Greatest Things That Happened To Film?

Could be a cinematic movement like neo-realism (or many other ones), it could be a director coming into the scene, the invention of the internet, breaking of the code for less censorship, movies going digital, etc...

I'd say breaking of the Hays production code for less censorship, did not result in better quality movies.

But my answer would be synchronized sound is the one greatest thing to happen to movies. Yes I love silent movies but synchronized sound opened up a whole new world to movie goers.

And as much as I love black and white movies, three strip Technicolor was a pretty cool invention too.

Like Rules said...
"Sound" was the first thing that occurred to me with color being next.

I know the Wizard of Oz wasn't the very first to do it, but I still get a kick out of how the film goes from black & white to color - that must have blown people away in 1939!

How about the resurgence of making black & white films long after color had become the standard?

I wish there was more of an audience for that, because a black and white film is not like pizza without cheese, it's a different feeling to it. Just think about Mel Brook's Young Frankenstein shot in color...shudder the thought.

Yes, I was trying to think of examples.
Young Frankenstein came to mind as an early example, and the reason it was shot in b&w is because it was an homage to the original. (Brooks took a chance as a lot of people advised him against it saying that people in the 70's wouldn't get it.)

Another is the Elephant Man. Schindler's List, of course and a recent one that I haven't seen was The Artist. (And there are bunches more!)

Dolemite.

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Citizen Kane

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Never change, HK.

As a lot of people are saying, colour and sound baby!

Also, there are certain individuals and techniques/skills they brought, for example Stan Winston and his creations were important to Hollywood for decades. Then there was the arrival of Hitchcock who created a more dynamic, kinetic way of filming scenes and of course Spielberg who took the blockbuster and turned it into an event.

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Both color and sound wounded cinema in a way, but also opened new possibilities.

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I can't think of a defense for silent films can you?

This is a very personal choice for me as an aspiring filmmaker. The advent of high-quality digital cameras for filmmaking. I love the look of movies shot on film, a lot, like I'll be the first to say that film generally looks better because of it's impossible-to-replicate-perfectly grain and higher dynamic range.

But the advent of digital filmmaking has allowed the craft to become so much more accessible to so many more filmmakers (myself included). This expanded accessibility has been crucial in allowing so many new voices to be able to tell their stories through filmmaking that not long ago would not have been able to because shooting on film is an expensive and arduous process. Now it's possible to make a good film with an iPhone a lens adapter a ten dollar app and premiere (Tangerine) and many indie feature films are produced on full frame DSLRs like the 5D (hell whiplash, one of my all-time favorite films, was made on an Alexa with a DSLR as a B-camera, both digital cameras), which costs a mere fraction what film cameras would cost.

It's more true now than ever, that almost anyone can be a filmmaker, and that's awesome. It's enabled me to get where I am and for so many others to get where they are. Has it changed the medium like sound and color did? No, but it has changed who can create within the medium on a scale like never before.

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70s

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By the late 20's silent cinema reached its artistic peak as a visual medium. It told stories, built character's psychology and did it profoundly with no need of sound. Music played by a pianist or orchestra were enough as these films worked entirely on visual level -- beautiful frames, stories told through images, great camerawork and glorious montage (films of Vertov, Eisenstein, Gance are some of the best edited movies in history). Most of it died when sound cinema emerged. You couldn't move camera too much and actors couldn't move that much neither, since microphones were pretty insensitive and you had to hide them somewhere. Besides, since sound was a novelty, talkies started coming up and story instead of being told visually begun to be just told verbally - mostly in dialogues, which severely damaged film as a visual medium. Some directors still managed to maintain former glory and even sound didn't disturb them, but many new films, even though some of them were masterpieces, were pretty unimaginative and just plain visually. Filmmakers started to rely on speech too much, which resulted in films with hundreds of dialogue lines that could've been replaced with one or two intertitles in silent era (and these intertitles would have much more power, because would be all substance and no talking just for the sake of talking). In American cinema this talking mania lasted through the 40's, up to even the 60's (second best decade of cinema besides the 20's) and it can be seen, not to look far, in films of Alfred Hitchcock. At least Hitchcock had a good eye for visuals, too, but his silent masterpiece Lodger was much better than most, if not all, of his sound movies. Of course, with time filmmakers learnt how to master sound and combine it with visuals to make sound only one of the layers that in the end enriched cinema as a whole. However, there are some aspects of silent cinema, like montage, that very rarely were topped in sound cinema.

If you're an aspiring film maker shooting with a digital camera I have one word for you....White balance. (No, that is not a racial term, it's a camera setting that controls the look of the color.)

I hope before you die that someday you finally get to meet Drew Barrymore HK.

Hopefully it wouldnt end with you being led away handcuffed.

lol I know what white balance is but yeah for sure

I can't think of a silent film that wouldn't be helped by sound.

How sound would help them? Would you mind giving examples of films?