Cinema of the United Kingdom
British cinema has significantly influenced the global film industry since the 19th century. The oldest known surviving film in the world, Roundhay Garden Scene, was shot in England by French inventor Louis Le Prince. Early colour films were also pioneered in the UK. Film production reached an all-time high in 1936, but the "golden age" of British cinema is usually thought to have occurred in the 1940s, which saw the release of the most critically acclaimed works by filmmakers such as David Lean, Michael Powell, and Carol Reed.
Many British actors have accrued critical success and worldwide recognition, including Alec Guinness, Patrick Stewart, Julie Andrews, Michael Caine, Joan Collins, Sean Connery, Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Craig, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Olivia de Havilland, Audrey Hepburn, Anthony Hopkins, Glynis Johns, Vivien Leigh, Ian Mckellen, Peter O'Toole, Gary Oldman, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Emma Thompson, Rachel Weisz, Kate Winslet and Keira Knightley. Some of the films with the largest ever box office profits have been made in the United Kingdom, including Harry Potter and James Bond, the fourth and fifth highest-grossing film franchises of all time.
The identity of British cinema, particularly in relation to the cinema of the United States, has been the subject of various debates over the years. Its history includes competition as well as collaboration with the United States cinema in production of a huge number of film projects. British filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Christopher Nolan, and Ridley Scott achieved success combining their work with the United States filmmakers as well, as did British performers such as Charlie Chaplin and Cary Grant.
In 2009, British films grossed around $2 billion worldwide and achieved a market share of around 7% globally and 17% in the United Kingdom. UK box office earnings totalled £1.1 billion in 2012, with 172.5 million admissions. The British Film Institute has produced a poll ranking what it considers to be the 100 greatest British films of all time. The annual BAFTA Awards hosted by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts are considered to be the British equivalent of the Academy Awards.
History
Origins and silent films
The world's first moving picture was shot in Leeds by Louis Le Prince in 1888 and the first moving pictures developed on celluloid film were made in Hyde Park, London in 1889 by British inventor William Friese Greene, who patented the process in 1890.The first people to build and run a working 35 mm camera in Britain were Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres. They made the first British film Incident at Clovelly Cottage in February 1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent. Soon several British film companies had opened to meet the demand for new films, such as Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. The Lumière brothers first brought their show to London in 1896. In 1898, American producer Charles Urban expanded the London-based Warwick Trading Company to produce British films, mostly documentary and news.
Although the earliest British films were of everyday events, the early 20th century saw the appearance of narrative shorts, mainly comedies and melodramas. The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for story lines already known to the audience, in particular, adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens novels.
In 1898, Gaumont-British Picture Corp. was founded as a subsidiary of the French Gaumont Film Company, constructing Lime Grove Studios in West London in 1915 in the first building built in Britain solely for film production. Also in 1898, Hepworth Studios was founded in Lambeth, South London by Cecil Hepworth, the Bamforths began producing films in Yorkshire, and William Haggar began producing films in Wales.
Directed by Walter R. Booth in 1901, Scrooge, or, Marley's Ghost is the earliest film adaptation of Charles Dickens's festive novella A Christmas Carol. Booth's The Hand of the Artist has been described as the first British animated film.
In 1902, Ealing Studios was founded by Will Barker. It has become the oldest continuously operating film studio in the world.
In 1902, the earliest colour film in the world was made; capturing everyday events. In 2012, it was found by the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford after lying forgotten in an old tin for 110 years. The previous title for earliest colour film, using Urban's inferior Kinemacolor process, was thought to date from 1909. The re-discovered films were made by pioneer Edward Raymond Turner from London who patented his process on 22 March 1899.
In 1909, Urban formed the Natural Color Kinematograph Company, which produced early colour films using his patented Kinemacolor process. This was later challenged in court by Greene, causing the company to go out of business in 1914.
In 1903, Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow directed Alice in Wonderland, the first film adaptation of Lewis Carroll's children's book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Also in 1903, Frank Mottershaw of Sheffield produced the film A Daring Daylight Robbery, which launched the chase genre.
In 1911, the Ideal Film Company was founded in Soho, London, distributing almost 400 films by 1934, and producing 80.
In 1913, stage director Maurice Elvey began directing British films, becoming Britain's most prolific film director, with almost 200 by 1957.
In 1914, Elstree Studios was founded, and acquired in 1928 by German-born Ludwig Blattner, who invented a magnetic steel tape recording system that was adopted by the BBC in 1930.
In 1915, the Kinematograph Renters’ Society of Great Britain and Ireland was formed to represent the film distribution companies. It is the oldest film trade body in the world. It was known as the Society of Film Distributors until it changed its name again to the Film Distributors’ Association.
During the 1918-1920 Spanish Influenza pandemic, cinema was seen as a way to take ameliorative action, causing many health professionals to see cinema as one of the primary ways the flu spread, as there was an absence of ventilation in the cinemas. There was an outcry to "Shut the Kinemas," and uneven, localized restrictions were put in place, primarily focusing on children and servicemen, including barring them from the theatre outright or requiring a 2.5 hour break each day.
In 1920, Gaumont opened Islington Studios, where Alfred Hitchcock got his start, selling out to Gainsborough Pictures in 1927. Also in 1920 Cricklewood Studios was founded by Sir Oswald Stoll, becoming Britain's largest film studio, known for Fu Manchu and Sherlock Holmes film series.
In 1920, the short-lived company Minerva Films was founded in London by the actor Leslie Howard and his friend and story editor Adrian Brunel. Some of their early films include four written by A. A. Milne including The Bump, starring C. Aubrey Smith; Twice Two; Five Pound Reward; and Bookworms.
By the mid-1920s the British film industry was losing out to heavy competition from the United States, which was helped by its much larger home market – in 1914 25% of films shown in the UK were British, but by 1926 this had fallen to 5%. A slump in 1924 caused many British film studios to close, resulting in the passage of the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 to boost local production, requiring that cinemas show a certain percentage of British films. The act was technically a success, with audiences for British films becoming larger than the quota required, but it had the effect of creating a market for poor quality, low cost films, made to satisfy the quota. The "quota quickies", as they became known, are often blamed by historians for holding back the development of the industry. However, some British film makers, such as Michael Powell, learnt their craft making such films. The act was modified with the Cinematograph Films Act 1938 assisted the British film industry by specifying only films made by and shot in Great Britain would be included in the quota, an act that severely reduced Canadian and Australian film production.
The biggest star of the silent era, English comedian Charlie Chaplin, was Hollywood-based.
File:Hitchcock, Alfred 02.jpg|thumb|upright=0.8|Alfred Hitchcock established himself as a name director with his first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog.
The early sound period
Scottish solicitor John Maxwell founded British International Pictures in 1927. Based at the former British National Pictures Studios in Elstree, the facilities original owners, including producer-director Herbert Wilcox, had run into financial difficulties. One of the company's early films, Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, is often regarded as the first British sound feature. It was a part-talkie with a synchronised score and sound effects. Earlier in 1929, the first all-talking British feature, The Clue of the New Pin was released. It was based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, starring Donald Calthrop, Benita Home and Fred Raines, which was made by British Lion at their Beaconsfield Studios. John Maxwell's BIP became the Associated British Picture Corporation in 1933. ABPC's studios in Elstree came to be known as the "porridge factory", according to Lou Alexander, "for reasons more likely to do with the quantity of films that the company turned out, than their quality". Elstree became the centre of the British film industry, with six film complexes over the years all in close proximity to each other.By 1927, the largest cinema chains in the United Kingdom consisted of around 20 cinemas but the following year Gaumont-British expanded significantly to become the largest, controlling 180 cinemas by 1928 and up to 300 by 1929. Maxwell formed ABC Cinemas in 1927 which became a subsidiary of BIP and went on to become one of the largest in the country, together with Odeon Cinemas, founded by Oscar Deutsch, who opened his first cinema in 1928. By 1937, these three chains controlled almost a quarter of all cinemas in the country. A booking by one of these chains was indispensable for the success of any British film.
With the advent of sound films, many foreign actors were in less demand, with English received pronunciation commonly used; for example, the voice of Czech actress Anny Ondra in Blackmail was substituted by an off-camera Joan Barry during Ondra's scenes.
Starting with John Grierson's Drifters, the period saw the emergence of the school of realist Documentary Film Movement, from 1933 associated with the GPO Film Unit. It was Grierson who coined the term "documentary" to describe a non-fiction film, and he produced the movement's most celebrated early films, Night Mail, written and directed by Basil Wright and Harry Watt, and incorporating the poem by W. H. Auden towards the end of the short.
Music halls also proved influential in comedy films of this period, and a number of popular personalities emerged, including George Formby, Gracie Fields, Jessie Matthews and Will Hay. These stars often made several films a year, and their productions remained important for morale purposes during World War II.
Many of the British films with larger budgets during the 1930s were produced by London Films, founded by Hungarian emigre Alexander Korda. The success of The Private Life of Henry VIII, made at British and Dominions Elstree Studios, persuaded United Artists and The Prudential to invest in Korda's Denham Film Studios, which opened in May 1936, but both investors suffered losses as a result. Korda's films before the war included Things to Come, Rembrandt and Knight Without Armour, as well as the early Technicolour films The Drum and The Four Feathers. These had followed closely on from Wings of the Morning, the UK's first three-strip Technicolour feature film, made by the local offshoot of 20th Century Fox. Although some of Korda's films indulged in "unrelenting pro-Empire flag waving", those featuring Sabu turned him into "a huge international star"; "for many years" he had the highest profile of any actor of Indian origin. Paul Robeson was also cast in leading roles when "there were hardly any opportunities" for African Americans "to play challenging roles" in their own country's productions.
In 1933, the British Film Institute was established as the lead organisation for film in the UK. They set up the National Film Library in 1935, with Ernest Lindgren as its curator.
In 1934, J. Arthur Rank became a co-founder of British National Films Company and they helped create Pinewood Studios, which opened in 1936. Also in 1936, Rank took over General Film Distributors and in 1937, Rank founded The Rank Organisation. In 1938, General Film Distributors became affiliated with Odeon Cinemas.
File:Pygmalion-1938.jpg|thumb|Scott Sunderland, Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller in Pygmalion
Rising expenditure and over-optimistic expectations of expansion into the American market caused a financial crisis in 1937, after an all-time high of 192 films were released in 1936. Of the 640 British production companies registered between 1925 and 1936, only 20 were still active in 1937. Moreover, the Cinematograph Films Act 1927 was up for renewal. The replacement Cinematograph Films Act 1938 provided incentives, via a "quality test", for UK companies to make fewer films, but of higher quality, and to eliminate the "quota quickies". Influenced by world politics, it encouraged American investment and imports. One result was the creation of MGM-British, an English subsidiary of the largest American studio, which produced four films before the war, including Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
The new venture was initially based at Denham Studios. Korda himself lost control of the facility in 1939 to the Rank Organisation. Circumstances forced Korda's The Thief of Bagdad, a spectacular fantasy film, to be completed in California, where Korda continued his film career during the war.
By now contracted to Gaumont British, Alfred Hitchcock had settled on the thriller genre by the mid-1930s with The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Lauded in Britain where he was dubbed "Alfred the Great" by Picturegoer magazine, Hitchcock's reputation was beginning to develop overseas, with a New York Times feature writer asserting; "Three unique and valuable institutions the British have that we in America have not. Magna Carta, the Tower Bridge and Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest director of screen melodramas in the world." Hitchcock was then signed up to a seven-year contract by Selznick and moved to Hollywood.