In its brief, action-filled history of 109 years the cinema has recapitulated the history of art from cave painting to Picasso, and conveniently for historians each decade has had a distinctive character. After the primitive but increasingly sophisticated fumblings of the first decade of the 20th century, the teen years saw the dominance of Chaplin and Griffith (respectively the great comedian who became the most famous man of all time, and the major pioneer of the popular feature film), and the creation of what were to be the great Hollywood studios. The Golden Age of the silent cinema came in the Twenties when Germany for a while challenged Hollywood and the Soviet film-makers had their hour of glory. But the decade ended with the coming of sound and the Wall Street crash, two events that caused a financial crisis that put movie-makers in permanent subjugation to bankers. The 1930s witnessed the end of avant-garde Soviet cinema under Stalin, the departure from Germany of the Jewish artists who had made the nation’s film industry so formidable, and the consolidation of Hollywood’s pre-eminence. It ended with the coming of the second world war, which briefly cut Hollywood off from half its foreign market but produced a boom in film-going everywhere.
The war enabled Britain to establish for the first time a popular autonomous national cinema, and immediately after the end of hostilities came the Italian neo-realist movement which was to have a major and continuing influence throughout the world. The decade ended and the 1950s began with two major blows against Hollywood. First, a Supreme Court decision forced the major studios to stick to production and distribution and divest themselves of their exhibiting activities. Second, the popularity of television and other leisure activities steadily eroded audiences.
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