Greatest Sports Films History | Examples - 1 | Examples - 2 | Examples - 3 | Examples - 4 | Examples - 5 | Examples - 6 Sports Films are those that have a sports setting (football or baseball stadium, arena, or the Olympics, etc.), competitive event (the 'big game,' 'fight,' or 'competition'), and/or athlete (boxer, racer, surfer, etc.) that are central and predominant in the story. Dramatic sports films or biographies have created memorable portraits of all-American sports heroes, individual athletes, or teams who are faced with tough odds in a championship match, race or large-scale sporting event, soul-searching or physical/psychological injuries, or romantic sub-plot distractions. Fictional sports films normally present a single sport (the most common being baseball, football, basketball, and boxing), and include the training and rise (and/or fall) of the underdog or champion in the world of sports.

Sports films may be fictional or non-fictional; and they are a hybrid sub-genre category, although they are often one of the following: sports-gambling (i.e., Two For the Money (2005)) stock car racing (i.e., Days of Thunder (1990)) table-tennis (i.e., The Tao of Pong (2004)) The Most Oscar-Winning and Nominated Sports Films: The sports in films with the most nominations (and wins) include Boxing, Football, Baseball, and Billiards/Pool, followed by many other examples of sports. While many sports films have been nominated (more than listed here), only 14 films in the sub-genre (as of 2015) have ever won at the Academy Awards, with 26 trophies among them. The first sports movie to win the Best Picture Academy Award was Rocky (1976) , often on the ten-best sports film lists. The only other two were Chariots of Fire (1981, UK) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Robert DeNiro won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of real-life boxer Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980) , while Hilary Swank won a Best Actress Oscar for portraying a working-class waitress who aspired to be a professional women's boxer in Million Dollar Baby (2004). Kirk Douglas earned his first Oscar nomination playing middleweight Midge Kelly in Champion (1949). Paul Newman won Best Actor in the sequel The Color of Money (1986). And Sandra Bullock won Best Actress for her role in the semi-autobiographical sports-drama film The Blind Side (2009). This was only the second instance in which a female won the top acting honor for a sports role. The Most Oscar-Winning and Nominated Sports Films Title (and Year) A number of sports films have documented or portrayed real-life characters, such as the following: boxer James J.

Corbett (Errol Flynn) in Gentleman Jim (1942) New York Yankees baseball player Lou Gehrig (Gary Cooper) in The Pride of the Yankees (1942) baseball player Jackie Robinson as Himself in The Jackie Robinson Story (1950) - he was still an active ballplayer at the time (his career didn't end until 1955) middleweight champion Rocky Graziano (Paul Newman) in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956) boxer Jack Johnson (James Earl Jones) in The Great White Hope (1970) boxer Jake LaMotta (Robert DeNiro) in slugger Babe Ruth (John Goodman) in The Babe (1992) boxer Muhammad Ali (Will Smith) in Ali (2001) Depression-Era heavyweight boxer James J.

Braddock (Russell Crowe) in director Ron Howard's The Cinderella Man (2005) South Africa's improbable Rugby World Cup victory in 1995, in Invictus (2009), led by rugby captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), with Morgan Freeman portraying inspiring political leader Nelson Mandela Popular Football Films: Typical sports football films (with biographical elements) include the sentimental biography of the Notre Dame football coach, Lloyd Bacon's Knute Rockne: All-American (1940) . One of the best films ever made about pro-football was Ted Kotcheff's North Dallas Forty (1979) which examined the brutal fact of labor abuses and drug use in professional football - loosely basing its story on the championship Dallas Cowboys team. The tearjerking made-for-TV sports film Brian's Song (1970) used professional football as the backdrop for its sad tale of the death of real-life Chicago Bears running back (James Caan as Brian Piccolo).

Burt Reynolds starred in The Longest Yard (1974) as scandalized ex-professional football quarterback Paul Crewe in prison who must organize a team of convicts to challenge a prison-guard team (and then face the additional challenge of throwing the game). Recently, Cameron Crowe's sports romance-drama Jerry Maguire (1996), famous for the phrase "Show me the money!" starred Tom Cruise as a hard-driven major sports agent, and Academy Award-winning Cuba Gooding, Jr. as a football player. In the Oscar-nominated The Blind Side (2009), a semi-autobiographical sports drama, the plot told about Michael Oher - who was able to overcome poverty and adoption (in the family of Leigh Anne Tuohy (Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock)), to eventually become an NFL football player - an offensive lineman for the Baltimore Ravens. Baseball Sports Films: One of the best sports biopics was Sam Wood's The Pride of the Yankees (1942) with Gary Cooper in a fine performance as New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig.

In The Jackie Robinson Story (1950), the famed black player who crossed the major-league 'color-line' and joined the Brooklyn Dodgers portrayed himself. Director Barry Levinson's mythical and romanticized film about baseball titled The Natural (1984) featured Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs - a gifted baseball player who made a fairytale comeback and led his New York team to the World Series. Ron Shelton, who was an actual ex-minor leaguer, wrote and directed the intelligent comedy/drama Bull Durham (1988) which used as its backdrop minor league baseball to tell the story of a baseball groupie (Susan Sarandon), a veteran catcher (Kevin Costner) and a dim-witted pitcher named Nuke LaLoosh (Tim Robbins). The immensely popular fantasy/drama Field of Dreams (1989) concerned the creation of a ball diamond in the middle of an Iowa cornfield by a farmer (Kevin Costner).

Writer/director John Sayles' Eight Men Out (1988) dramatized the infamous episode in professional baseball of the scandalous 1919 World Series that was fixed - with its final sepia-toned shots of banned ball-player "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) in the minors. And Tommy Lee Jones starred as the legendary baseball great Ty Cobb in Shelton's Cobb (1994). The popular Penny Marshall-directed A League of Their Own (1992) portrayed a 1940s female baseball team named the Rockford Peaches in the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (including players Madonna, Geena Davis, and Rosie O'Donnell), coached by Tom Hanks! More recently, Moneyball (2011) starred Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, general manager in the early 2000s of the Oakland Athletics, who radically believed in relying on statistics alone to pick players for the team.

Basketball Sports Films: Basketball-related sports dramas are not as numerous: three notable ones were Spike Lee's He Got Game (1998) with Denzel Washington as the convict father of a promising basketball athlete, David Anspaugh's Hoosiers (1986) about an underdog 50s basketball team (coached by Gene Hackman) that won the state championship, and Ron Shelton's play-filled, trash-talking court action film White Men Can't Jump (1992) with its two basketball hustlers/con-artists (Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes) and their scenes of two-on-two tournaments. The family-friendly comedy sports-related film Space Jam (1996), the first full-length picture for Warner Bros.' Looney Tunes characters, starred real-life basketball superstar Michael Jordan AND Bugs Bunny in a blend of live-action and animation. Boxing Sports Films: Films about boxing are perhaps the most numerous sub-genre, and one of the most lucrative.

One of the best boxing films ever made, along with Robert Wise's classic film noirish The Set-Up (1949) starring Robert Ryan as aging boxer Stoker Thompson, was the realistically stark Body and Soul (1947). It starred John Garfield as boxer Charlie Davis who 'sold his soul' to unethical promoters but then had a change of heart in the last three rounds of a championship fight during which he was supposed to take a dive.

Others included King Vidor's classic The Champ (1931), an award-winning story of a prizefighter and his young son, Champion (1949) with Kirk Douglas as the young fighter, the brutal boxing drama The Harder They Fall (1956) (Humphrey Bogart's underrated last film in which he portrayed Eddie Willis - an aging, crooked sportswriter), Ralph Nelson's Requiem for a Heavyweight (1962) with Anthony Quinn as punch-drunk, washed-up professional boxer Louis 'Mountain' Rivera, Martin Ritt's The Great White Hope (1970) with James Earl Jones as black boxer Jack Jefferson, and Karyn Kusama's independent feminist film Girlfight (2000) with a great performance by Michelle Rodriguez as a struggling Brooklynite and teenage Latino boxer. David O.

Russell's Oscar-winning dramatic boxing film The Fighter (2010) told about two half-brothers who were boxers: welterweight "Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) and Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) - a boxer-turned-trainer who was plagued by drugs and addiction, but triumphed to lead Mickey to the world championship. One of the best films of the 80s decade, Raging Bull (1980) was Martin Scorsese's tough, visceral and uncompromising biopic film of the rise and fall of prizefighter Jake La Motta with a remarkable performance by actor Robert DeNiro. The stylized scenes in the ring included flying blood and sweat, exaggerated flashbulb camera flashes, slow-motion and violent punching sounds. The all-American fictional, underdog Philadelphia boxing hero Rocky Balboa in the populist, feel-good, Oscar-winning drama Rocky (1976) series emerged as the peak boxing-film series, with a reprised film in the next decade, Rocky Balboa (2006) and another sequel in the following decade, Creed (2015): Rocky V (1990) - dir. John G.

Avildsen Other Sports Films: Kevin Costner portrayed a talented pro golfer in Ron Shelton's romantic sports film Tin Cup (1996). Although a comedy, Caddyshack (1980) was about an elitist country club for golf, a mischievous green-destroying gopher, and a crazed groundskeeper (Bill Murray). And Paul Newman portrayed swaggering, upstart poolshark gambler Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler (1961) in the world of professional pool, shooting against the great champ Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason). Newman reprised his role in Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986). Autoracing in the Daytona 500 was featured in the action/drama Days of Thunder (1990). Ron Howard's Rush (2013) told of the intense 1970s rivalry between two Formula One competitive speed-racers: handsome playboy James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Austrian opponent Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl). The most successful car-racing film was Pixar's/Disney's animated Cars (2006).

And one of the most memorable ice hockey films was Slap Shot (1977), with Paul Newman as inspiring player-coach Reg Dunlop of a minor-league team. One of the most successful ice-hockey films was Miracle (2004), the true story of the 1980s US Olympic hockey team, coached by Herb Brooks (Kurt Russell), who led the team to improbable victory over the Russians. The Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire (1981) told the parallel stories of two English runners (one a devout Protestant, the other Jewish) competing in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Downhill Racer (1969) starred Robert Redford as an American downhill skier training to become an Olympic superstar.

Some of the "Worst" Sports Films: Other than some of the most classic and best sports films, there are also those that are sometimes considered the 'worst' sports-related films of all time, such as: The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978), a remake (the third film in the series) of the 1975 film with Walter Matthau, starring Tony Curtis as the coach (baseball) The Main Event (1979), a romantic comedy with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal (boxing) The Slugger's Wife (1985), a romantic drama with Michael O'Keefe and Rebecca DeMornay (pro-baseball) Amazing Grace and Chuck (1987) (Little League baseball, the NBA, other sports stars, and anti-nuclear war) Caddyshack II (1988), a sequel to the 1980 hit (golf) Rocky V (1990) , the fifth film in the never-ending series (boxing) The Babe (1992), with John Goodman (baseball) The Fan (1996), with Robert DeNiro as a fanatical fan (base

ball) Rollerball (2001), a remake of the 1975 classic (futuristic sports) 12 Films About Black History | IndieWire 12 Films About Black History 12 Films About Black History Talk This Friday sees the release of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler,” ( our review ) the true story of Eugene Allen (renamed Cecil Gaines for the film), an African-American butler who served multiple presidents through several generations in the White House.

As played by Forest Whitaker, Gaines bears witness to pivotal moments in the nation’s evolution, watching as the intersection of American history and black history reveals truths about himself and his surroundings, understanding both where he’s been, and where he’s going. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, films explicitly about black history in America are few and far between. Many find the stories mediated through the eyes of a white protagonist to better sell to a wider (read: whiter) audience. Others rely on common populist crutches that limit black advancement to the field of music or sports. As a result, while the big screen undoubtedly lends itself to capturing the scope and breadth of the black American experience, there’s a long list of fantastic films that were relegated to television (for budgeting or target-marketing reasons) that document African-American history with panache, titles like “Roots,” “The Rosa Parks Story,” “Boycott,” "Separate But Equal," "Thurgood" and “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge.” But as prestige-y and high-profile as "Lee Daniels’ The Butler" is, we decided to take a peek at a variety of big screen titles that deal with similarly real people and events from black U.S. history.

It remains difficult to get funding for these types of films today, mostly because it remains difficult to get funding for any type of film that doesn’t rely on explosions or capes. But despite everything, through the years, a number of filmmakers have taken a serious-minded, intense approach to the struggles and victories of the black American, from the slave era to today. Some are undoubtedly more successful than others, but here are twelve big-screen films that at least attempted to give cinematic voice to some historical aspect of the black experience in America. “Ali” (2001) Movies have been made about Muhammad Ali before and since, but often they kowtow to his notorious vanity and outsized charisma, placing him at the center of the universe. Michael Mann remains the only filmmaker thus far to understand that Ali was part of a rich tapestry of an extraordinary era of black politics and social change, a titan attempting to stand straight in the middle of a tempest. Most were bewildered when “Ali” opened in 2001, as it pictures the boxer in a deeply lyrical manner, framing him against a live performance by Sam Cooke, suggesting that the story we were about to see was deeply rooted within a complex American legacy.

Will Smith’s Ali is, like the inspiration, handsome and brash, big and proud—it’s unquestionably the best thing the former Fresh Prince has ever done. Mann’s film is an ensemble piece, however, not just for Smith but also for Ali. The film picks up when he’s already a heavyweight champion, with the name Cassius Clay, before he meets Elijah Muhammad (Albert Hall), who claims he must now be Muhammad Ali and convert to Islam. Thus begins the most tumultuous era of Ali’s life, as he refuses to volunteer for the Vietnam War (the subject of the upcoming Stephen Frears documentary "Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight"), and becomes involved with several extramarital affairs while carrying on with the peripheral characters of his life, including famed sportscaster Howard Cosell (Jon Voight) and trainers Drew Bundini Brown (Jamie Foxx) and Angelo Dundee (Ron Silver). Like Ali himself, Mann’s film floats like a butterfly, but in lieu of a sting, it levitates, presenting, through the prism of Ali’s life, a moment when America was forced to question their allies and heroes, and face the truths about an increasingly racially diversified world.

“Amistad” (1997) There was a certain inevitable failure to Steven Spielberg taking on “Amistad” as a directorial project. Years before, he had dealt with negativity from the black community for making “The Color Purple.” He was therefore under pressure to produce a great picture, particularly given the needs of the still-fresh DreamWorks he had just co-founded, and also to right previous wrongs. The film follows a major Supreme Court case to determine the rights of rebellious slaves who, in 1841, led a mutiny of their slave ship headed to Cuba, only to end up on American soil. The slaves are arrested, as the courts attempt to determine who should be in true possession of the boat: slavery is still legal in America, but the international slave trade had already long been outlawed. Spielberg’s film feels as much about the institution of slavery itself as it does about the truth of the case, which (as seen in the film) involved a complex series of restrictions on citizenship that clashed with common perceptions about slaves on American soil.

“Amistad” is credited with the discovery of the talented Djimon Honsou, but it features a number of unconvincing casting choices, including Matthew McConaughey as attorney Roger Baldwin, just one year after defending Samuel L. Jackson for a revenge murder in “A Time To Kill.” Unfortunately, the structure of Spielberg’s film manages to maintain the second-citizen status of blacks within the trial, compounded by a number of European actors playing American figures (including two presidents played by Brits) to suggest what historical pictures have always illustrated as a representation hierarchy: if you were to judge by films, you’d assume all of human history originated from the United Kingdom. Oscar bait though it may have been (the film received three Academy Award nominations) it still represents a significant story wherein the architects of our nation were forced to question their prejudices. “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars And Motor Kings” (1976) The Negro Leagues of the 1930s were a sore spot for the history of social progress in sports, given that even those who supported integration were content with the entertainment level provided by segregated baseball.

John Badham’s classic sports comedy, however, isn’t concerned with the racial aspect of the Negro Leagues, but the business end: charming pitcher Bingo Long (Billy Dee Williams) is not the only player who rankles under the harsh and underwhelming salaries of Negro League stars, but he’s the first one to propose that a group of their best players secede instead. His Traveling All-Stars And Motor Kings become more of a sideshow than a league, going from town to town and dividing the box office receipts for themselves, while also sapping a chunk of the profit from their former bosses and current competitors. “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars And Motor Kings” opts not to focus on the racial strife and ugliness that led to the compartmentalization of black athletes, but the financial discrepancies, taking a look at an equal pay situation through the prism of a crowd-pleasing comedy where dangerous racist elements keep surfacing, taking a lighthearted view at a very basic problem regarding segregation that forced some to think creatively.

“Get On The Bus” (1996) The historic Million Man March was bound to result in a film at some point, and considering the amount of extras required, you’d think it would be a massive undertaking. Instead, Spike Lee hustled to get his version of the story onscreen only one year later, by taking an opposite tack: portraying a trip to the event, an intimate bus ride that allows us to witness the spectrum of politically motivated African-American men in the mid-’90s. Lee’s film, shot on the fly with a minor budget, is instead something of a theater piece, not indicative of the racially charged anger that critics claim was a major part of Lee’s stronger films, but showcasing a warmer, more human view of strangers united by a skin color. It’s a bit of a cheat that Lee finds a surrogate in a film student played by Hill Harper, who introduces conversation topics bound to cause debate and disharmony amongst the group, giving Lee and screenwriter Reggie Rock Bythewood a chance to soapbox about topics like the O.J. Simpson verdict. But the enclosed space also grants a showcase for actors like Charles S.

Dutton and the late Bernie Mac, while brief stops along the way to allow for standout appearances from Richard Belzer and Wendell Pierce, adding to the dramatic tempest at the center of this rich, ultimately inclusive film. “Glory” (1989) There’s a reason some filmmakers are labeled as being practitioners of the same concepts and ideas over and over again: Edward Zwick earned criticism for following “Glory” with films like “The Last Samurai” and “Blood Diamond,” capturing the experience of foreigners and minorities through the eyes of a white, often American, protagonist. Perhaps that observation wouldn’t be so cutting were it not for the ill-fated casting of Matthew Broderick, a fine comedic performer, in the pivotal role of Colonel Shaw here. Broderick’s been classically known as a lightweight dramatic actor with a youthful appearance, and selecting him to front this Civil War drama about the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry severely undermines the drama implicit in Shaw’s task. The character here is placed in charge of the group, a battalion of black soldiers that represented the first such group of black soldiers in American history.

As an escaped slave, a young Denzel Washington , gives an intense, spirited performance, one that earned him his first Academy Award and paved the way for an illustrious career to come; Broderick would not be the last minor actor he would blow off the screen. “Glory” is otherwise an admirably handsome historical epic, with large-scale battles that cemented Zwick as a filmmaker who could work with massive casts and significant budgets, but it also helped tell a story of the very first time following the Emancipation Proclamation that whites were legally forced to place their lives in the hands of their fellow Americans of a different skin color. “The Jackie Robinson Story”/”42” (1950/2013) The two more prominent retellings of this crucial moment in black history take decidedly different approaches in bringing the story of the first black major league baseball player to the screen. The first one, in fact, cheats by going straight to the source: Robinson is tasked with playing himself in this meat-and-potatoes biopic.

In an approach that marks Robinson as blessed since youth, we watch him makes his way up the ranks, dominating while maintaining a graceful, intense silence, responding to adversity as simply another wave of athletic competition keeping him from success on the diamond. The newer film, which features Chadwick Boseman as the color barrier-breaking second baseman, focuses more on the racial struggles faced by the player, while also illustrating how he was both passionate and headstrong enough to know that the rest of the world was socially a bit behind in accepting progress in both the sport and in life. Boseman is terrific, ironically much more engaging than the stiff Robinson, and the contemporary film doesn’t feel compromised in its address of racial issues, particularly in one upsetting scene where a rival manager becomes a catcalling jerk in the middle of the game, severely disrupting whatever peaceful balance exists between Robinson and other players. Both films show that, in order to rise above the rancor, Robinson needed to get out there and play ball, opening the floodgates for diversity on the field that led to baseball being recognized as America’s pastime, and a pivotal part of our national identity.

“Malcolm X” (1992) It took a village to get “Malcolm X” up and running at Warner Bros. Such are the obstacles facing films about black American history, with financiers concerned about "niche" material and a narrow appreciation of history among the audience, black or otherwise. “Malcolm X” was a different beast, however, one that refused to shut down, as director Spike Lee pooled in some of his own money while receiving contributions from almost every major black celebrity to tell the story of the incendiary Civil Rights leader. Lee’s film is unique because of how it dispenses with standard biopic trappings, instead depicting a colorful black culture that provides a playground for handsome young Malcolm Little, in a star turn by Denzel Washington that remains one of the best performances to never be honored with an Academy Award. Little’s rise in the criminal underworld results in a broken spirit behind bars, which allows for a rocky conversion to Islam, sowing the seeds for a tumultuous time spent speaking on behalf of black Americans, urging them to come together and rise up against white oppressors.

Lee makes sure to depict Malcolm’s evolving views, just as he examines the paranoia of his last days, surrounded by prying eyes and invasive forces concentrated on subversive elements. The struggle to bring “Malcolm X” to the big screen was a worthy one, resulting in a vital, lively picture that demonstrates Malcolm X as a fiery, multi-dimensional personality, one who redefined what it was like to be black in America. It also provided a showcase for a never-better Washington, one that cemented his status as one of the great actors of his generation; in “Malcolm X” he’s exciting, handsome, and ultimately moving as a charismatic firebrand who sought change during politically troubled times. “Night Catches Us” (2010) It’s been years since Marcus (Anthony Mackie) has visited Philadelphia, but everyone’s memory remains fresh, and bitter. Marcus was a former Black Panther, but is known locally as a snitch, rolling over on a fellow radical who ended up dying during an arrest. With hostility from even his brother (Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter), Marcus finds no sanctuary anywhere but in the arms of the widow of the man he outed (Kerry Washington).

Making amends, he befriends her and her daughter, but soon the relationship grows more intense; when the local police think they can hit Marcus up for another favor, it creates a tension that results in him questioning his own identity and what constitutes social responsibility, both to the people around him and to the racial realities that still surround a black man in 1976. Tanya Hamilton’s underseen 2010 drama takes its cues from real-life incidents, but the line between fact and fiction is more blurred than in most examples here, as she also creates a personal, intimate portrayal of the later generations of Black Panthers, those forced to pay for the actions of their predecessors while still staying true to their communities. With an intense score from The Roots, the picture also features a standout role from Mackie, who proves to be deserving of more widely seen work, giving a performance that respects the moral ambiguity of a politically dangerous moment in time.

"Ghosts of Mississippi" (1996) Directed by Rob Reiner with an astonishing lack of subtlety, the undoubtedly well-meaning but even now dated-feeling “Ghosts of Mississippi” tells the story of the decades-long lead up to the 1994 trial and eventual conviction of unrepentant racist Byron De La Beckwith (a snarling, revolting James Woods) for the murder of black civil rights activist Medgar Evers over 30 years before. A little like Alan Parker’s controversial, incendiary (and much more effective, to the point of rage-inducing) “Mississippi Burning”—which is loosely based on a case referenced in ‘Ghosts,’ in fact—Reiner’s film positions the drama as more of a fight between Good White Guys and Bad White Guys, leaving not a lot of room for any of the black cast members to breathe, let alone get in some decent characterization. It’s a great pity here, as Evers’ widow is very strongly portrayed by Whoopi Goldberg, who steals every one of her scenes with her mixture of stoic, wry intelligence and tamped-down righteous rage.

But no, what we’re really asked to invest in is lawyer Bobby deLaughter’s (Alec Baldwin) journey from Dixie-singing assistant DA married to the kind of blonde Southern bigot who’s always played by Virginia Madsen and who sleeps with a bow in her hair, to passionate firebrand crusader married to a supportively forward-thinking nurse. Perhaps it’s unfair to blame a film so almost mawkishly mired in its own good intentions, for the focus of the story it chooses. But it is telling that we have this glossy, A-list Hollywood movie about Bobby deLaughter, the lawyer who convicted the killer of Medgar Evers, but nothing truly comparable about Evers himself. Streets, statues and songs, yes, but movies, no. Instead we have “Ghosts of Mississippi” and its terrible surfeit of cheesy closeups of Alec Baldwin Being Moved. “Panther” (1995) Mario Van Peebles ’ third film chronicles the beginnings of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, depicting the early days of the organization as a way for urban community members to stand their ground in the face of bigotry and police brutality.

While the focus is placed on several historically well-known members of the party (primarily Marcus Chong as Huey P. Newton), the film is an ensemble, illustrated by a fakeout introduction that allows us to meet a young child who dies shortly after the opening credits, fooling us into thinking we would watch his coming-of-age. “Panther” is an intense experience, pitting the members of the party against each other as they disagree regarding certain principles, questioning the decision to be non-violent when bodies start to hit the pavement, cutting down the numbers of the separate Panther clans. But the picture’s aim becomes one of militance in the third act. The shady white law enforcement agents spying on the organization and plotting turn out to be a true-life rogue FBI faction, one whom the movie credits with funneling narcotics into inner city environments and crippling radical revolutionary groups. It’s a popular theory, the sort you could never squeeze into a wide release movie today, a disappointing but curious fact.

“Panther” isn’t largely discussed today, but it boasts a who’s-who of young stars, including surprisingly strong dramatic turns from Chris Rock and Bobby Brown, though to see a more pointed, less historically-based film that makes similar points, it’s highly recommended to seek out “The Spook Who Sat By The Door.” “ Red Tails ” (2011) On paper, what Anthony Hemingway and George Lucas’ “Red Tails” does is illustrate the struggles and adventures of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-black pilots deployed during World War II to navigate our airborne battles in Italy as the war raged on from the ground level. But the picture is primarily focused on being a throwback to the war serials of yesterday, where heroes climbed into the cockpit and pulled off death-defying stunts to crush the Kraut opposition while becoming aviation legends in their own right.

Hawks portrayed by should-be stars Nate Parker and David Oyelowo headline a cast of characters that, when not battling the enemy, are trading barbs and taking instructions in a manner completely removed from contemporary sensibilities: these are clean-cut heroes, each with certain skeletons in their closet but all joining forces against a common enemy while coping with the ignorant racism from their white peers. The corniness of “Red Tails” in its out-of-time simplicity and hoary clichés feels more conceptual than organic, particularly when matched with the cutting-edge technology that allows for some of the more compelling aerial dogfights ever captured on film. But as great as the significance is that we’re watching the very first black pilots in flight, the Lucasfilms production seems more concerned with old-school Hollywood spectacle, one that simply replaces the hue of the characters involved.

"Rosewood" (1997) Ostensibly a dramatization of a real-life 1923 massacre that left an entire Florida community burned to the ground (and at least a half dozen African Americans dead), John Singleton‘s "Rosewood," an unexpected follow-up to his romantic drama "Higher Learning," is a history lesson dressed up with occasional sentimentality (complete with a "sweeping" score by John Williams) and a host of boldly stylistic flourishes. A costly box office flop at the time of its release, "Rosewood" features a fine lead performance by Ving Rhames, who plays a drifter and World War I veteran who, while passing through the town of Rosewood, hears the tale a white woman spins about a black man abusing her. Fearing for his life, Rhames leaves town while the hysteria and lynch mob mentality takes over. (Eventually he comes back, to kill a bunch of motherfuckers.) At the time, Singleton was known for his urban dramas, but here he makes the past come alive via a host of pop culture references to action movies past, everything from classic westerns to the Hong Kong bullet ballets of John Woo.

"Rosewood" is occasionally overwrought and came under fire for its deviations from historical fact, but more often than not it’s a riveting, beautifully told story that has enough visual dazzle and kinetic energy to keep even the most jaded viewer engaged. Its supporting cast is also unimpeachable and features early work by Don Cheadle alongside established actors like Jon Voight, Michael Rooker and Robert Patrick. While the film concerns a town that’s burned down, some of the actors showcase the dangers of chewing scenery. Moving and memorable, "Rosewood" was unfairly overlooked and deserves a second look, at least while the rest of Singleton’s body is being reassessed. Of course this is merely scratching the surface of even this most underrepresented of topics.

Black history is obviously not confined to the U.S., though we took that as our focus, but with a more international flavor there are diverse examples of films that deal with events of historical importance from crowd-pleasers like "Cool Runnings," to explosive dramas that shed light on underreported incidents like ‘Hotel Rwanda" and Richard Attenborough‘s "Cry Freedom" to even old-school epics like "Zulu" and the cottage industry around Nelson Mandela ("Goodbye Bafana," "Invictus," "Winnie Mandela" and the upcoming "Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom"). Others may have been set against historical U.S.

backdrops, but were themselves fiction, or heavily fictionalized dramas which discounted some of the more obvious prestige pics like "Beloved," "The Color Purple," "The Great White Hope," "The Spook Who Sat By The Door," even "Gone With the Wind" and Quentin Tarantino‘s controversial "Django Unchained." And, ultimately, some were just "Driving Miss Daisy." –Gabe Toro, with Jessica Kiang, Drew Taylor Movie History - Filmbug Movie History Movies developed gradually from a carnival novelty to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century. Motion picture films have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics. The Birth of Film William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, chief engineer with the Edison Laboratories, is credited with the invention of a practicable form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. Celluloid blocks were thinly sliced, the slice marks were then removed with heated pressure plates. After this, the celluloid strips were coated with a photosensitive gelatin emulsion.

In 1893 at the Chicago World Fair Thomas Edison introduced to the public two pioneering inventions based on this innovation: the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope. The latter was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of Dickson's celluloid film (powered by an electric motor) was backlit by an incandescent lamp and seen through a magnifying lens. The spectator neared an eye piece. Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets photographed by Dickson, in Edison's "Black Maria" studio. These sequences recorded mundane events (such as Fred Ott's Sneeze, 1894) as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations. Kinetoscope parlors soon spread successfully to Europe. Edison, however, never attempted to patent these instruments on the other side of the Atlantic, since they relied so greatly on previous experiments and innovations from Britain and Europe. This enabled the development of imitations, such as the camera devised by British electrician and scientific instrument maker Robert William Paul and his partner Birt Acres.

Paul had the idea of displaying moving pictures for group audiences, rather than just to individual viewers, and invented a film projector, giving his first public showing in 1895. At about the same time, in France, Auguste and Louis Lumiï¿½re invented the cinematograph, a portable, three-in-one device: camera, printer, and projector. In late 1895 in Paris, father Antoine Lumiï¿½re began exhibitions of projected films before the paying public, beginning the general conversion of the medium to projection (Cook, 1990). They quickly became Europe's main producers with their actualitï¿½s like Workers Leaving the Lumiï¿½re Factory and comic vignettes like The Sprinkler Sprinkled (both 1895). Even Edison, initially dismissive of projection, joined the trend with the Vitascope within less than six months. The first public motion-picture film presentation in Europe, though, belongs to Max and Emil Skladanowsky of Berlin, who projected with their apparatus "Bioscop", a flickerfree duplex construction, November 1 through 31, 1895.

Still older, May, 1895, was Lauste in the U. S. A. with an Eidoloscope which he devised for the Latham family. The first public screening of film ever is due to Jean Aimï¿½ "Acme" Le Roy, a French photographer. On February 5, 1894, his 40th birthday, he presented his "Marvellous Cinematograph" to a group of around twenty show business men in New York City. The movies of the time were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique: no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, stagey compositions. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to mushroom before the end of the century, in countries around the world.

The Silent Era Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles. Early developments in technique, form and business Paris stage magician Georges Mï¿½liï¿½s began shooting and exhibiting films in 1896. His stock-in-trade became films of fantasy and the bizarre, including A Trip to the Moon (1902), possibly the first movie to portray space travel. He pioneered many of the fundamental special effects techniques used in movies for most of the twentieth century, demonstrating that film had unprecedented power to distort visible reality rather than just faithfully recording it (Cook, 1990). He also led the way in making multi-scene narratives as long as fifteen minutes. Edwin S. Porter, Edison's leading director in these years, pushed forward the sophistication of film editing in works like Life of an American Fireman and the first movie Western, The Great Train Robbery (both 1903).

Porter arguably discovered that the basic unit of structure in a film is the shot, rather than the scene (the basic unit of structure in a play). These helped establish the medium as more than a fad and encouraged the increase of nickelodeons, the first permanent movie theaters ("The oldest cinema in the world still in operation today is the Pionier Cinema which opened as the Helios on the 26 September 1909 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland)" ï¿½ Guinness World Records). There were 10,000 in the U.S. alone by 1908 (Cook, 1990). The previously anarchic industry increasingly became major business, which encouraged consolidation. The French Pathï¿½ Frï¿½res company achieved a dominant position worldwide through methods like control of key patents and ownership of theaters. In the U.S., Edison led the creation of the Motion Picture Patents Company, which achieved a brief, virtual monopoly there, using not just aggressive business tactics but sometimes violent intimidation against independent competitors (Parkinson, 1995).

Rise of the feature film and film as art The standard length of a film remained one reel, or about ten to fifteen minutes, through the first decade of the century, partly based on producers' assumptions about the attention spans of their still largely working class audiences. The Australian film The Story of the Kelly Gang (also screened as Ned Kelly and His Gang) is widely regarded as the world's first "feature length" film. Its 80 minute running time was unprecedented when it was released in 1906. In 1906 Dan Barry and Charles Tait of Melbourne produced and directed 'The Story of the Kelly Gang.' It wasnï¿½t until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia. Soon Europe created multiple-reel period extravaganzas that were even longer. With international box office successes like Queen Elizabeth (France, 1912), Quo Vadis? (Italy, 1913) and Cabiria (Italy, 1914), the feature film began to replace the short as the cinema's central form. Leading this trend in America was director D.W.

Griffith with his historical epics The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). Unprecedented in scale, they also did much to fix the developing codes of editing and visual storytelling that remain the foundation of mainstream film grammar. The former film was also notable as perhaps the first to inspire widespread racial controversy. Along with a boom in high-toned literary adaptations, these trends began to make the movies a respectable diversion for the middle class and gain them recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century. In France brothers Lafitte in 1907. created so-called Films d'art. They were supposed to draw the higher classes of society into movie theaters. The more educated classes thought that film was just for uneducated people and preferred traditional theater. Films d'art were theater plays shot with camera and played in movie theaters. People didn't like them and the 'experiment' showed that film has its own expressive language different from theater. Hollywood triumphant Until this point, the cinemas of France and Italy had been the most globally popular and powerful.

But the United States was already gaining quickly when World War I (1914-1918) caused a devastating interruption in the European film industries. The American industry, or "Hollywood," as it was becoming known after its new geographical center in California, gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: movie factory for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and controlling the market in many of them. By the 1920s, the U.S. reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total (Eyman, 1997). The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow, to cite just a few examples, made these performersï¿½ faces well-known on every continent. The Western visual norm that would become classical continuity editing was developed and exported - although its adoption was slower in some non-Western countries without strong realist traditions in art and drama, such as Japan.

This development was contemporary with the growth of the studio system and its greatest publicity method, the star system, which characterized American film for decades to come and provided models for other movie industries. The studiosï¿½ efficient, top-down control over all stages of their product enabled a new and ever-growing level of lavish production and technical sophistication. At the same time, the systemï¿½s commercial regimentation and focus on glamorous escapism discouraged daring and ambition beyond a certain degree, a prime example being the brief but still legendary directing career of the iconoclastic Erich von Stroheim in the late teens and the ï¿½20s. World film at the peak of the silents But even now, the dominance of mainstream Hollywood entertainment wasnï¿½t as strong as it would be, and alternatives were still widely seen and influential. In 1915, after a ban was ended on foreign imports in France the early Hollywood fare inspired the birth of the cinematic avant-garde. A group of filmmakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing. The trend became known as French Impressionist Cinema. Germany was Americaï¿½s strongest competitor.

Its most distinctive contribution was the dark, hallucinatory worlds of German Expressionism, which advanced the power of anti-realistic presentation to put internal states of mind onscreen, as well as strongly influenced the emerging horror genre. The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called dialectical or intellectual montage, which strove to make non-linear, often violently clashing, images express ideas and provoke emotional and intellectual reactions in the viewer. Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent film was made in India by Dadasaheb Phalke, considered to be the Father of Indian Cinema. The film was the period piece Raja Harishchandra (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period films. By the next decade the output of Indian Cinema was an average of 27 films per year. The cultural avant gardes of a number of countries worked with experimental films, mostly shorts, that completely abandoned linear narrative and embraced abstraction, pure aestheticism and the irrational subconscious, most famously in the early work of Spanish surrealist Luis Buï¿½uel.

In some ways, in fact, this decade marked the first serious split between mainstream, "popular" film and "art" film. But even within the mainstream, refinement was rapid, bringing silent film to what would turn out to be its aesthetic summit. The possibilities of cinematography kept increasing as cameras became more mobile (thanks to new booms and dollies) and film stocks more sensitive and versatile. Screen acting became more of a craft, without its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism. As visual eloquence increased, reliance on intertitles decreased; the occasional film, such as F.W. Murnauï¿½s The Last Laugh (Germany, 1926) even eschewed them altogether. Paradoxically, at about this time, the silent cinema period ended. The Sound Era Experimentation with sound film technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome (Eyman, 1997). In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros.

introduced the "Vitaphone" system, producing short films of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. During late 1927, Warners released The Jazz Singer, which was mostly silent but contained the first synchronized dialogue (and singing) in a feature film. It was a great success, as were follow-ups like Warners' The Lights of New York (1928), the first all-synchronized-sound feature. The early sound-on-disc processes such as Vitaphone were soon superseded by sound-on-film methods like Fox Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA Photophone. The trend convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that "talking pictures", or "talkies," were the future. Industry impact of sound The change was remarkably swift. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be standardized). Total changeover was slightly slower in the rest of the world, principally for economic reasons.

Cultural reasons were also a factor in countries like China and Japan, where silents co-existed successfully with sound well into the 1930s, indeed producing what would be some of the most revered classics in those countries, like Wu Yonggang's The Goddess (China, 1934) and Yasujiro Ozu's I Was Born, But... (Japan, 1932). But even in Japan, a figure such as the benshi, the live narrator who was a major part of Japanese silent cinema, found his acting career was ending. Sound further tightened the grip of major studios in numerous countries: the vast expense of the transition overwhelmed smaller competitors, while the novelty of sound lured vastly larger audiences for those producers that remained. In the case of the U.S., some historians credit sound with saving the Hollywood studio system in the face of the Great Depression (Parkinson, 1995). Thus began what is now often called "The Golden Age of Hollywood," which refers roughly to the period beginning with the introduction of sound until the late 1940s. The American cinema reached its peak of efficiently manufactured glamour and global appeal during this period.

The top actors of the era are now thought of as the classic movie stars, such as Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart and the greatest box office draw of the 1930s, child performer Shirley Temple. Creative impact of sound Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in some ways, film briefly reverted to the conditions of its earliest days. The late '20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in front of and behind the camera struggled with the stringent limitations of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to utilize the new medium. Many stage performers, directors and writers were introduced to cinema as producers sought personnel experienced in dialogue-based storytelling. Many major silent filmmakers and actors were unable to adjust and found their careers severely curtailed or even ended. This awkward period was fairly short-lived.

1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with Chinatown Nights and The Man I Love, Rouben Mamoulian with Applause, Alfred Hitchcock with Blackmail (Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of sound (Eyman, 1997). In this, they both benefited from, and pushed further, technical advances in microphones and cameras, and capabilities for editing and post-synchronizing sound (rather than recording all sound directly at the time of filming). Sound films emphasized and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the musical film was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was The Broadway Melody (1929) and the form would find its first major creator in choreographer/director Busby Berkeley (42nd Street, 1933, Dames, 1934). In France, avant-garde director Renï¿½ Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like Under the Roofs of Paris (1930) and Le Million (1931).

The trend thrived best in India, where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama made the musical the basic form of most sound movies (Cook, 1990); virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian popular cinema would nevertheless become the world's most prolific. (See also Bollywood.) At this time, American gangster films like Little Caesar and Wellman's The Public Enemy (both 1931) became popular. Dialogue now took precedence over "slapstick" in Hollywood comedies: the fast-paced, witty banter of The Front Page (1931) or It Happened One Night (1934), the sexual double entrendres of Mae West (She Done Him Wrong, 1933) or the often subversively anarchic nonsense talk of the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup, 1933). 1939, a major year for American cinema, brought such films as like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with The Wind.

The 1940s: the war and post-war years The desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the film industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like Forty-Ninth Parallel (1941), Went the Day Well? (1942), The Way Ahead (1944) and Noel Coward and David Lean's celebrated naval film In Which We Serve in 1942 , which won a special Academy Award. These existed alongside more flamboyant films like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944) and A Matter of Life and Death (1946), as well as Laurence Olivier's 1944 film Henry V, based on the Shakespearean history Henry V. The onset of US involvement in WWII also brought a proliferation of movies as both patriotism and propaganda. American propaganda movies included Desperate Journey, Mrs. Miniver, Forever and a Day and Objective Burma.

Notable American films from the war years include the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine (1943), scripted by Dashiell Hammett; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's direction of a script by Thornton Wilder; the George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney, and the immensely popular Casablanca, with Humphrey Bogart. Bogart would star in 36 films between 1934 and 1942 including John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), one of the first movies now considered a classic film noir. The strictures of wartime also brought an interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's Gainsborough melodramas (including The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady), and films like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, I Married a Witch and Blithe Spirit. Val Lewton also produced a series of atmospheric and influential small-budget horror films, some of the more famous examples being Cat People, Isle of the Dead (film) and The Body Snatcher.

The decade probably also saw the so-called "women's pictures," such as Now, Voyager, Random Harvest and Mildred Pierce at the peak of their popularity. 1946 saw RKO Radio releasing It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra. Soldiers returning from the war would provide the inspiration for films like The Best Years of Our Lives, and many of those in the film industry had served in some capacity during the war. Samuel Fuller's experiences in WWII would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One. The Actor's Studio was founded in October 1947 by Elia Kazan, Robert Lewis, and Cheryl Crawford, and the same year Oskar Fischinger filmed Motion Painting No. 1. In 1943, Ossessione was screened in Italy, marking the beginning of Italian neorealism. Major films of this type during the 1940s included Bicycle Thieves, Rome, Open City, and La Terra Trema. In 1952 Umberto D was released, usually considered the last film of this type.

In the late 1940s, in Britain, Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including Whisky Galore!, Passport to Pimlico, Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Man in the White Suit, and Carol Reed directed his influential thrillers Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. David Lean was also rapidly becoming a force in world cinema with Brief Encounter and his Dickens adaptations Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger would experience the best of their creative partnership with films like Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes. The 1950s The House Un-American Activities Committee investigated Hollywood in the early 1950s. Protested by the Hollywood Ten before the committee, the hearings resulted in the blacklisting of many actors, writers and directors, including Chayefsky, Charlie Chaplin, and Dalton Trumbo, and many of these fled to Europe, especially the United Kingdom. The Cold War era zeitgeist translated into a type of near-paranoia manifested in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The War of the Worlds); and communist fifth columnists, (The Manchurian Candidate).

During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was also threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some movie theatres would bankrupt and close. The demise of the "studio system" spurred the self-commentary of films like Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). In 1950, the Lettrists avante-gardists caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Treatise on Slime and Eternity was screened. After their criticism of Charlie Chaplin and split with the movement, the Ultra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they showed their new hypergraphical techniques. The most notorious film is Guy Debord's Bombs in Favor of DeSade of 1952. Distressed by the increasing number of closed theatres, studios and companies would find new and innovative ways to bring audiences back. These included attempts to literally widen their appeal with new screen formats. Cinemascope, which would remain a 20th Century Fox distinction until 1967 , was announced with 1953's The Robe.

VistaVision, Cinerama, boasted a "bigger is better" approach to marketing movies to a dwindling US audience. This resulted in the revival of epic films to take advantage of the new big screen formats. Some of the most successful examples of these Biblical and historical spectaculars include The Ten Commandments (1956), The Vikings (1958), Ben-Hur (1959), Spartacus (1960) and El Cid (1961). Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The fad for 3-D film would last for only two years, 1952-1954, and helped sell House of Wax and Creature from the Black Lagoon. Producer William Castle would tout films featuring "Emergo" "Percepto", the first of a series of gimmicks that would remain popular marketing tools for Castle and others throughout the 1960s.

In the U.S., a post-WW2 tendency toward questioning the establishment and societal norms and the early activism of the Civil Rights Movement was reflected in Hollywood films such as Blackboard Jungle (1955), On the Waterfront (1954), Paddy Chayefsky's Marty and Reginald Rose's 12 Angry Men (1957). Disney's Sleeping Beauty was released on January 29, 1959 by The Walt Disney Company after nearly a decade in production. Across the globe, the 1950s marked a very productive period for Indian Cinema, with more than 200 films being made. Indian films also gained greater recognition through films like Pather Panchali (1955), from critically acclaimed Academy Award winning director Satyajit Ray. Television began competing seriously with films projected in theatres, but surprisingly it promoted more moviegoing rather than curtailing it. 1960s 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 and Cinecittï¿½ in Rome.

"Hollywood" movies were still largely aimed at family audiences, and it was often the more old-fashioned films that produced the studios' biggest successes. Productions like Mary Poppins (1964), My Fair Lady (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) were among the biggest money-makers of the decade. The growth in independent producers and production companies, and the increase in the power of individual actors also contributed to the decline of traditional Hollywood studio production. There was also an increasing awareness of foreign language cinema during this period. During the late 1950s and 1960s the French New Wave directors such as Franï¿½ois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard produced films such as Les quatre cents coups and Jules et Jim which broke the rules of Hollywood cinema's narrative structure. As well, audiences were becoming aware of Italian films like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the stark dramas of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman. In Britain, the "Free Cinema" of Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson and others lead to a group of realistic and innovative dramas including Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and This Sporting Life.

Other British films such as Repulsion, Darling, Alfie, Blowup and Georgy Girl (all in 1965-1966) helped to reduce prohibitions sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the James Bond films, beginning with Dr. No in 1962 would render the series popular worldwide. During the 1960s, Ousmane Sembï¿½ne produced several French- and Wolof-language films and became the 'father' of African Cinema. In Latin America the dominance of the "Hollywood" model was challenged by many film makers. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Gettino called for a politically engaged Third Cinema in contrast to Hollywood and the European auteur cinema. In documentary film the sixties saw the blossoming of Direct Cinema, an observational style of film making as well as the advent of more overtly partisan films like In the Year of the Pig about the Vietnam War by Emile de Antonio.

By the late 1960s however, Hollywood producers were beginning to create more innovative films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Graduate (1967), Midnight Cowboy (1969), and The Wild Bunch (1969). Bonnie and Clyde is often considered the beginning of the so-called New Hollywood. 1970s: The 'New Hollywood' or Post-classical cinema 'The New Hollywood' and 'post-classical cinema' are terms used to describe the period following the decline of the studio system during the 1950s and 1960s and the end of the production code. During the 1970s, filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths. 'Post-classical cinema' is a term used to describe the changing methods of storytelling of the "New Hollywood" producers. The new methods of drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during the classical/Golden Age period: story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling "twist endings", main characters may behave in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred.

The beginnings of post-classical storytelling may be seen in 1940s and 1950s film noir movies, in films such as Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and in Hitchcock's Psycho. During the 1970s, a new group of American filmmakers emerged, such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Brian de Palma. This coincided with the increasing popularity of the auteur theory in film literature and the media, which posited that a film director's films express their personal vision and creative insights. The development of the auteur style of filmmaking helped to give these directors far greater control over their projects than would have been possible in earlier eras. This led to some great critical and commercial successes, like Coppola's The Godfather films, Spielberg's Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas's Star Wars. It also, however, resulted in some failures, including Peter Bogdanovich's At Long Last Love and Michael Cimino's hugely expensive Western epic Heaven's Gate, which helped to bring about the demise of its backer, United Artists.

The financial disaster of Heaven's Gate marking the end of the visionary "auteur" directors of the "New Hollywood", who had unrestrained creative and financial freedom to develop films. The phenomenal success in the 1970s of Jaws and Star Wars in particular, led to the rise of the modern "blockbuster". Hollywood studios increasingly focused on producing a smaller number of very large budget films with massive marketing and promotional campaigns. This trend had already been foreshadowed by the commercial success of disaster films such as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. During the mid-1970s, more pornographic theatres, euphemistically called "adult cinemas", were established, and the legal production of hardcore pornographic films began. Porn films such as Deep Throat and its star Linda Lovelace became something of a popular culture phenomenon and resulted in a spate of similar sex films. The porn cinemas finally died out during the 1980s, when the popularization of the home VCR and pornography videotapes allowed audiences to watch sex films at home.

In the early 1970s, English language audiences became more aware of the new West German cinema, with Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders among its leading exponents. The end of the decade saw the first major international marketing of Australian cinema, as Peter Weir's films Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave and Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith gained critical acclaim. In 1979, Australian filmmaker George Miller also garnered international attention for his violent, low-budget action film Mad Max. 1980s: sequels, blockbusters and videotape During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching movies on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of movies on home video became a significant "second venue" for exhibition of films, and an additional source of revenue for the movie companies. The Lucas-Spielberg combine would dominate "Hollywood" cinema for much of the 1980s, and lead to much imitation.

Two follow-ups to Star Wars, three to Jaws, and three Indiana Jones films helped to make sequels of successful films more of an expectation than ever before. Lucas also launched THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm in 1982, while Spielberg enjoyed one of the decade's greatest successes in E.T. the same year. American independent cinema struggled more during the decade, although Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), After Hours (1985), and The King of Comedy (1983) helped to establish him as one of the most critically acclaimed American film makers of the era. Also during 1983 Scarface was released, was very profitable and resulted in even greater fame for its leading actor Al Pacino. Probably the most successful film commercially was vended during 1989: Tim Burton's version of Bob Kane's creation, Batman, exceeded box-office records. Jack Nicholson's portrayal of the demented Joker earned him $60,000,000 (the most money an actor has ever made from one film) and it brought Tim Burton and Michael Keaton great fame.

British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of David Puttnam's company Goldcrest Films. The films Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Killing Fields and A Room with a View appealed to a "middlebrow" audience which was increasingly being ignored by the major Hollywood studios. While the films of the 1970s had helped to define modern blockbuster motion pictures, the way "Hollywood" released its films would now change. Films, for the most part, would premiere in a wider number of theatres, although, to this day, some movies still premiere using the route of the limited/roadshow release system. Against some expectations, the rise of the multiplex cinema did not allow less mainstream films to be shown, but simply allowed the major blockbusters to be given an even greater number of screenings. However, films that had been overlooked in cinemas were increasingly being given a second chance on home video and later DVD. 1990s: New special effects, independent films, and DVDs 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 Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape (1989) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992) had significant commercial success both at the cinema and on home video. The major studios began to create their own "independent" production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. One of the most successful independents of the 1990s, Miramax Films, was bought by Disney the year before the release of Tarantino's runaway hit Pulp Fiction in 1994. The same year marked the beginning of film and video distribution online. Animated films aimed at family audiences also regained their popularity, with Disney's Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. During 1995 the first feature length computer-animated feature, Toy Story, was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney.

After the success of Toy Story, Disney returned to traditional animation and made three more popular films: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, Hercules in 1997, and Mulan in 1998. In 1999, Disney released Tarzan, which employed the use of a CGI rendering technique called Deep Canvas. During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes. 2000s The documentary film also rose as a commercial genre for perhaps the first time, with the success of films such as March of the Penguins and Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. 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 lead to a revival of interest in epic 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. Future: Problems of digital distribution to be overcome -- higher compression, cheaper technology. Content security. Expiration of copyrights, enforcing copyright. The Long Tail One major new development in the early 21st century is the development of systems that make it much easier for regular people to write, shoot, edit and distribute their own movies without the large apparatus of the film industry. This phenomenon and its repercussions are outlined in Chris Anderson's theory, The Long Tail. More

Question: In cinema history which sport has been the subject of most films?
Answer: Boxing