The history of American film

The history of American film

The history of American film

The history of American film is a chapter in film history that is relevant to the film's art as well as the film's economics precisely because of its prominent position as a film nation. Hollywood, a district of Los Angeles, became world famous as the center of the American film industry, which is why the name is often synonymous with the entire American film industry. Synonymous with Hollywood's film industry is again the term dream factory ( English Dream Factory ) used. 

Until 1912, the US film companies focused on the domestic American film competition. Only then did their influence on the world market increase. And so fast that in 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, they made up half of the world's film production.

The fierce competition between the Edison Trust and the "Independents" cited by Carl Laemmle had created effective tools that, tried and tested on the national competitor, now met international competition with increasing severity. Nevertheless, the supremacy of Hollywood was far from unassailable, only a political development gave her the necessary peace to restructure: The war in Europe.

The French film production, the main competitor of the Americans, came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of the war, as Pathé turned his raw film factory into an ammunition factory and his studios in barracks. Similar, yet less extreme, Italian production collapsed in 1916 when the country entered the war.

After it was foreseeable that the war could take a long time, the French tried to get back into the business. The position they held before the outbreak of war no longer reached them. In addition, the German Reich decided in 1916, the general film import ban, which deprived the European film nations of their most important market. Exports overseas were also increasingly difficult because the military claimed a lot of transport capacity. German U-boats and smaller cruisers also engaged in a trade war against the Entente powers, with civilian freighters also being sunk as the Entente was suspected of abusing them for arms deliveries (eg the sinking of the RMS Lusitania ).

The power of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) was already largely broken in 1914, the subsequent court decisions were only formalities. Both the national and international competition of the Independents were eliminated. Although the US film industry lost part of the European sales market, the need for fresh films within the United States was higher than in the whole of Europe, for example in 1916 there were already about 28,000 cinemas across America. In the rest of the world, the Hollywood companies took a dominant position, they represented, for example, a large part of the films shown in Australia and South America, which were sold directly from about 1916 (it used to be common to sell to local middlemen).