CINEMA OF EUROPE

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Cinema of Europe refers to the film industries and films produced in the continent of Europe.

Europeans were the pioneers of the motion picture industry, with several innovative engineers and artists making an impact especially at the end of the 19th century. 

 Louis Le Prince became famous for his 1888 Roundhay Garden Scene, the first known celluloid film recorded. 

TheSkladanowsky brothers from Berlin used their "Bioscop" to amaze the Wintergarten theatre audience with the first film show ever, from November 1 through 31, 1895.

The Lumière Brothers established the Cinematograph; which initiated the silent film era, a period where European cinema was a major commercial success. It remained so until the art-hostile environment of World War II.

Notable European early film movements include German Expressionism (1920s), French Impressionist Cinema (1920s), Poetic realism(1930s), and Italian neorealism (1940s); it was a period now seen in retrospect as "The Other Hollywood". The first large-scale film studio was also established in Europe, with the Babelsberg Studio near Berlin in 1912.

Post World War II movements include Free Cinema (1950s), French New Wave (1950s–60s), Polish Film School (1950s–60s),Czechoslovak New Wave (1960s), New German Cinema (1960s–80s), British New Wave (1950s–60s), Spaghetti Western (1960s) and Novo Cinema (1960s–70s).

The turn of the 21st century has seen movements such as Dogme 95, New French Extremity, Romanian New Waveand Berlin School.

19th CENTURY

Antoine Lumière realized, on 28 December 1895, the first projection, with the Cinematograph, in Paris.[2][3][4] In 1897, Georges Méliès established the first cinema studio on a rooftop property in Montreuil, near Paris.

After the first screening of the Lumière brothers Cinématographe at the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris in 1895, the operators of the Lumière brothers took to the streets of major European capitals.

Film was used to highlight the historical events, literature and theatrical traditions. For this reason, the film industry in Italy and France pointed to the splendor of staging as well as to traditional everyday life.

 If Hollywood is considered the pioneers of a spectacular cinema, in Europe films became a formal language and a new kind of art, rather than just a technical innovation. That sort of 'common language' for European art movements and for public education gave cinema the name of 'tenth muse'.

During the 1940s and 1950s, a new ‘cinematic landscape’ was born.

The Europeans began to talk about the resistance to Nazism, rediscovering reality, attitudes and different problems in various European countries.

The Italian neo-realism and films like Paisà (1946) by Roberto Rossellini, the French film La Bataille du Rail (1946) by René Clément, or The Third Man (1949) by Carol Reed, also episodes of French and Italian films such as The Losers (1953) by Michelangelo Antonioni, showed the vivid picture of Europe. In this sense, the war marked the formation of some characteristics of European film industry.

In fact, in Europe, war in cinema became more and more a social custom and, moreover, with the birth of film clubs and forms of cultural associations, as well as with the proliferation of film journalism, cinema also became the subject of cultural debate.

20th CENTURY

The European Film Academy was founded in 1988 to annually celebrate European cinema through the European Film Awards.

Philippe Binant realized, on 2 February 2000, the first digital cinema projection in Europe, with the DLP CINEMA technology developed byTexas Instruments, in Paris

From the 1970s to the 1990s, European film industry followed an inverse trend of the product compared to American models, with a series of provocative and ascetic films which were poor in effects, and in methods, but rich of a direct language.

The following directors might be seen as the examples of such kind of cinema: Polish Krzysztof Kieslowski, French Eric Rohmer, and Russian Andrei Tarkovsky, Danish Lars von Trier, Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, and Finnish Aki Kaurismäki.

Since 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the processes of independence of many Eastern European countries, even cinema in those areas evolved significantly.

The films made back then seemed to be a metaphor for the disorientation; there was also the need of breaking up with the past. The collapse of the Soviet system resulted, first in Russia and then in the countries of the area of influence, a fall in production and a reduced inflow of public.

Between 1991 and 1994, there was a proliferation of small independent producers, some of them were: Aleksandr Sokurov, Kira Muratova, Alexei O. Balabanov, Vitaly E. Kanevskij. 

EUROPEAN FILM AWARDS

European Film Awards

BAFTA

Goya

César

Lolas

David di Donatello

Orły

FILM INDUSTRY AND HUMAN MIGRATION

During the second half of the 20th century, Europe underwent a crucial change due to a massive immigration of ethnic communities from other continents, which brought their cultural elements in our continent. For this reason, a new cinematographic language developed in Europe and every film was distinguished by the immigration history of some certain new-comers community.