The lights of the Salon Indien, nestled in the basement of Le Grand Café, dim by the hand of Auguste Lumière. His brother Louis steps to a small wooden box mid-room and turns a brass crank1. A dusty beam of light emerges from the box and finds purchase on the seven-foot white screen mounted against the wall2. On the screen appears – grainy and silent – a crowd of finely dressed women emerging from the barn doors of a warehouse. A dog investigates. A bicycle breaks through the crowd. The audience – enticed from the cold 1895 December Parisian streets with the promise of ten “views” of “Le Cinematographe”3 – sits staring with rapt attention. They are the first to witness what would become one of the most ubiquitous forms of media in the coming century: the motion picture. That flickering light would become a billion-dollar entertainment industry4, superseding the novel, theatre, radio, and television, and dictating the way audiences speak and act all over the world. The popularity, accessibility, and culturally influence of the motion picture is such that it should be considered the quintessential form of storytelling of the twentieth century.
As the first commentary entry in this new venture, I thought perhaps a bit of history and context was called for. Both so I could reuse a chunk of text I wrote for a thesis a while ago (less work with maximum result), but also so we could all be on the same page when, in the future, I stress how big movies are, as a cultural and financial obelisk.
From that first screening in the basement of a Parisian café, the art form became immensely popular. In the United States, the first dedicated movie theatre opened in 19055, only a decade after the Lumières. By the time the second world war broke out, 90 million Americans - two thirds of the population - went to the movies every week6. Even the Depression couldn’t kill the audience’s thirst for the pictures. I imagine for many, movies were a comfort; a distraction from the challenges they were facing in life and at home. Pay a nickel and you get to watch the news, see a few cartoons, and catch up on whatever The Shadow is getting up to that week. Fast forward a century, and US and Canadian audiences spent 13.74 billion dollars going to the movies in 20197, with one third of the population seeing at least one movie a month in a theatre in that same year8.
The Lumières spread the technology across Europe in the early century9, and across the Atlantic, where the concept was already being developed by several others who were spurred on by the French brothers’ success. The American competition for the Lumière’s Cinematographe was courtesy of history’s greatest intellectual property thief, Thomas “It’s Mine Now” Edison. Separated by an ocean, Edison controlled the market with his Kinetoscope10. Anyone using one of Edison’s machines had to license it from him, and the first American film studios were established in New Jersey - under Edison’s oppressive gaze and within reach of his lawyers. The move to California by many filmmakers was as much about skipping out on paying Edison his fees and avoiding his lawsuits as it was finding a warm climate more suitable for filming year round (Florida was briefly considered but was still too near to Jersey - and also, has hurricanes). By 1915, 60% of American film production was centered on Hollywood. Edison’s monopoly was shattered by geography.
Free of Edison pinching their pockets, new film studios quickly established themselves. Between 1915 and 1924, Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, Metro Pictures, Louis B Mayer Pictures, the Fox Film Corporation, First National Pictures, Warner Brothers Pictures, Columbia Pictures, and the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio were all founded. Through various mergers and rebrandings, these studios largely still dominate the industry in 2022. Disney claims 25.5% of the industry (thanks due to it’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox), followed by Sony/Columbia, Universal, Warner Bros, United Artists/MGM (now owned by Amazon), Paramount, and Lionsgate. Smaller studios and independent producers currently make up only 5.94% of the market11.
The global cultural colonization by America in the post-war years saw America films exported to countries around the world. While American films dominated most markets, they also had the effect of introducing movies to many cultures, and seeded home-grown film industries as people were inspired to tell stories that reflected their own cultures and identities12. Non US-based film industries continue to grow in success and audience, and in the midst of the pandemic, the Chinese box office overtook the US as the largest in the world, with 7.3 billion dollars annually13. The US and Canada follow with 4.5 billion, and Japan comes in third with 1.5 billion. France, the founding nation of filmmaking, is tied for fourth with the UK at 0.8 billion dollars annually14.
Over the course of the 20th century, the movie surged to the forefront of culture. Even television, which arguably had greater reach by the simple fact of sitting in the corner of every living room and broadcasting for free, spent the century fighting for a fragment of the legitimacy that movies had. The number of theatres skyrocketed, hitting a national high of 7200 indoor theatres in the US in 199515. The number of films released annually held around 400 per year in the 1950s, to the near collapse of the industry in the ‘60s and ‘70s, during which time only 200 films were released a year16, to the second wind and all time high of 873 films released in 201817. Due to the pandemic, the number of releases from the major studios is currently back down to 1950 numbers.
What impact has this had on all of us, who have grown up marinated in a society where the most common cultural touchstones are movies? Movies that bind people into tribes of experience, creating worldlines that locate us in times and places by what movies we’ve seen, which ones we haven’t, and how we experienced them. It’s questions like these I will explore in future editions.
Further Reading:
Lumière Cinématographe: Science museum group collection. Lumière Cinématographe | Science Museum Group.
Grundhauser, E. Did a silent film about a train really cause audiences to stampede? Atlas Obscura.
Anido, J. First public showing of movies: Un Jour de plus à Paris. Un jour de plus à Paris | L'incontournable des visites culturelles et touristiques à Paris. Balades, visites guidées, découvertes insolites... Visitez Paris autrement !
Navarro, J. G. Box office revenue in the U.S. and Canada 2021. Statista.
Ho, S. Weekender: Behind the curtains: A brief history of movie theaters. The Daily Californian.
Weikle, B. How Hollywood became the unofficial propaganda arm of the U.S. military | CBC Radio. CBCnews.
Navarro, J. G. United States: Consumer spending on movie tickets 2020. Statista.
Navarro, J. G. Number of movies seen monthly in the U.S. by ethnicity 2019. Statista.
Turan, K. Paris, with popcorn. Los Angeles Times.
The Kinetoscope. Library of Congress.
Navarro, J. G. U.S. & Canada: Market share of film studios 2021. Statista.
Brzeski, P. It's official: China overtakes north america as World's biggest box office in 2020. The Hollywood Reporter.
Navarro, J. G. Top box office markets worldwide by revenue 2021. Statista.
Navarro, J. G. Number of indoor cinema sites in the United States from 1995 to 2020. Statista.
Scott, A. Hollywood and the world: The geography of motion-picture distribution and marketing. Review of International Political Economy. 11(1):33-61
Navarro, J. G. Number of movies released in the United States and Canada from 2000 to 2021. Statista.