Text 4 the history of cinema

Exercise 1. Read the text and answer the questions below it.

The art of making films has existed for more than a hundred years. Motion pictures developed gradually from a carnival innovation to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century. Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to match the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was found until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with a dialogue and narration presented in intertitles. The sound film was invented by the Hungarian Dénes Mihály in 1918 and was mostly silent but contained the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. It was a great success. In the war and post-war years the desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas. The critics of wartime brought an interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's Gainsborough melodramas. Val Lewton also produced a series of atmospheric and small-budget horror films. The 1950s marked a very productive period for Indian cinema, with more than 200 films being made. During the 1960s the studio system in Hollywood declined, because many films were now being made on location in other countries, or using studio facilities abroad, such as Pinewood in England. There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema during this period. In the 1980s audiences began increasingly watching movies on their home VCRs and the early 1990s saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), independent films like and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994). During 1995 the first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios. A new genre was created with Martin Kunert and Eric Manes' Voices of Iraq, when 150 inexpensive DV cameras were distributed across Iraq, transforming ordinary people into collaborative filmmakers. The success of Gladiator led to a revival of interest in epic cinema, and Moulin Rouge! renewed interest in musical cinema. Home theatre systems became increasingly sophisticated, as did some of the special edition DVDs designed to be shown on them. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was released on DVD in both the theatrical version and in a special extended version intended only for home cinema audiences.

Exercise 2. a) You have met a few names of the famous films and animated cartoons in the text. Have you watched them? What can you say about them? Did you like them or not? Why?

b) Answer the following questions:

1. What kinds of films were produced at the beginning of the cinema development?

2. Say a few words about the first sound film. What was it like?

3. What types of films were popular in the years of war and after it?

4. How are films such as Titanic and Terminator 2: Judgment Day called?

5. What animated films began to appear after 1995?

6. What can you say about a new genre connected with the names of Martin Kunert and Eric Manes?

7. Do you know any other genres, which have not been mentioned in the text? Give your examples.