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Cinema in the course of its development has gone from silent black-and-white short films with a running time of less than a minute, to multimillion-dollar photorealistic blockbusters, almost completely rendered on a computer.
There are many facts in the history of cinema that may seem strange or unbelievable, but they are true nonetheless.
10 Film set life path
Have you ever wondered where the sets go after filming? Facades, landscaping, décor, all sorts of structures, gadgets and other props are never thrown away: studios always leave them “in reserve”, hoping to use them in other projects. This, by the way, they do very well.
For example, the scenery of the town of Hill Valley, shown in the Back to the Future trilogy, was later used in 104 more films, but hardly anyone could recognize them from a different angle and with a different layout.
Props from the filming of Steven Spielberg’s “ET” were exploited 37 more times, and things from Charlie Chaplin’s “Gold Rush” “went around” the most: they were used in at least two hundred other films.
9. Most Wanted Historical Figures
Who do you think is the subject of the most films? About God? Caesar? The answer is Napoleon Bonaparte. He became the main character in about 200 films, while Jesus Christ was in the lead roles in only ~150.
Oddly enough, but the third line is occupied by “grandfather” Lenin, about whom in the USSR and not only managed to shoot almost a hundred biopics.
Following the leader of the proletariat is Adolf Hitler, and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, it turns out, is less popular than Cleopatra.
As for literary characters, Cinderella holds the palm here, although Hamlet steps on her heels, followed by Carmen, Romeo and Juliet, Don Quixote and a company of musketeers led by d’Artagnan.
8. The most massive funeral in cinema
In the 1982 biopic Gandhi, starring Ben Kingsley (winning 8 Oscars), there is a two-minute funeral scene in which all the people in the frame are real.
In those years, computer graphics essentially did not exist, therefore, in order to show a crowd of people in the frame, the creators had to recruit extras from 300 people (!), And only 000 worked under a contract and received money, and the rest were filmed simply out of love for art .
Now, when a small group of people can be beautifully multiplied and create an entire army on the screen, such a move seems to be something incredible.
7. Movie length
The first films made by the Lumiere brothers were much shorter than today’s shorts.
Thus, “Exit of Workers from the Lumiere Factory” had a duration of only 50 seconds and was completely devoid of any plot.
The brothers simply set up a camera near the entrance to the factory and captured the moment when employees leave after their shift home.
No acting, script, dialogue (then, in principle, there was no sound film), and even more so special effects, but even this was a real revelation for those years.
In the future, the duration increased, but still, on average, a film of the beginning of the 10th century lasted an average of 15-XNUMX minutes.
Gradually, the running time increased, but director David Griffith did not want to wait, and already in 1915 he filmed The Birth of a Nation for 3 hours, which became a record.
6. The birth of sound cinema
Despite the fact that the first public screening of a sound film took place in Paris in 1900, the world really began to learn about this technology only in the early 20s.
Germany was the most active in this niche, where they were able to combine the sound with the image without desynchronization, but this did not cause any enthusiasm.
The public rather coldly accepted the novelty: people are already accustomed to the fact that cinema is to watch, not listen to.
The director Alan Crosland, who shot the musical The Jazz Singer in 1927, was able to break this barrier. Previous attempts to make friends with sound and video were experimental in nature, and this was a feature-length film in which all the lines were voiced synchronously. The release date of the film, October 6, has become considered the official birthday of sound cinema.
5. Founding of Hollywood
Harvey Henderson Wilcox is the man who created Hollywood without meaning to. He owned a ranch near Los Angeles and a large plot of land, part of which he decided to sell, and if someone wanted to build a church, he gave the land away for free.
This is how residential neighborhoods began to appear, and later the Hollywoodland advertising sign appeared, which was supposed to attract new residents, but in the end became a symbol of something completely different.
4. Different versions of the film for different countries
Censorship is the scourge of modern cinema, according to many critics and ordinary viewers. Sometimes individual frames fall under the knife, and sometimes you have to reshoot entire scenes, especially when it comes to distribution in other countries.
Given that Hollywood blockbusters with hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets can’t break even without a global market, studios have to make those sacrifices.
For example, Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol and Transformers: Age of Extinction look completely different in China and India, and for the Chinese version of the third Iron Man, they filmed almost a separate storyline that viewers in other countries have not seen.
3. Who shoots the most?
It is generally accepted that Hollywood is the king of world cinema, which is essentially true, but in terms of performance, the American film industry is far from the first place.
Bollywood, that is, Indian cinema, produces many more films, including a huge number of trash remakes of Western films.
Over 1 films are filmed there every year, which begs the question: “Who watches so many of them”?
2. color cinema
Color cinema, in contrast to sound, was accepted with enthusiasm by the public, but it conquered the market extremely slowly.
The first full-length color work was the cult drama Gone with the Wind, which went down in history forever.
Full-fledged black-and-white film disappeared only in the 70s. By the way, actress Olivia de Havilland, who played one of the roles, is still alive: she is now 102 years old.
1. Film physical dimensions
It’s hard to imagine now, but directors and editors used to have to process just an incredible amount of film .. manually.
The film of Gone with the Wind mentioned above had a length of 152 kilometers (!!!), if you count the entire footage.