Arts and Music Atlas

Works, Makers, Traditions
Art Forms

Film

Also Known As Cinema · Motion Pictures

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

Film is the art of moving images, recorded and arranged in sequence to tell a story or convey an experience, combining elements of photography, writing, performance, music, and editing into a single medium. It emerged as a technology in the final years of the nineteenth century and matured rapidly into a narrative art over the following decades, developing techniques of editing, camera movement, and sound that had no precedent in the older performing arts. National film industries developed distinct styles, and Japanese cinema in particular, through directors such as Akira Kurosawa, brought a rigorous visual and narrative discipline to international attention in the decades after the Second World War, influencing filmmakers worldwide. Film is often described as a collaborative and industrial art, typically produced by large creative and technical teams and dependent on the equipment and, later, the digital tools of its era, in contrast to the more solitary practice associated with painting or sculpture. Its combination of moving image and recorded sound allows a single work to reach audiences across the world in a way earlier performing arts, tied to a single live performance, could not.

Facts
Medium
Recorded moving images arranged in sequence, combined with sound, on photographic or digital media 1
Signature Technique
Montage: separate pieces of film selected, edited and assembled together to build a new sequence or meaning within a film. 2
Place of Origin
The idea of film as a fine art in its own right, rather than merely a recording technology, is dated to 1911 and Ricciotto Canudo's manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art. 2
Notable Example
Ricciotto Canudo's 1911 manifesto The Birth of the Sixth Art, the founding argument for treating film as a fine art alongside painting, sculpture, architecture, music and poetry. 2
Cross-Tradition Connections

Movements

Modernism, Movements
Source Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica editors

Practitioners

Source The Films of Akira KurosawaDonald Richie
Orson Welles, Artists
Source Encyclopaedia BritannicaEncyclopaedia Britannica editors

Works In This Form

Citizen Kane, Works
Seven Samurai, Works
Source The Films of Akira KurosawaDonald Richie
Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.entry: history of film
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Movements: Modernism, entry: Modernism
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.Practitioners: Orson Welles, entry: Orson Welles
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationFilm, Film Theory section
Quote, Film, Film Theory section
The concept of film as an art-form began in 1911 with Ricciotto Canudo's manifest The Birth of the Sixth Art.
View the Source
The Films of Akira Kurosawa
Donald Richie, University of California PressPractitioners: Akira Kurosawa, introductory chapters on Kurosawa's life and career
The Films of Akira Kurosawa
Donald Richie, University of California PressWorks In This Form: Seven Samurai, chapter on Seven Samurai

Take a Related Quiz

Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.