970s, however, three major figures emerged as leaders of the movement�Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, and Wim Wenders.

Fassbinder was the most prolific, having made more than 40 features before he died in 1982. His films are also the most flamboyant. Nearly all of them take the form of extreme melodrama, ending in murder or suicide�Warum l�uft Herr R. amok? (1969; Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?), Die bitteren Tr�nen der Petra von Kant (1972; The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant), and Angst essen Seele auf (1973; Ali: Fear Eats the Soul)�and several are consciously focused on German wartime and postwar society (Die Ehe der Maria Braun [The Marriage of Maria Braun], 1979; Lola, 1981; Veronika Voss, 1982).

Herzog�s films tended more toward the mystical and the spiritual than the social, although there is nearly always some contemporary referent in his work�the image of idealism turned to barbarism in Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972; Aguirre, the Wrath of God); the hopeless inability of science to address the human condition in Jeder f�r sich und Gott gegen alle (1974; Every Man for Himself and God Against All, or The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser); the inherently destructive nature of technology in Herz aus Glas (1977; Heart of Glass); the incomprehensible nature of pestilence in his remake of Murnau�s Nosferatu (1979).

Wenders, on the other hand, was profoundly postmodern in his contemplation of alienation through spatial metaphor. In such works of existential questing as Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter (1971; The Goalie�s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick) and Im Lauf der Zeit (1976; �In the Course of Time�; Kings of the Road), he addressed the universal phenomena of dislocation and rootlessness that afflict modern society.

The state subsidy system enabled hundreds of filmmakers, including many women (e.g., Margarethe von Trotta) and minorities, to participate in the New German Cinema. With the exception of the work of Fassbinder, Herzog, and Wenders, however, the New German Cinema did not find a large audience outside West Germany. Yet in terms of exploring and extending the audio-language system of film, it was to the 1970s and �80s very much what the New Wave was to the �60s, and its influence was widely felt.

By the reunification of Germany in 1990, a national identity had still not been forged in any of the various arts. Several outstanding German directors and production artists did emerge, but most of them achieved their greatest success in Hollywood. Roland Emerich (Independence Day, 1996; The Patriot, 2000) proved to be a skillful practitioner of the action-adventure genre, and Wolfgang Petersen, who received international acclaim for Das Boot (1982), earned a reputation for tense thrillers (In the Line of Fire, 1993) and unrelenting visual spectacles (The Perfect Storm, 2000). German cinematographers (Michael Ballhaus, Karl Walter Lindenlaub) and composers (Hans Zimmer, Christopher Franke) were also among the more notable artisans working in Hollywood films at the turn of the 21st century. Africa

The development of an indigenous film culture in Africa occurred at different moments in the history of the continent. The various timelines are related to the political, social, and economic situations in each country and to the varying effects of colonialism on the continent. Only Egypt had a truly active film industry for the first half of the 20th century; the development of cinema elsewhere on the continent was largely the result of individual efforts. One such example is Paul Soumanou Vieyra, the first African graduate of the French film school Institut des Hautes �tudes Cin�, who joined with friends to produce the short film Afrique sur Seine (1955), considered the first fiction film by black Africans.

Some countries, such as Morocco, did not develop a strong national cinema; others, such as Algeria and Tunisia, nationalized all or parts of their film industries. Several African nations joined the F�d�ration Pan-Africaine des Cin�astes (FEPACI; �Federation of Pan-African Filmmakers�), formed in 1969 to oversee the political and financial problems of the film industries throughout the continent.

As the 20th century drew to a close, many filmmakers and scholars began to examine the questions of, first, what constitutes an �African film� and, second, how film can best deal with the diaspora of the African people. On one hand, African filmmakers had to acknowledge and learn from the conventions of Western film. On the other, they wanted to highlight and preserve aspects of African culture that had been threatened by Western colonialism. As part of this search to define the goals of African cinema, African filmmakers often used the medium to explore the social issues plaguing postcolonial Africa. Directors such as Adama Drabo (Ta Dona [Fire], 1991) and Moufida Tlatli (Les Silences du palais [The Silences of the Palace], 1994) explored such matters as education, the environment, and women�s rights and suggested that traditional approaches to such issues had to be adapted to the realities of contemporary Africa. Aspects of these realities were examined by such directors as Tsitsi Dangarembga (Everyone�s Child, 1996) and Salem Mekuria (Ye Wonz Maibel [Deluge], 1995), who dealt with the AIDS crisis and political violence, respectively. Colonization itself was examined by such directors as Bassek ba Kobhio, whose satiric study of Albert Schweitzer, Le Grand Blanc de Lambar�n� (1995; The Great White Man of Lambar�n�), shows how colonialism damaged both the colonizer and the colonized. Japan

Although more than half of Japan�s theatres were destroyed by U.S. bombing during World War II, most of its studio facilities were left intact. Japan, therefore, continued to produce films in quantity during the Allied occupation (1945�52). Many traditional Japanese subjects were forbidden by the Allied Command as promoting feudalism, however, including all films classified as jidai-geki (period dramas). Nevertheless, the film that first brought Japanese cinema to international attention belonged to that category: Kurosawa Akira�s Rashomon (1950), which won the Golden Lion at the 1951 Venice film festival. The film, a meditation on the nature of truth set in the medieval past, marked the beginning of the Japanese cinema�s unprecedented renaissance . During this period, new export markets opened in the West, and Japanese filmmakers produced some of their finest work, winning festival awards throughout the world. Kurosawa, who was already well known in his homeland for a number of wartime and postwar genre films, became the most famous Japanese director in the West on the strength of his masterful samurai epics�Shichinin no samurai (1954; Seven Samurai), Kumonosu-jo (1957; Throne of Blood), Kakushi toride no san akunin (1958; The Hidden Fortress), Yojimbo (1961), and Sanjuro (1962)�which raised the chambara, or �sword-fight,� film to the status of art. He made films in other genres, including literary adaptations, gendai-geki (modern dramas), gangster films, and period films that cannot be categorized at all (Akahige [Red Beard], 1965; Dersu Uzala, 1975); but Kurosawa always returned to the samurai form for his most profound statements about life and art (Kagemusha [The Shadow Warrior], 1980; Ran, 1985).

Two other established directors who produced their greatest films in the postwar period were Mizoguchi Kenji and Ozu Yasujirō. Both had begun their careers in the silent era and were more traditionally Japanese in style and content than Kurosawa. Mizoguchi�s films, whether period (Sansho dayu [Sansho the Bailiff], 1954) or contemporary (Yoru no onnatachi [Women of the Night], 1948), were frequently critiques of feudalism that focused on the condition of women within the social order. His greatest postwar films were Saikaku ichidai onna (1952; The Life of Oharu), the biography of a 17th-century courtesan, and Ugetsu (1953), the story of two men who abandon their wives for fame and glory during the 16th-century civil wars. Both were masterworks that clearly demonstrated Mizoguchi�s expressive use of luminous decor, extended long takes, and deep-focus composition. As one of the great mise-en-sc�ne directors, Mizoguchi can be compared to Murnau, Oph�ls, and Welles, but his transcendental visual style makes him unique in the history of cinema.

Ozu Yasujirō too was a stylist, but the majority of his 54 films were shomin-geki, a variety of gendai film dealing with the lives of lower-middle-class families (Tokyo monogatari [Tokyo Story], 1953; Higanbana [Equinox Flower], 1958; Ukigusa [Floating Weeds], 1959). They were all very much alike and, in a sense, were all part of a single large film whose subject was the ordinary lives of ordinary people and the sacred beauty therein. Ozu�s minimalist style�originating in both Zen Buddhist aesthetics and the fact that most of his films were shot within the confines of a typical Japanese house�was based on his use of low-angle long takes in which the camera is positioned about three feet (one metre) off the floor at the eye level of a person seated on a tatami mat. This practice led Ozu to an especially imaginative use of offscreen space and �empty scenes.�

Tōkyō monogatari (Tokyo Story)Scene from Tōkyō monogatari (1953; Tokyo Story), directed by Ozu Yasujirō.� Shochiku Films; photograph from a private collection

The second postwar generation of Japanese filmmakers was mainly composed of Kobayashi Masaki, Ichikawa Kon, and Shindo Kaneto. Kobayashi is best known for Ningen no joken (1959�61; The Human Condition), his three-part antiwar epic set during Japan�s brutal occupation of Manchuria, and the beautiful ghost film Kwaidan (1964). Ichikawa�s major works were the pacifist films Biruma no tategoto (1956; The Burmese Harp) and Nobi (1959; Fires on the Plain). Shindo is best known for his poetic semidocumentary Hadaka no shima (1960; The Island) and the bizarre, folkloristic Onibaba (1964).

The third generation of postwar directors was most active during the 1960s and �70s. The group was deeply influenced by the French New Wave and included Teshigahara Hiroshi (Suna no onna [Woman in the Dunes], 1964), Masumura Yasuzo (Akai Tenshi [The Red Angel], 1965), Imamura Shohei (Jinruigako nyumon [The Pornographers], 1966), and Oshima Nagisa (Ai no corrida [In the Realm of the Senses], 1976). In the mid-1960s, however, competition from multiple-channel colour television and from American distributors forced the Japanese film industry into economic decline. A decade later, two major studios were bankrupt, and film production was increasingly dominated by two domestic exploitation genres: the yakuza-eiga, or contemporary urban gangster film, and the semipornographic eroducti on film, which mixed sex and sadism. During the 1980s and �90s, Japan continued to produce the highest annual volume of films of any country in the world, but the studios remained in decline, and most serious productions, such as Kurosawa�s Kagemusha, were funded by foreign interests. At the turn of the 21st century, funding for films remained low, although the market for films was the greatest ever. This situation led to the mass production of low-budget films, as well as to the increased popularity of amateur and experimental films. China, Taiwan, and Korea

Other Asian nations have had spotty cinematic histories, although most developed strong traditions during the late 20th century. The film industries of China, Taiwan, and Korea were marked by government restrictions for most of the 20th century, and the majority of their output consisted of propaganda films. The loosening of many restrictions in the 1980s and �90s resulted in a new wave of Asian directors who attained worldwide prominence. At the turn of the 21st century, China�s �Fifth Generation Cinema� was known for such outstanding young directors as Zhang Yimou, who specialized in tales of political oppression and sexual repression. Korea�s cinematic history is difficult to assess, because virtually no films made prior to World War II exist, but works produced during the 1950s and �60s�the �golden age� of Korean cinema�gained a strong international reputation. The most successful Taiwanese directors of the late 20th century were Ang Lee, who directed films ranging from American morality tales such as The Ice Storm (1997) to the lavish martial-arts fantasy Wo hu zang long (2000; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon); and Hou Hsiao-hsien, who was best known for his sensitive family dramas (Hao nan hao nu [Good Men, Good Women], 1995).

Zhang Ziyi and Chang Chen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden DragonZhang Ziyi (left) and Chang Chen in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.� Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc.; photo, Chan Kam ChuenIndia

Serious postwar Indian cinema was for years associated with the work of Satyajit Ray, a director of singular talent who produced the great Apu trilogy (Pather panchali [The Song of the Road], 1955; Aparajito [The Unvanquished], 1956; Apur sansar [The World of Apu], 1959) under the influence of both Jean Renoir and Italian Neorealism. Ray continued to dominate Indian cinema through the 1960s and �70s with such artful Bengali films as Devi (1960; The Goddess), Charulata (1964; The Lonely Wife), Aranyer din ratri (1970; Days and Nights in the Forest), and Ashani sanket (1973; Distant Thunder). The Marxist intellectual Ritwik Ghatak received much less critical attention than his contemporary Ray, but through such films as Ajantrik (1958; Pathetic Fallacy) he created a body of alternative cinema that greatly influenced the rising generation.

In 1961 the Indian government established the Film Institute of India to train aspiring directors. It also formed the Film Finance Commission (FFC) to help fund independent production (and, later, experimental films). The National Film Archive was founded in 1964. These organizations encouraged the production of such important first features as Mrinal Sen�s Bhuvan Shome (1969; Mr. Shome), Basu Chatterji�s Sara akaash (1979; The Whole Sky), Mani Kaul�s Uski roti (1969; Daily Bread), Kumar Shahani�s Maya darpan (1972; Mirror of Illusion), Avtar Kaul�s 27 Down (1973), and M.S. Sathyu�s Garam hawa (1973; Scorching Wind) and promoted the development of a nonstar �parallel cinema� centred in Bombay (Mumbai). A more traditional path was followed by Shyam Benegal, whose films (Ankur [The Seedling], 1974; Nishant [Night�s End], 1975; Manthan [The Churning], 1976) are relatively realistic in form and deeply committed in sociopolitical terms. During the 1970s the regional industries of the southwestern states�especially those of Kerala and Karnataka�began to subsidize independent production, resulting in a �southern new wave� in the films of such diverse figures as G. Aravindan (Kanchana sita [Golden Sita], 1977), Adoor Gopalakrishnan (Elipathayam [Rat-Trap], 1981), and Girish Karnad (Kaadu [The Forest], 1973). Despite the international recognition of these films, the Indian government�s efforts to raise the artistic level of the nation�s cinema were largely unsuccessful. During the 1970s, India was a land of more than one billion people, many of them illiterate and poor, whose exclusive access to audiovisual entertainment was film; television was the medium of the rich and powerful middle class. The Indian film industry was for much of the later 20th century the world�s largest producer of low-quality films for domestic consumption, releasing on average 700 features per year in 16 languages. Australia

Australia was a country virtually without a film industry until the late 1960s and early �70s, when the federal government established the Australian Film Development Corporation (after 1975, the Australian Film Commission) to subsidize the growth of an authentic national cinema, founded a national film school (the Australian Film and Television School, later the Australian Film Television and Radio School, or AFTRS) to train directors and other creative personnel, and initiated a system of lucrative tax incentives to attract foreign investment capital to the new industry. The result was a creative explosion unprecedented in the English-language cinema. Australia produced nearly 400 films between 1970 and 1985�more than had been made in all of its prior history.

With financing from the Film Commission and such semiofficial bodies as the New South Wales Film Corporation (by the end of the decade each of the federal states had its own funding agency), the first films began to appear in the early 1970s, and within the next few years several talented directors began to receive recognition, including Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, 1975), Bruce Beresford (The Getting of Wisdom, 1977), Fred Schepisi (The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, 1978), George Miller (Mad Max, 1979), and the first AFTRS graduates, Phillip Noyce (Newsfront, 1978) and Gillian Armstrong (My Brilliant Career, 1979). Unlike the productions financed with foreign capital by the Canadian Film Development Corporation during the same period, these new Australian films had indigenous casts and crews and treated distinctly national themes. By the end of the 1970s, Australian motion pictures were being prominently featured at the Cannes international film festival and competing strongly at the box office in Europe. In 1981 Australia penetrated the American market with two critical hits, Beresford�s Breaker Morant (1980) and Weir�s Gallipoli (1981), and the following year it achieved a smashing commercial success with Miller�s Mad Max II (1981; retitled The Road Warrior, 1982). In the 1980s, many Australian directors worked for the American film industry, with varying degrees of success (Schepisi: Barbarossa, 1982; Beresford: Tender Mercies, 1983; Armstrong: Mrs. Soffel, 1984; Weir: Witness, 1985; Miller: The Witches of Eastwick, 1987). Despite this temporary talent drain and a decline in government tax concessions, the Australian cinema remained one of the most influential and creatively vital in the world. Prominent younger directors helped to maintain Australia�s world status, including Baz Luhrmann, noted for his flamboyant visual style in such films as William Shakespeare�s Romeo + Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge (2001), and P.J. Hogan, known for biting social comedies such as Muriel�s Wedding (1994) and My Best Friend�s Wedding (1997). Russia, eastern Europe, and Central Asia

After World War II the Soviet Union�s film industry experienced greater stagnation than that of any other nation except Germany. The Socialist Realism doctrine imposed during Stalin�s dictatorship caused film production to fall from 19 features in 1945 to 5 in 1952. Although Stalin died the following year, the situation did not improve until the late 1950s, when such films as Mikhail Kalatozov�s Letyat zhuravli (1957; The Cranes Are Flying) and Grigory Chukhrai�s Ballada o soldate (1959; Ballad of a Soldier) emerged to take prizes at international film festivals. Some impressive literary adaptations were produced during the 1960s (Grigory Kozintsev�s Hamlet, 1964; Sergey Bondarchuk�s Voyna i mir [War and Peace], 1965�67), but the most important phenomenon of the decade was the graduation of a whole new generation of Soviet directors from the Vsesoyuzny Gosudarstvenny Institut Kinematografii (VGIK; �All-Union State Institute of Cinematography�), many of them from the non-Russian republics�the Ukraine (Yury Ilyenko, Larissa Shepitko), Georgia (Tengiz Abuladze, Georgy Danelia, Georgy Shengelaya and Eldar Shengelaya, Otar Yoseliani), Moldavia (Emil Lotyanu), Armenia (Sergey Paradzhanov), Lithuania (Vitautas Zhalekevichius), Kyrgyzstan (Bolotbek Shamshiev, Tolomush Okeyev), Uzbekistan (Elyor Ishmukhamedov, Ali Khamraev), Turkmenistan (Bulat Mansurov), and Kazakhstan (Abdulla Karsakbayev). By far the most brilliant of the new directors were Sergey Paradzhanov and Andrey Tarkovsky, who both were later persecuted for the unconventionality of their work. Paradzhanov�s greatest film was Tini zabutykh predkiv (1964; Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors), a hallucinatory retelling of a Ukrainian folk legend of ravishing formal beauty. Tarkovsky created a body of work whose seriousness and symbolic resonance had a major impact on world cinema (Andrey Rublev, 1966; Solaris, 1971; Zerkalo [Mirror], 1974; Stalker, 1979; Nostalghia [Nostalgia], 1983), even though it was frequently tampered with by Soviet censors.

During the 1970s the policy of Socialist Realism (euphemized as �pedagogic realism�) was again put into practice, so only two types of films could safely be made�literary adaptations and bytovye, or films of everyday life, such as Vladimir Menshov�s Moskva slezam ne verit (1980; Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears). The Soviet cinema then experienced a far-reaching liberalization under the regime of Party Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, whose policy of glasnost (�openness�) took control of the industry away from bureaucratic censors and placed it in the hands of the filmmakers themselves. The Soviet cinema began to be revitalized as formerly suppressed films, such as Elem Klimov�s Agoniya (1975), were distributed for the first time, and films that dealt confrontationally with Stalinism, such as Abuladze�s Pokayaniye (1987; Repentance), were made without government interference.

A publicity still from Moscow Does Not Believe in TearsA publicity still from Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.Copyright � 1981 International Film Exchange Ltd.

Of the eastern European nations that fell under Soviet control after World War II, all except East Germany and Albania produced distinguished cinemas. Following the pattern set by the Soviets, these countries nationalized their film industries and established state film schools. They experienced a similar period of repressive government-imposed restrictions between 1945 and 1953, with a �thaw� during the late 1950s under Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. In Poland the loosening of ideological criteria gave rise to the so-called Polish school led by Jerzy Kawalerowicz (Matka Joanna od aniołŅw [Mother Joan of the Angels], 1961), Andrzej Munk (Eroica, 1957), and, preeminently, Andrzej Wajda (Pokolenie [A Generation], 1954; Kanał [Canal], 1956; Popi�ł i diament [Ashes and Diamonds], 1958). Wajda�s reputation grew throughout the 1960s and �70s, when he was joined by a second generation of Polish filmmakers that included Roman Polanski (N�ż w wodzie [Knife in the Water], 1962), Jerzy Skolimowski (Bariera [Barrier], 1966), and Krzysztof Zanussi (Iluminacja [Illumination], 1972). The Polish cinema expressed its support of the Solidarity trade union in the late 1970s through films by Wajda and such younger directors as Krysztof Kieślowski, Agnieszka Holland, and Feliks Falk.

The example of the Polish school encouraged the development of the Czech New Wave (1962�68), which became similarly entangled in politics. The Czechoslovak films that reached international audiences during this period were widely acclaimed for their freshness and formal experimentation, but they faced official disapproval at home, and many were suppressed for being politically subversive. Among the directors who were most critical of Pres. Anton�n Novotn��s hard-line regime were Věra Chytilov� (Sedmikrasky [Daisies], 1966), Jaromil Jire� (Zert [The Joke], 1968), J�n Kad�r (Obchod na Korze [The Shop on Main Street], 1965), Milo� Forman (Hoř�, m� panenko [The Firemen�s Ball], 1967), Jir� Menzel (Ostře sledovan� vlaky [Closely Watched Trains], 1966), and Jan Němec (O Slavnosti a hostech [The Party and the Guests], 1966). When Alexander Dubček became president in January 1968, the Czechoslovak cinema eagerly participated in his brief attempt to give socialism �a human face.� After the Soviet invasion of August 1968, many New Wave films were banned, the Czechoslovak film industry was reorganized, and several prominent figures, including Forman and Němec, were forced into exile.

Vaclav Neckar and Jitka Bendova in Closely Watched TrainsVaclav Neckar and Jitka Bendova in Closely Watched Trains.Sigma III/Filmove Studio Barrandov

In Hungary the abortive revolution of 1956 forestalled a postwar revival in film until the late 1960s, when the complex work of Mikl�s Jancs� (Szeg�nyleg�nyek [The Round-Up], 1965; Csillagosok, katon�k [The Red and the White], 1967; M�g k�r a n�p [Red Psalm], 1972) began to be internationally recognized. The rigorous training given students at the Budapest Film Academy ensured that the younger generation of Hungarian filmmakers would rise to prominence, as happened in the case of Istv�n Szab� (1981; Mephisto), Istv�n Ga�l (Magasiskola [Falcons], 1970), M�rta M�sz�ros (�r�kbefogad�s [Adoption], 1975), and P�l G�bor (1978; Angi Vera), many of whose films�as do Jancs�s�involve ideological interpretations of the national past.

Yugoslavia, Romania, and Bulgaria, unlike their more sophisticated Warsaw Pact allies, did not begin to develop film industries until after World War II. Yugoslavia was the most immediately successful and produced the countries� first internationally known director: the political avant-gardist Du�an Makavejev (Ljubavni slucaj ili tragedija sluzbenice P.T.T. [The Tragedy of the Switchboard Operator], 1967). Makavejev belonged to the late 1960s movement known as Novi Film (New Film), which also included such directors as Puri�a Djordjević, Aleksandar Petrović, and �ivojin Pavlović, all of whom were temporarily purged from the film industry during a reactionary period in the early 1970s. This dark period came to an end in 1976 when the filmmakers of the Prague school made their debuts. Goran Marković, Rajko Grlić, Srdjan Karanović, Lordan Zafranović, and Emir Kusturica were all graduates of the FAMU film school in Prague who had begun their careers working for Yugoslav television. Their offbeat, visually flamboyant social comedies brought a new breath of life into Yugoslav cinema and won a number of international prizes. Like Czechoslovakia, whose Jiř� Trnka perfected puppet animation in the 1950s, Yugoslavia also became world famous for its animation, especially that of the �Zagreb school� founded by Vatroslav Mimica and Du�an Vukotić.

The Romanian and Bulgarian film industries did not begin to progress until the mid-1960s. Both countries subsequently developed authentic national cinemas and boasted directors well known on the festival circuit (e.g., the Romanians Dan Piţa, Mircea Veroiu, and Mircea Daneliuc and the Bulgarians Hristo Hristov, Eduard Zakhariev, Georgi Dyulgerov, and award-winning animator Todor Dinov).

For decades, state money was readily available for filmmaking throughout the Soviet bloc countries, provided that the films were ideologically acceptable. This changed with the collapse of the Soviet Union in January 1992, whereupon funding became the chief obstacle to filmmaking in the region. By the late 1990s, fewer than two dozen films per year were produced in Russia. Adding to the decline were such factors as theatres that were closed or converted into businesses such as car dealerships, a home-video industry that was barely in its inceptive stages, and the popularity of American and Asian films. Although such directors as Sergey Bodrov and Vladimir Khotinenko received a degree of international acclaim, the financial situation of the film industries throughout Russia and eastern Europe during the 1990s suggested that it would be many years before these nations established a degree of prominence in world cinema. Spain and Mexico