Life through a Lens: Film Studies 101

Are you an incredibly lazy film student? If so, get the gist of the whole of film history by watching the quintessential movies from each decade of cinema's short existence

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 08 Sep 2014

1890s: It took cinema years to realise it was an art form. The initial thrill of the movies was their novelty, and this is no more evident than in the reaction that reportedly met the Lumière Brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. To modern eyes, this 50 second documentary of a train pulling into a station is pretty humdrum. But in 1895, so the legend goes, the image of the projected locomotive rushing toward the audience sent those in attendance into such a tizzy, that they leaped from their seats believing it was going to burst from the screen.

1900s: While the camera movements were non-existent and synced sound was still decades off, filmmakers like Georges Méliès were beginning to utilise cinema's ability to transport us to dream worlds. A Trip to the Moon, which employed every sleight of hand cinema had to offer at the start of the century, is the perfect example of a medium starting to understand its potential.

1910s: The most influential film of the 1910s – perhaps ever – was D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance. Four stories set in four different time periods are edited together to create a jaw-dropping spectacle. Nowadays a computer whizz could knock up some of Griffith’s mammoth set-pieces in an hour or two, but they’ll never have the visceral power that comes from knowing those sets and those hundreds of extras are for real.

1920s: Silent film began to reach a kind of perfection towards the late 20s. Rather than simply resembling filmed plays, cinema had developed its own language of expression. This synergy of image, movement and performance reached is zenith in F.W. Murnau's Sunrise, in which the German filmmaker utilises the technical power of the American studio to turn a simple tale into a heartbreaking love story that’s as elegant as it is epic.

1930s: As well as reaching its artistic peak in 1927, cinema also experienced a significant technical innovation: sound was introduced. It took filmmakers a while to work out how use this new technology creatively, however. One of the first to understand the power of sound was Jean Renoir – and his freewheeling tragicomic masterpiece The Rules of the Game made poetic use of its overlapping dialogue. To paraphrase Robert Altman: Renoir taught future filmmakers the rules of the game.

1940s: American cinema during and immediately after WWII came in two distinct shades: the light screwball comedies and the dark film noirs. Draw a Venn diagram of those two genres and you’ll find one overlap: Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep. The noir is obvious: based on Raymond Chandler’s pulp classic and starring Humphrey Bogart as the wisecracking Philip Marlowe, it’s the genre’s template, but Bogart and co-star Lauren Bacall’s verbal sparring and electric chemistry give it the same fizz we associate with Hawks’ romantic comedies.

1950s: The studio system was dying in the 50s. But, oh, what a death rattle, with stalwarts like Hitchcock, Welles and Ford spitting out their masterpieces. The filmmaker who best summed up this lush but elegiac period in American cinema was Douglas Sirk, whose florid women’s pictures set the Technicolor look of the decade. His heartbreaking melodrama Imitation of Life, from 1959, was a fittingly melancholic end to the era.

1960s: With Hollywood in crisis, cinema in Europe was going through a purple patch. Names like Fellini, Godard and Buñuel were packing out art-house cinemas. But for a prize 60s cinematic artefact, particularly from a British perspective, it’s got to be Antonioni’s erotic thriller Blow-Up, which not only typifies the avant-garde stylings (and sometimes infuriating pretensions) of the decade’s art-house cinema, it also acts as an exotic document of the groovy decade.

1970s: The 70s saw a Hollywood renaissance, and its chief theme was of crumbling male psyches. Almost all of the classics of the era dealt with it, but it wasn’t just the US's concern. Japan, Australia, Senegal and, in particular, Germany were also on a cinematic high and dealing with this subject. From the latter, the image of Klaus Kinski’s bug-eyed usurper in Werner Herzog’s blistering Aguirre, the Wrath of God sums up this unique decade, in which artistic ambition and commercial success collided.

1980s: The 80s was the decade of the teenager. Since the monumental success of Jaws and Star Wars, movies were now aimed at teens – and they tended to star in them too. It wasn’t all clawing coming-of-age tales, though. In the decade’s quintessential film, Blue Velvet, its teen protagonist is plunged into a twisted underworld a million miles away from the cosy classrooms of John Hughes.

1990s: Love him or hate him, no filmmaker put his stamp on the 90s like Quentin Tarantino. James Cameron ruled the box office, the likes of Wong Kar-Wai and Abbas Kiarostami wowed the critics, but it was Tarantino's cineliterate cinema that seared itself onto the public’s consciousness. Which of his three 90s features to choose, though? Let’s go with his best: Jackie Brown.

2000s: The shadow of the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent 'War on Terror' loomed over 2000s cinema. Filmmakers like Paul Greengrass and Kathryn Bigelow tackled it head on, while others took a more allegorical approach. Even comic books got in on the action. The best of these mood-of-the-planet movies was Alfonso Cuarón’s bleak but hopeful Children of Men, which imagined, in a compelling and believable fashion, the human race's slow apocalypse.

2010s: Ask us in ten years…

For reviews of classic re-releases and to keep up to date with what’s happening in contemporary cinema, head across to theskinny.co.uk/film