DK - The Movie Book

This guide describes,discusses, and pays tribute to some of the movies that best capture the wonder ofcinema. The movies gathered here are those that the authors feel, in the imprecise wayof these things, to have had the most seismic impact on both cinema and theworld.

The journey starts in 1902, when Parisian showman Georges Mlisunveiled the latest in the series of short silent movies with which he had beenentertaining his countrymen. It was a romp through space called A Trip to the Moon (Le voyage dans lalune), and it was a huge and instant successnot just in Francebut across the world. (Sadly for Mlis, much of that success was due tothe movie being incessantly pirated by rivals.) Its popularity did more than any othermovie of the time to secure the movie as the premier art form of the age. None before ithad been as spectacular; none had such an intricate storyline.

"No matter where the cinema goes, we cannot afford to lose sight of itsbeginnings."

Martin Scorsese

By the time Mlis was making his lunar adventure, cinema hadalready been established as a slightly disreputable pastime, to be enjoyed attheaters and fairgrounds. To find its true beginnings, it is necessary to stepback furtherto Paris again, but this time with two showmen in thespotlight. The pair, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumire, had their momentin 1896. That was when, after holding large-scale screenings of their movies theyear before, they first showed the French public Larrive dun train en gare de LaCiotatalso known as The Arrival of aTrain. It was a mere 50 seconds of footage in which, as the titlesuggests, a steam train entered La Ciotat station, shot from the adjacentplatform. The sight sent all those watching fleeing in panic, convincedthey were about to be mowed down by the speeding locomotiveor at leastthats the story that circulated after the event. The exact truth hasbeen lost to time, but either the Lumires had quickly mastered the newart forms ability to make the screen feel like life, or they had astunning knack for promotional hype. Perhaps it doesnt matter eitherwayboth those skills have a central place in the story of cinema.

But it may be necessary to step back further still. After all, before theLumire brothers sent their audience bolting in terror, plenty of othershad pioneered movies. There should be a tip of the hat to US inventor ThomasEdison, who had screened movies of boxing cats and men sneezing to individualcustomers a couple of years before the Lumires, and to Englishphotographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose 1880s studies of humans and animals inmotion were a vital preface to the moving picture.

I dont know yet what Im going totell them. Itll be pretty closeto the truth.

In fact, the story of movie arguably stretches back to prehistoric times, tohuman ancestors hunched around a fire as one among them used the light to castshadows on the wall and illustrate tales of fearsome beasts or unlikely heroism.When the audience settle into their seats for an insanely expensive,effects-fueled blockbuster on a towering IMAX screen, theyre back aroundthat fire. Movie in the 21st century is still a telling of stories with wordsand images, bringing those images to believable life.

This guide is an attempt to build a narrative ofmovie history out of the movies themselves, taking a tour of a hundred or somovies from Mlis on through the next century and beyond. Eachentry discusses where a movie came from, maps its inspiration and how it wasmade, documents the men and women whose talent shaped it, and details theripples of influence it sent out.

It is a story that crosses time. In the silent age, the first men and womenexplored the possibilities of moving pictures. From there, the story slips intothe 1930s and 1940s, the gilded years when cinemas stood on every main streetand movies were beloved slabs of mass appeal; the age of movie stars such asHumphrey Bogart, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart. In the 1950s, filmmakersfrom Europe, India, and Japan created a string of masterpieces that stillreceive acclaim to this day; this was the time of Henri-Georges Clouzot, AkiraKurosawa, Yasujir Ozu, Nicholas Ray, and Satyajit Ray. A new generationtook hold in the 1960s and 1970s, and broke the established molds. And then thestory of cinema arrives in the present, where movies are made with technologythat would have been the stuff of science fiction even 10 years ago, wholeworlds spun into being at the push of a button.