Cinemas were thriving throughout WW2 with roughly 30 million weekly admissions between 1944-45 since citizens needed an escape from the terrors of the war and so would go to watch films for some entertainment. Alongside that, cinemas were also used to distribute information on the war through news sources such as ‘Pathe News’ as TV’s wouldn’t be generally used until 1948
TV’s began to become more popular and common after the war as people preferred watching films from their own home as it was more convenient and a lot cheaper than going to a cinema. This led to a massive decline in the amount of cinema tickets being sold which made it difficult for some of the cinemas to stay open due to their lack of income
Some huge companies such as paramount pictures, warner bros and 20th-century fox owned their own studios which included everything from the film inside the cameras to the theatres themselves, allowing them to exclusively play films that they produced at their theatres via block booking [a bundle of films] which guaranteed their films to be successful as they were controlling the whole film process. However, in 1948 the paramount decision was made where the government forced the studios to sell their theatres as it violated an anti-trust law in the US, the law stating that companies can’t prohibit/control what people buy and therefore watch, stopping the studios from block booking. Due to the studios losing their theatres, it was no longer guaranteed that their films would be successful which caused them to lose a lot of money and gain a lot of competition as smaller studios now had the chance to play their films in theatres too. This led to the end of the golden age of cinema and started a massive decline in the film industry as studios now had to hire directors, screenwriters etc to create good and successful films instead of just mass-producing films, especially as TV was becoming more and more popular.
June 6, 1948 the Lumiere brothers created the film La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (1895; “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), which is considered the first motion picture.
The concept of the ‘phantom ride’ a technique that originated from the point of view of a moving train being filmed, which gave the illusion of the camera floating; like a ghost.
“The sick Kitten”- the first film credited for using the first close-up “Life of an American Fireman”- scenes were cut to advance the narrative, giving the audience different perspectives
