9. Type: _____________

Judy Garland gives a dazzling performance in this much-loved movie. She is young Dorothy who is knocked unconscious when a tornado rips through her Kansas farmhouse and who wakes up in the Technicolour world of Oz (the film starts in black and white). A perfect MGM production with imaginative sets, photography, costumes and make-up. The classic Harold Arlen/ E Y Harburg songs include Follow the Yellow Brick Road and the Oscar-winning Over the Rainbow.

Big Business (1988)

10. Type: _____________

Two sets of identical twins, acciden­tally separated and switched at birth, meet up years later in New York when one set arrives for a showdown with the corporation that’s going to erase their little home town, only to find that the other set of girls is in charge of the company. Excellent performances from Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin. The script is a bit contrived, but there are a lot of laughs.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

11. Type: _____________

Two couples engage in a complex session of all-night conversation that leads to much bitterness and recrimination. Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were never better together than in this totally absorb­ing but ultimately depressing film.

Ice Castles (1978)

12. Type: _____________

Tear-jerking romance about a young couple who meet on an ice rink and quickly fall in love. Both find fame and fortune on the ice - he as a professional hockey player, she as an Olympic champion dancer - but tragedy strikes when she becomes blind.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

13. Type: _____________

When a famous scientist is shot, a highly experimental technique is used in order to save him. A medi­cal team is placed aboard a sub­marine, reduced to microscopic size and injected into his bloodstream to remove a blood clot on his brain. An interesting film with excellent special effects.

The Lady and the Tramp

(1955)

14. Type: _____________

One of Disney’s most delightful animated films, in which a pedigree dog runs away from home after the arrival of a baby makes her feel unwanted. She soon meets up with a stray who lives by his wits. The two dogs survive various hazards and win through in the end, when they prove their worth by rescuing the baby. The first Disney film in

Cinemascope. Songs are by Peggy Lee and Sonny Burke.

Curse II: The Bite (1988)

15. Type: _____________

A nest of snakes are infected by radiation and turned into deadly squirming monsters. Anyone they bite is transformed into a terrible mutant beast which will kill you first chance it gets. Frivolous but enter­taining monster film.

Read the text about the history of cinema. Where did cinema come from and who invented it?

Our journey begins in the Far East.

Moving images have always been popular. In China, for example, there were ‘shadow plays’ 5.000 years ago. These used firelight to project images of puppets onto screens. So projection is a very old idea. But cinema only became possible when this old Asian idea met a new European one – photography.

The two came together in the middle of the 19th century. That’s when photos were first used in ‘magic lanterns’. Before that these early projectors had used glass slides. The pictures on these slides were painted by hand and very expensive. In comparison, photos were cheap and easy to produce.

So – by 1850 projection and photography had come together. But the result still wasn't ‘cinema’. How could it be when the pictures didn’t move? The solution to that problem came in several stages.

The first, in 1877, came via English inventor Eadweard Muybridge. He discovered a way to take photos very quickly, one after the other.

Eleven years later, an Ametican called George Eastman produced the first celluloid film on a roll.

By 1890, it was possible to take up to 40 photos per second. Next, in 1893, came another invention – Thomas Edison’s ‘Kinetoscope’.

The kinetoscope projected moving pictures, but it had three problems: (a) It was noisy, (b) the pictures it produced were very low-quality, (c) only one person could watch a kinetoscope at a time.

Before cinema could be born, one last invention was necessary – a quiet machine able to project high-quality pictures onto a large screen. And the men who produced that were two French brothers from the city of Lyons.