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Cinema of the United States

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Cinema of the United States

The film industry of the United States, primarily associated with major film studios collectively referred to as Hollywood, has significantly influenced the global film industry since the early 20th century.

Classical Hollywood cinema, a filmmaking style developed in the 1910's, continues to shape many American films today. While French filmmakers Auguste and Louis Lumière are often credited with modern cinema's origins, American filmmaking quickly rose to global dominance. As of 2017, more than 600 English-language films were released annually in the United States, making it the fourth-largest producer of films, trailing only India, Japan, and China. Although the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand also produce English-language films, they are not directly part of the Hollywood system. Due to this global reach, Hollywood is frequently regarded as a transnational cinema with some films released in multiple language versions, such as Spanish and French.

Contemporary Hollywood frequently outsources production to countries including the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The five major film studiosUniversal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., Walt Disney Studios, and Sony Pictures—are media conglomerates that dominate American box office revenue and have produced some of the most commercially successful film and television programs worldwide.

In 1894, the world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition was held in New York City using Thomas Edison's kinetoscope and kinetograph. In the following decades, the production of silent films greatly expanded. New studios formed, migrated to California, and began to create longer films. The United States produced the world's first sync-sound musical film, The Jazz Singer in 1927, and was at the forefront of sound-film development in the following decades.

Since the early 20th century, the American film industry has primarily been based in and around the thirty-mile zone, centered in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles County, California. The director D. W. Griffith was central to the development of a film grammar. Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is frequently cited in critics' polls as the greatest film of all time. Hollywood is widely regarded as the oldest hub of the film industry, where most of the earliest studios and production companies originated, and is the birthplace of numerous cinematic genres.

The earliest recorded instance of motion capture was Eadweard Muybridge’s series of photographs depicting a running horse, which he took in Palo Alto, California using a set of still cameras placed in a row. Muybridge's accomplishment led inventors everywhere to attempt to make similar devices. In the United States, Thomas Edison was among the first to produce such a device, the kinetoscope and kinetograph.

The history of cinema in the United States can trace its roots to the East Coast, where, at one time, Fort Lee, New Jersey, was the motion-picture capital of America. The American film industry began at the end of the 19th century, with the construction of Thomas Edison's "Black Maria", the first motion-picture studio in West Orange, New Jersey. The cities and towns on the Hudson River and Hudson Palisades offered land at costs considerably less than New York City across the river and benefited greatly as a result of the phenomenal growth of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century.

The industry began attracting both capital and innovative work forces. In 1907, when the Kalem Company began using Fort Lee as a location for filming in the area, other filmmakers quickly followed. In 1909, a forerunner of Universal Studios, the Champion Film Company, built the first studio. Others quickly followed and either built new studios or leased facilities in Fort Lee. In the 1910s and 1920s, film companies such as the Independent Moving Pictures Company, Peerless Pictures Studios, Solax Studios, Eclair, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, Star Film (Georges Méliès), World Film Company, Biograph Studios, Fox Film Corporation, Société Pathé Frères, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc., Victor Film Company, and Selznick International Pictures were all making pictures in Fort Lee. Many notable actors, such as Mary Pickford, got their start at Biograph Studios.

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