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Animation in China grew from its austere beginnings in the 1920s, when the Wan brothers used very rudimentary materials and learn-as-you-go skills to produce animated shorts, to an industry today that leads the world in quantity of production. In between were two golden eras where highly aesthetic animation classics were made using Chinese stories, techniques, and materials. Accounting for this prosperity was the availability of time and resources offered by the government-owned Shanghai Animation Film Studio. The situation changed drastically after China went from a planned to a market economy at the end of the twentieth century. The Shanghai studio increasingly was forced to speed up production, to fend for itself in the market, and to compete in a field of hundreds of new studios. In the early 2000s, benefiting from much government support, foreign influences and connections, and digitalized technology, Chinese animation moved into an age of giantism, with all of its inherent problems.

This chapter introduces five motion picture studios that stood out in Asia at the beginning of the 1960s, such as Shin Films in South Korea, GMP and CMPC in Taiwan, and Shaw Brothers and MP&GI in Hong Kong and Singapore. It examines how film studios in the region aspired to implement the rationalized and industrialized system of mass-producing motion pictures known as the Hollywood studio system. It also explains that the Hollywood studio system evolved in the United States to handle film production, distribution, and exhibition during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The chapter recounts how the studio system became a highly efficient system that produced feature films, newsreels, animations, and shorts to supply its mass-produced motion pictures to subsidized theaters. It describes Fordism as the famous American system of mass production with particular American circumstances.

This chapter examines how the Second World War had a significant impact on the British film industry. It continues the theme of secondary status by examining how this played out in the 1940s, a decade dominated by the Second World War and an official address to women to join the workforce as reserve labor. In the service film units, the chapter shows how women “free[d] a man for the fleet” by taking over roles in editing, projection, photography, and animation, while their work as assistants in art departments kept the “back room” of Britain's film studios functioning. It also draws on the experience of women in documentary directing to introduce the concept of the episodic-interrupted career as a defining characteristic of women's employment. The chapter uses the concept to illuminate the multifaceted nature of women's occupational profiles and, in doing so, disrupt the dominant, male-defined narrative of the continuous work history as the key indicator of career success.

This chapter details the financial woes that the Wharton brothers faced. The once-bustling Wharton Studio at Renwick Park was, by 1919, a film studio in name only. With its debt increasing and prospects for new production slowing correspondingly, it was facing an uncertain future. By May of 1919, the brothers' long-standing money troubles had become too big to hide or ignore. To be sure, the Whartons' prospects in the industry looked grim. Yet surprisingly, within just days of the sale of the studio's contents, reports surfaced of a new Wharton film venture: The Crooked Dagger. However, between the problems with Pathé and the loss of the serial's leading man and other actors, Ted Wharton found himself unable to move forward with the production. Consequently, although a number of filmographies list The Crooked Dagger as a completed picture, the serial “never saw the light of day.”

This chapter describes the rise of the Hollywood studios and advent of sound technology. The Hollywood Studio System would properly take hold by 1930 once five companies — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, RKO, Fox (later Twentieth-Century Fox), Warner Bros. and Paramount — had emerged victorious from increasing competition and a scrimmage of mergers and takeovers of production and distribution companies. By 1930 it is estimated that there were around 24,000 cinemas in the US with the five major studios controlling at least 50 per cent of the total industry output. By 1931, D. W. Griffith had made his last film and the film industry was primed to establish the classical Hollywood era with the new technology of sound. In fact, the era from the coming of the sound film to the end of the 1940s is often called Hollywood's ‘Golden Age’. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Translating the Talkies: Diffusion, Reception and Live Performance’ by Mark Jancovich and Lucy Faire. Their study of spectatorship and film consumption in a single British city, Nottingham, at the moment in which the talkies came to Nottingham's Elite cinema in June 1929, is significant in its interrelation of the local with a global phenomenon — the coming of sound.

This chapter interprets the archival discourse at the 1993 National Film Preservation Board congressional hearings as an indirect outcome of the Culture Wars and the Christian Right's successful attack on National Endowment of the Arts, the primary funder of film preservation in the United States. Federal funding for preservation had been drastically reduced at the same time that the film archive was increasingly understood as the memoryscape of the twentieth century. Part of the purpose of the hearings (and the report that followed) was an attempt to redirect the federal government's film preservation priorities from Hollywood to orphan films and to shift some of the financial burdens of preservation onto film studios. Paramount to the hearings' discourse was that all American citizens might shape their historical consciousness by accessing a wide array of cinematic genres, and for the first time in archival history orphan films were discursively placed front and center. The successful paradigmatic shift from a Hollywood centered preservation plan to an orphan-centered one served to dramatically expand the type and scope of cinematic histories preserved within film archives.

This chapter examines how studio moguls controlled various modes of production during the golden era of Hollywood. For the Christian film industry, after the pioneer days of Friedrich and Baptista, the 1950s ushered in a studio era controlled by the godfathers of religious films. The studio work of Sam Hersh, Ken Anderson, and Billy Zeoli, along with their independent producers and directors, provided the bulk of Christian film products for church and school use. As each of these producers added their bricks to the building of an international Christian film industry, they contributed to the use of films by various Protestant groups. Their general evangelical film work would spark studios with greater economic resources, commitment to film ministries, and innovative scholarly visions to serve as master filmmakers for wider Christian audiences.

This chapter considers the activities of the London-based cine club Ace Movies, which was founded in 1929 and continued in operation well into the 1960s. As a relatively high-profile group within British cine culture, Ace was portrayed in its later years as an exemplary club in terms of resources and organisation, but also as adopting a distinctive approach to film-making, deemed highly appropriate to amateur circumstances. Epitomising the ‘serious’ creative possibilities of amateur filmmaking, the Ace Movies ‘house style’ was sometimes associated with developments in European art cinema and frequently rewarded with competition-recognition, both in national and international arenas. Scrutiny of post-war sources suggests that for many amateurs, the commitment to ‘silent’ practice persists stubbornly within the cine movement well beyond the practical viability of synchronised sound for small-gauge. Such residual perspectives are seen here both as informing the development of Ace’s particular studio culture, and as illustrating the persistence of 1930s amateur film-making ambitions more generally, through the 1950s and beyond.

This chapter evaluates the British horror film industry. Given the country's input in the success of the Hollywood horror films of the 1930s, in terms of source material as well as technicians and actors, horror film production in Britain was remarkably slow to emerge. This was due in no small part to the stringent censorship rules of the British Board of Film Censorship/Classification (BBFC), who did their best to dissuade British studios from making such films. The chapter investigates how one studio took up the reins of the genre and went on to dominate it for almost two decades. Matched only by the golden age of Universal in the 1930s and 1940s, Hammer Films produced some of the genre's most iconic images and characters through dozens of productions, while breaking box-office records around the world. The chapter looks at Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the company's first foray into the genre, one which would lay the foundations for their success and set the template for the English Gothic horror film as it flourished into the 1960s and 1970s.

Ranked among the “big four” Cantonese film studios in Hong Kong during the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, the studio style of Sun Luen and Union can be defined by a creative adaptation of the aesthetic taste and preferences of the south-bound intellectuals from Mainland China. the filmmakers were guided by their vision of a healthy Cantonese film culture as an agent of more far-reaching social change, which explains their sense of urgency in using cinema as a collective wake-up call against a materialistic (capitalist) and decadent society that colonial Hong Kong presumably had become. Their work included the Third Cantonese Cinema Clean-up Movement and the founding of the South China Film Industry Workers’ Union in 1949. This chapter takes a closer look at the studios’ genre films to shed light on the left -wing’s effort to claim a space in the commercial mainstream. It is argued that alongside the more serious drama films, the lighter entertainment films also contributed to the “studio style” of the left -wing cinema.

This chapter begins with a discussion of features common to the studio film. It suggests that locating the impetus for new punk cinema, particularly in terms of narrative experimentation, requires a return to Welles and Hitchcock, and to dabble in the notion of ‘auteur’. Auteur theory, championed by French film director, François Truffaut, located the creative force of a film in the director, or more correctly, the director/writer. The chapter then discusses the new punk aesthetic and the input of the Hollywood independent. It describes the new punk films of Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan. It concludes with a discussion of new punk as a cinema aesthetic.

Chapter 1, ‘Broad Strokes and Simple Chords’, provides details of the prevailing film-making culture of the 1940s in film centres that had a direct influence on music and singing practices. It charts the developments in song-making, film production at studios, rise of independent producers, new demands on film business, songs, and the star system. It provides an overview of the socio-political and economic situation in India, its influence on films and film songs, their diffusion through the gramophone and radio technologies, women singers recording for gramophone companies, styles of Indian music in the north and south and their influence on film music, and the singers entering the film industry as actors.

This chapter discusses the age of the dream palace and the rise of the star system. By the end of the First World War, the cinema was an established cultural fact in an era of rapid social change. In America, theatres or dream palaces were crucial to the structuring of the film industry. They were the places where cinema came to the masses and the studios successfully exploited such venues as they did the movie stars under contract to them. The system of star-making was perfected during the ‘Jazz Age’, the era that F. Scott Fitzgerald had declared ‘open’ in 1919. The studios made the stars a phenomenon peculiar to the movies; they were industrial tools and their pictures in theatre lobbies ensured box office success. The chapter includes a study by Douglas Gomery, which traces American cinematic presentation from its origins through the rise of the ‘dream palaces’ down the decades to include the domestic viewing of home videos and the rise of the multiplex.

This chapter explores the conversion of Rome’s Cinecittà film studios into a refugee camp in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It argues that as one recognizes its material and historical vicissitudes, its true magnitude, the duration of its existence, and the broader social and political forces that governed its development, the camp emerges as a hidden, obverse figure of neorealism. Archival documents and images, and the gaps that still plague the history of the camp, join in a description of the overlapping uses and meanings, the physical and figurative implications, of a uniquely warped space, at once actual and phantasmatic, allegorical and cinematic.

This chapter focuses on the career of Béla Tarr. Tarr was born in Pécs, in southern Hungary, in 1955. For his fourteenth birthday he received an 8mm camera from his father which started his journey into filmmaking. At the age of twenty-two, he released his first full-length feature film, Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek, 1977), which also won the Grand Prize at the 1979 Mannheim International Film Festival. In 1980, Tarr was among the founders of a newly formed studio called Társulás Studiá. Officially the studio's mission was to create and promote the semi-documentary, semi-fictional style the founders of the studio initiated five years earlier. However, filmmakers with clearly avant-garde ambitions could also come and make films in the studio. By the early years of 2000 Tarr was already well-known for his international successes and was recognized as a somewhat eccentric but important figure of Hungarian cinema. In 2010 he was elected president of the Hungarian Filmmakers Association.

This book examines Japanese cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, and more specifically how Japanese modernity took shape in the film culture of the period. It considers film genres that highlight modern subject identity and contain the discourses of Japanese modernity, along with the heterogeneous norms of the Japanese national cinema. It looks at one preeminent studio of the 1920s and 1930s, Shochiku Kamata Film Studios, and how it established norms for a classical Japanese cinema. Shochiku was the only studio that continued production in Tokyo throughout this period of early development of the Japanese film industry. The book thus explores the ways in which Tokyo, and by extension Shochiku, became both the center of modern film production and the cultural hub of Japanese modernity itself. It also investigates how modern Japanese subjectivity was materialized by the Japanese themselves through cinema and how the classical Japanese cinema gave rise to a fictive Japanese national identity.

Focused on the period of atmospheric (above-ground) nuclear weapons testing in the continental United States, from 1945 to 1963, this chapter, written by Susan Courtney, does two things. First, it describes some of the basic conditions and infrastructure that shaped the proliferation of films of nuclear weapons tests, including the U.S. government’s secret military film studio dedicated to this work in the hills above Los Angeles, known as Lookout Mountain Air Force Station or Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Second, it turns to the representational legacy that resulted, which was by no means limited to films made by or for the military. More specifically, it considers how footage of atomic tests in New Mexico and at the Nevada Test Site helped to shape the filmic record of nuclear weapons—and popular cultural memory—by framing the bomb in the desert West, arguably the screen space of American exceptionalism.