The Story of Cinema: An Illustrated History, Vol. 2: From Citizen Kane to the Present Day

The second and concluding volume of David Shipman’s magisterial history of world cinema opens with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, first released in 1947, and ends with such blockbusting movies as Gandhi and ET. In starting this second volume with Citizen Kane, Shipman notes that the Hollywood factory system of filmmaking was beginning to give way to the individual filmmaker; in Hollywood, for the first time since the Silent days, Capra excepted, directors like Wells, Sturges, Wilder and Hitchcock were making films recognisably theirs. After examining the British and American films made to entertain audiences during the Second World War, Shipman returns to this theme, and studies the rise to prominence of directors like Kazan, Mankiewicz, Zinnemann and Minnelli, as well as old masters such as Wyler, Ford, and Cukor. He takes us to the present day, from Kubrick, Lumet, Ritt, and Penn to today’s so-called ‘movie brats’, while not forgetting the important studio films made by less distinguished directors; and covers the breakdown of the accepted standards of morality and the screen’s new permissiveness. Apart from the British contribution to the war effort, the book looks at the British film industry’s surge of creative activity as the War ended, followed by the slump of the Fifties and the Woodfall revival at the beginning of the Sixties, together with Hollywood’s annexation of such talents as David Lean, Carol Reed, and John Schlesinger. The French and Italian cinemas are examined with reference to their great periods, the nouvelle vague in France and new-realism in Italy; there are separate chapters on such major figures as Ray, Bunuel, and Bergman, and films from Eastern Europe, together with recognition of the renaissance of the German cinema and Australia’s fine new industry. The book is not intended to be comprehensive for, like Volume One, it deals only with those films which have received wide distribution—though, as Shipman says, there are some neglected films which any historian must take into account. As in his first volume, he makes a number of major discoveries, and the two books together provide a history of the cinema that should prove indispensable for years to come.