| The development of the technology of motion pictures and the large movie industry is an important global phenomenon of the first half of the 20th century. The ability to present “moving pictures” was the result of work by people in a number of different countries in the 1890s. Louis and Auguste Lumière in France developed equipment using machines made by Thomas Edison, and the Lumières first presented motion pictures to a paying audience in a Paris café in 1895. The film industry developed rapidly in the U.S., with D.W. Griffith making more than 400 films between 1908 and 1913, transforming the art and the business. World War I inhibited the development of the film industry in Europe, but in the interwar period cinema spread rapidly throughout the world, both in terms of audience and film production. In the 1920s, large film companies grew in the U.S., especially in Hollywood, California, and major film industries developed in Germany, France, and Sweden. In the new Soviet Union, major directors like Sergei Eisenstein created films like Potemkin (1925), which had an international impact. Cinema sometimes became an important medium for political propaganda, as in the films of Leni Riefenstahl in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Outside of Europe and the U.S., important film industries also developed, showing the global impact of the new medium. In Egypt, film shows for Allied troops during World War I created great local interest, and local production efforts began after the war. The first full-length Egyptian film was produced in 1927, and in 1934 the large Studio Misr was founded. World War II stimulated further interest and opportunity, so that the Egyptian film industry emerged as an important part of the postwar Arab world. Other major film industries producing large numbers of films began in the interwar era in JAPAN and INDIA, and after World War II movies like Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) gained major international recognition. The expansion of the movie industry was a part of the Westernization and industrialization of the modern world. It also provided modern means for the expression of distinctive cultural identities in the context of increasingly global means of presentation and communication. | 1 |
