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A Remembrance of Early Movies

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Well, I guess that's all the time I have. Thanks for giving me the chance to share some of the things I saw and read about from the very first days of motion pictures. I watched the movies with great awe from the first days of the Kinetoscope Parlors, and I intend to keep watching them for a good many more years. I hope motion picture producers can make these new-fangled sound pictures into something worth watching. Interestingly enough, when sound came in, oh, about five years ago, the movies went dead back to where they were in 1900 artistically. The cameras don't move (I guess it would mess up the sound equipment), the acting hasn't adapted to the new medium, and movies have again become stage-bound. Oh, well. In 1900 people didn't think movies would amount to much either. All we need is another brilliant filmmaker to teach the camera how to move again.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mast, Gerald & Kwan, Bruce F. A Short History of the Movies. Boston, London, Toronto, Sydney, Tokyo and Singapore: Allyn and Bacon, 2000

Koszarski, Richard. Hollywood Directors 1914-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976

Ebert, Roger. Roger Ebert's Book of Film: From Tolstoy to Tarantino, the finest writing from a century of film. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997

Edited by Kearney, Robin. Chronicle of the Cinema: 100 Years of the Movies. London, New York, Stuttgart and Moscow: Dorling Kindersley, 1995

Hampton, Benjamin B. History of the American Film Industry from its beginnings to 1931. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1970

MacDonald, Dwight. On Movies. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1969

Landmarks of Early Film. DVD; Kino, 2000

Birth of a Nation. Video; Barr Entertainment, 1933 cut

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This paper originated as a term paper for Introduction to Mass Media, Spring 2000.

©Copyright 2000 by Jandy Stone

Page last updated 8/1/04.