History of British Cinema
British Cinema History
Emergent British Cinema 1880-1900
Modern cinema is generally regarded as descending from the work of the French Lumière brothers in 1892, and their show first came to London in 1896. However, the first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. The film is the first known instance of a projected moving image. At the end of the 19th America had started to experiment in how to get a moving image onto a screen and in Britain Friese-Green was working hard at doing much the same thing on a commercial basis. The first people to build and run a working 35 mm camera in Britain were Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres. They made the first British film ‘Incident at Clovelly Cottage’ in February 1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent.
Although the earliest British films were of everyday events, the early 20th century saw the appearance of narrative shorts, mainly comedies and melodramas. Popular and pioneering film makers included the Bamforths in Yorkshire, William Haggar and his family business in Wales and Frank Mottershaw whose film, A Daring Daylight Robbery, started the chase genre. The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for storylines which were already known to the audience - in particular adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens' novels.
By the mid-twenties the British film industry was losing out to heavy competition from the United States, which was helped by its much larger home market - in 1914 25% of films shown in the UK were British, but by 1926 this had fallen to 5%. The biggest star of the silent era, English comedian Charlie Chaplin, was Hollywood based.The Cinematograph Films Act 1927 was passed in order to boost local production, requiring that cinemas show a certain percentage of British films. The act was technically a success, with audiences for British
Emergent British Cinema 1880-1900
Modern cinema is generally regarded as descending from the work of the French Lumière brothers in 1892, and their show first came to London in 1896. However, the first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park in 1889 by William Friese Greene, a British inventor, who patented the process in 1890. The film is the first known instance of a projected moving image. At the end of the 19th America had started to experiment in how to get a moving image onto a screen and in Britain Friese-Green was working hard at doing much the same thing on a commercial basis. The first people to build and run a working 35 mm camera in Britain were Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres. They made the first British film ‘Incident at Clovelly Cottage’ in February 1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent.
Although the earliest British films were of everyday events, the early 20th century saw the appearance of narrative shorts, mainly comedies and melodramas. Popular and pioneering film makers included the Bamforths in Yorkshire, William Haggar and his family business in Wales and Frank Mottershaw whose film, A Daring Daylight Robbery, started the chase genre. The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for storylines which were already known to the audience - in particular adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens' novels.
By the mid-twenties the British film industry was losing out to heavy competition from the United States, which was helped by its much larger home market - in 1914 25% of films shown in the UK were British, but by 1926 this had fallen to 5%. The biggest star of the silent era, English comedian Charlie Chaplin, was Hollywood based.The Cinematograph Films Act 1927 was passed in order to boost local production, requiring that cinemas show a certain percentage of British films. The act was technically a success, with audiences for British