d so on—as a sort of writing instrument, a means of self-expression. For Astruc, the creation of a fi lm was like the writing of a novel or a poem: it was not only a creative act, but a deeply personal one. He re-jected the idea that a fi lm director simply took a preexisting screenplay and fi lmed it according to its specifi cations. Instead, Astruc argued, the best directors created an entirely new and intensely personal work of art, with the screenplay being only a blueprint for story, plot, dialogue, and characters. Film art, he argued, was onscreen, not on the typed or printed page.

Readers of the script may legitimately attribute the script to Herman Mankiewicz, but Citizen Kane’s audi-ences see the work of Orson Welles.

eators. A more defensible reason for treating a fi lm’s director as its author is that it is the director, not the screenwriter or the producer or any other member of the creative team, who generally decides where the camera goes, what it shoots, and where it moves

Was Spielberg even present on the set or location every single day? Could it have been an assistant director who suggested a particular gesture to Hanks? Perhaps the gesture was specifi ed in Robert Rodat’s screenplay

. Film historians are rarely present during the writing, production, and postproduction of the fi lms we study, and without doing a great deal of archival research and interviews, it is impossible to know exactly who made every artistic decision in the creation of a motion picture. Even after doing detailed research, we fi nd that many decisions remain unattributable.

Although there is continuing disagreement on the point, fi lm scholars tend to credit the director as the chief creator of a given fi lm.

he ultimate issue is not who owns the movie companies but whomanages them.

the creation of the NationalLabor Relations Board. Thus Hollywood evolved fromessentially an ‘open shop’ to a ‘union town’ in the 1930s,with the division and specialization of film-making labournow mandated by the government and codified by thevarious unions and guilds

Columbia andUniversal pursued a very different course, gearing theirfactories to low-cost, low-risk features which fell into anew and significant 1930s product category: the ‘B movie’

the american film industry in the 1930sThe 1920s had been a decade of tremendous growth andprosperity

they created amodel system–the ‘studio system’–which other countrieshad to imitate in order to compete. But attempts at imit-ating the American system were only partially successful,and by 1925 it was the ‘Hollywood’ system

s an art form and as a technology, the cinema hasbeen in existence for barely a hundred years. Primitivecinematic devices came into being and began to beexploited in the 1890s, almost simultaneously in theUnited States, France, Germany, and Great Britain.Within twenty years the cinema had spread to all partsof the globe; it had developed a sophistica

You can paint landscapes you’ve never actually seen