The cinema celebrated its centenary in 1995. One started very early - as of the years 1910 - to write the history of the cinematographic techniques. As from the years 1930, syntheses approaching the cinema from the point of view of art are appeared, both in the United States and in Europe: in France, the first work of this type is the History of the cinema of Robert Brasillach and Maurice Bardèche (1935).

This movement continues with the encyclopedic sums of Georges Sadoul (as from 1946), of Jean Mitry (first volumes published in the years 1960), of Rene Jeanne and Charles Ford, who all are, in one way or another, the collection of memories of people having lived the evolution of the cinema since the beginning of the century.

 With the compared History of the cinema of Jacques Deslandes and Jacques Richard (1966-1968), a new form of writing of the history of the cinema was born, marked by a return to the sources and the taking into account of questions of method up to that point underestimated. Work of Deslandes and Richard unfortunately stopped under investigation production until 1906; North-American and Italian historians took the changing.

The first question which the history of the cinema raises is that of the periodisation. The second relates to the distinction of the productions with country, taking into account the influences of a cinematography on another and of the role dominating of the American cinema over the world scene - except in the USSR and in the Eastern European countries before the years 1990.

The criteria of periodisation can be based on the political and social history, therefore to be external with the cinema, or of course the changes suitable for cinema industry: technical, economic or formal changes. The periods will be all the more easily délimitables one will be able to combine the two criteria.

From the point of view of the internal history of the cinema, one can distinguish historical stages starting from the following phenomena: passage of runs to the feature-length film, of the silent film to the cinema sound and speaking, of the black and white to the color, the standard screen to the broad screen, access of certain kinds to films to large budget, modification of the social base of the public ones.

These criteria combined with the events sociopolitic make it possible to distinguish five or six periods recovering, each time, from fifteen to twenty years of production.

1895-1914

The primitive period is completed with the passage of the short film to the feature-length film. Commercial triumph, in 1915, of Birth of a nation of D.W. Griffith marks the beginning of the hegemony of film of long life (higher than 80 min). It also corresponds to the modification of the report of the forces between French production, hitherto economically dominant, and American production. It is also the moment when firms start to settle in Hollywood, which will develop very quickly during the war of 1914-1918. There are, for this period, coincidence between political history and economic evolution of the cinema, the war having precipitated the decline of the European cinemas (French, but also Italian and Scandinavian).

1915-1929

The second period ends in the brutal disappearance of the silent film, initially in the United States, then in Europe. To this technical and esthetic upheaval correspond the economic crisis of 1929 and its repercussions in Europe, the appearance of the totalitarian modes and the attempts at official organization of cinema industry, in Italy initially, then in Germany. In France, in 1940, under the Occupation, is set up the Steering Committee of the cinema industry (COIC), which will become National center of cinematography (CNC) in 1946.

1930-1945

These fifteen years see the triumph of the American model of production: it is the golden age of the studios, which results in the massive export of Hollywood films into Europe and the other continents. Of course, this export is brutally stopped by the war and the occupation of the European countries by the German armies. It is thus necessary to distinguish the history from the American cinema, of which the period ostentation is prolonged until the beginning of the year 1960, and the evolution of other national cinematographies.

1945-1960

With this prolongation of the American reign answer of the minority forms of national resistance: the neorealism in Italy, “psychological realism” in France, socialist realism in the USSR. This period ends by the crisis of the Majors Hollywood and the increasingly competing assertion, for cinema industry, of television. Besides this one will cause an renewed interest for the documentary one and will cause a new esthetics with the cinema: the “direct cinema”, or “cinema truth”, in particular in the United States (Richard Leacock), in France (Jean Rouch) and in Canada (Low Hake and Pierre Perrault).

1960-1980

These two decades are marked by a very important fall of the frequentation of the cinemas, in most country of the world. At the same time, new forms of cinematographic writing appear. Initially in France, then in England, in Italy, in Hungary, in Czechoslovakia, in Brazil: it is the explosion of the “new waves”. The cinema ceases belonging to the media of mass, yielding the place to televisions. In parallel, the American production starts a slow change which is concretized with the beginning of the year 1980 by the repurchase of the Majors (an American tycoon of oil seizes the 20th Century Fox; Coca-Cola takes control Columbia).

To fight against the crisis, the producers revise the policy which had been theirs since the beginnings. In 1938, Walter Wanger had declared: “the films must have an attraction equal for all from 8 to 80 years, and must be also diverting for the members of all the races, all the nations and all the religious, political and fraternal organizations”. It acts from now on, on the contrary, to target public the partial definite ones (such social class, such minority), since it is necessary to what the products, ensured of a less profit, lower also their manufacturing costs; except, of course, periodically, some federator films.

Since 1980

During the last period, it is the Japanese electronics industry which repurchases the Majors (Sony seizes Columbia, Matsushita of Universal), while the American production specializes in two new kinds: the science fiction film, after the triumphs of 2001: the Odyssey of space (1968), (1977) and the Meeting Star Wars of the third type (1977); and the science fiction film and of terror, after successes of Shining (1979) and Alien (1979).

The new place of these two kinds, confined before in the series productions “B” (with average budget for specialized public), indicates that the American cinema does not seek any more to be addressed to the adult public, become mainly televiewer, but who it intends to survive and again to triumph over the screens over the world thanks to the public over the teenagers, remained film large-scale consumers in rooms. Vis-a-vis the new domination of the worldwide market of the cinema by the United States, extra-American cinema industries have more and more evil to develop their production, even with only maintaining it.