The Story of Cinema: An Illustrated History, Vol. 1: From the Beginnings to Gone with the Wind

Writers have fought shy of a history of film because the field has become so vast—the cinema is now over eighty years old, during which time some 23,000 English-language films have been shown in Britain and the United States alone, and probably as many foreign films. David Shipman has been preparing the present book for almost a decade, during which time—unlike any earlier practitioner in this field—he has seen every film he discusses, thereby re-evaluating a number of major figures as well as a number of minor ones, in many cases reversing accepted reputations. He has clearly provided a history of the cinema which will be unsurpassed for years to come. His approach is two-fold: to give the reader an idea of the sort of films he might have been seeing had he been a cinemagoer Back When, and to examine to what extent films were a product of their era, and how they reflected or influenced it. Unlike other film histories, bad films are given their due, on the understanding that this is an industry as much as an art. Shipman has also maintained a flexibility of form to bring variety to a long text: for instance, he discusses the wartime British films thematically (as propaganda and escapism) and the Italian neorealist films in chronological order (to trace the development of the movement). One of his most brilliant achievements has been to individualise each film when necessary. His comments include all or some of the following: its raison d’être, its antecedents and the films it in turn influenced; its source material; its production history and cost; its place in the career of its director and/or leading players; a note on plot or contents; its reception by public and/or critics (with quotations); its subsequent place in film history and its reception today; and its relevance to the society which gave it birth. Much current misunderstanding of the subject has resulted from attempts to pinpoint a film’s qualities in one or two pithy lines, but when Shipman extends his comments he remains precise and exact. There is not a superfluous word, and there are some 600,000 of them, half in this present volume, which takes us to Gone with the Wind and World War Two. Thus this book covers the first forty-odd years of cinema history, and Volume Two the forty years from then to the present.