American culture

Cinema of the United States

The cinema of the United States, sometimes simply referred to as Hollywood, can perhaps be summed up by the title American film critic Pauline Kael gave a 1968 collection of her reviews: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

By way of explanation, she said that the words, which came from an Italian movie poster, were "perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies." Certainly, they sum up the raw energy of many American films.

Early development

The birth of cinema, as well as its radical development, can largely be traced back to the United States. The first recorded instance of photographs capturing and reproducing motion was Eadweard Muybridge's series of photographs of a running horse, which he captured in Palo Alto, California, using a set of still cameras placed in a row.

Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt forming devices that would similar capture such motion. In the United States, Thomas Alva Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope, whose heavy-handed patent enforcement caused early filmmakers to look for alternatives.

In the United States, the first exhibitions of films for large audiences typically followed the intermissions in vaudeville shows. Entrepreneurs began travelling to exhibit their films, bringing to the world the first forays into dramatic filmmaking.

The first huge success of American cinema, as well as the largest experimental achievement to its point, was The Great Train Robbery, directed by Edwin S. Porter.