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Turning Points in Film History
Film expert and author Andrew J. Rausch presents the 32 most pivotal moments in the history of the medium that changed the way movies were produced. Accompanied with insights from noted film historians and filmmakers, Rausch's essays analyze the significance of each influential event, industry pioneer, and technological breakthrough--from Thomas Edison's Kinescopes to computer-generated imagery:
- Georges Melies' introduction of narrative story in A Trip to the Moon
- D.W. Griffith's first landmark motion picture, The Birth of a Nation
- French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Sergei Eisenstein's montage techniques
- The establishment of the Academy Awards
- Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs--the first feature-length animated film
- The innovative camerawork and non-linear storyline of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane
- The dark side of America--Film Noir
- French New Wave
- The creation of the ratings system under MPAA President Jack Valenti
- The Blaxploitation Movement
- "Realist" filmmakers from Hollywood's New Wave
- The impact of Home Video
- Jaws, Star Wars, and the birth of the modern blockbuster
- Pixar's Toy Story--the first fully computer animated film
- Includes a timeline and two sidebars per chapter.
- Georges Melies' introduction of narrative story in A Trip to the Moon
- D.W. Griffith's first landmark motion picture, The Birth of a Nation
- French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Sergei Eisenstein's montage techniques
- The establishment of the Academy Awards
- Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs--the first feature-length animated film
- The innovative camerawork and non-linear storyline of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane
- The dark side of America--Film Noir
- French New Wave
- The creation of the ratings system under MPAA President Jack Valenti
- The Blaxploitation Movement
- "Realist" filmmakers from Hollywood's New Wave
- The impact of Home Video
- Jaws, Star Wars, and the birth of the modern blockbuster
- Pixar's Toy Story--the first fully computer animated film
- Includes a timeline and two sidebars per chapter.
352 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 2004
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About the author
Andrew J. Rausch
37 books5 followersAndrew J. Rausch is a film critic, author, and celebrity interviewer, as well as film producer, screenwriter, and actor. He had written or co-written nearly 20 books on the subject of popular culture, including Turning Points in Film History, Making Movies with Orson Welles (w/Gary Graver), and The Films of Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. He is the screenwriter of the motion picture Dahmer vs. Gacy and the author of three novels, The Suicide Game, Riding Shotgun, and Elvis Presley, CIA Assassin. He can be reached at cruelkindgom@gmail.com.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 27, 2022
Turning to a study like this one can be a good beginning for the reader who wants to start getting a sense of milestone moments in the history of cinema. Andrew Rausch’s Turning Points in Film History concisely sets forth the process through which film evolved into the dominant art form of our times, and a pre-eminent popular-culture trendsetter into the bargain.
Of Rausch, a Kansas-based film critic and freelance writer, the author blurb at the back of Turning Points in Film History fearlessly reports that he “has worked on a number of B movies in various capacities, including executive producer, screenwriter, and actor.” Look up Rausch’s name on the Internet Movie Database, and you’ll find that his credits include movies like Zombiegeddon (2003) and Slaughter Party (2006). Yes, those titles definitely convey that B-movie vibe.
But it does not follow, from Rausch’s participation in B-movie projects, that he cannot write well about A-level movies; and Turning Points in Film History does provide a helpful introduction to a number of cinematic movements (the classical Hollywood “studio system,” film noir, Italian neorealism, “blaxploitation” films, the “New Hollywood,” Dogme 95) and cinematically important historical moments (the Hays Code, the beginnings of sound cinema, the establishment of the Academy Awards, the advent of the MPAA ratings system, and the technological and cultural impact of television, home video, and computer-generated imagery).
I liked Rausch’s emphasis on how, particularly toward the beginnings of cinema, filmmakers used innovative thinking to overcome technical and economic challenges. In the chapter on German expressionism, for example, Rausch places appropriate emphasis on how impoverished the German film industry was in the wake of imperial Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
With so little money to work with, Austrian artist Carl Mayer and Czechoslovak poet Hans Janowitz presented to producer Erich Pommer a brilliant idea for the set design for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919): “[I]t was Mayer and Janowitz who first suggested the idea of doing Caligari in an Expressionistic style. Mayer and Janowitz then suggested the idea of filming the entire movie on one set with stylishly painted canvas backdrops. Pommer considered this suggestion for several days, and ultimately agreed. After all, what could be more economic than filming on one set against painted backdrops?” (p. 50) More than 100 years later, film aficionados can still see how those painted backdrops, with all their visual distortions, contribute to the surrealistic, nightmarish quality of Caligari.
Rausch places comparable, and appropriate, emphasis on the landmark status of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), seeking to give American cinema’s original “bad boy” credit where credit is due: “Welles’s detractors have always been quick to pass off Kane’s massive achievements by calling attention to the enormous level of talent that surrounded him at every turn. What they fail to realize is that filmmaking is a collaborative act, something Welles himself was very much aware of. Whether one loves him or hates him, one must credit Welles’s decision to surround himself with extraordinary talent” (p. 106).
And, as Rausch chronicles, Citizen Kane’s innovations are many: deep-focus photography, low-angle shooting, and overlapping dialogue, among others. And if you like the use of long uninterrupted shots in movies like Sam Mendes’s 1917, or in the films of Alfonso Cuarón, then it’s good to be aware that that too is a Citizen Kane innovation – and one for which the thoughtful viewer of cinema should be grateful, as “one of the benefits of unbroken shots is that the viewer is given the choice of looking at whatever he or she chooses in the frame, rather than be guided by the filmmaker” (p. 112).
Which chapters of Turning Points in Film History work best for you will depend upon what you like best in cinema. Admirers of international art cinema will cry out Magnifique! at the chapter on “La Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave,” for the manner in which Rausch praises how innovative French filmmakers like François Truffaut not only “craft[ed] inexpensive films by shooting primarily on location with portable equipment, using unknown actors, and employing miniscule crews” (p. 156), but also joined critics like André Bazin in championing the scholarly and critical examination of cinema as a serious art form.
Meanwhile, those who enjoy studying popular culture at its most tacky will get a kick out of the chapter on “American International Pictures: A Blueprint for Success,” with its stories about the ways in which AIP, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, squeezed out cheap, quickly produced pictures with lurid titles that were meant to draw in the large and emerging market of teenage moviegoers, as with AIP’s The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (1956): “Because producer Roger Corman had gone over budget with his previous film, he was given a paltry $29,000 with which to complete the film. Because of his limited budget Corman decided to eliminate the monster from the film entirely – this in a film entitled The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes!” (p. 150)
And anyone who decries the “superhero-ization” of contemporary megaplex cinema – with one new Marvel Comics Universe or DC Comics Universe release treading upon another’s heels, so fast they follow – will relate to Rausch’s chapter “A Shark, a Jedi Knight, and the Modern Blockbuster,” in which Rausch discusses the factors that contributed to the extraordinary financial success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977).
Rausch points out that even though Steven Spielberg was lukewarm about the Jaws project (evidently, he despised Peter Benchley’s source novel), Universal Studios took the young director’s shark-attack picture and applied all the tools of modern marketing to its release – “a promotional campaign the likes of which had never been seen before, including the unprecedented use of $700,000 worth of saturation television advertising”, as well as booking the film “into 490 theatres – more than any film had ever been booked in simultaneously – for its opening weekend in June 1975” (p. 204).
Jaws made over $100 million at the box office – the first film ever to earn that distinction – and established many of the parameters for a summer blockbuster: a special effects-heavy, action-laden film with a strong horror, science-fiction, or fantasy element; relentless advertising; and a summer release date to lure in students who are out of school and looking for something to do. Two years later, Star Wars (there was no Episode IV: A New Hope subtitle on it at the time) joined Jaws as a $100 million box office bonanza, and additionally “taught Hollywood just how lucrative movie tie-ins and merchandising can be”, with “fans quickly snatch[ing] up seemingly anything and everything with the Star Wars logo on it, from lunch boxes to action figures” (p. 207).
At the time of this book’s publication in 2004, Star Wars merchandise had brought in almost $3 billion, much more than the box-office take for the five Star Wars films that had been released as of that time; now, with Disney taking over Star Wars, and applying to the franchise the company’s characteristic merchandising brilliance, one shudders to think about how much money all those films and all that merchandise are gathering. The latest estimated totals are $9.4 billion for the films, plus $262 billion (!) for the merchandise. Perhaps Lucas’s Galactic Empire has already taken over, with a world of moviegoers willingly participating in the rise of the Sith.
Rausch gives greater emphasis to some films, for their supposed innovations, than I would have; I would not, for example, have devoted an entire chapter to Toy Story (1995). Yet overall, this brief, 230-page book provides a good, quick introduction to cinematic history, with a fine bibliography that can lead the reader toward more in-depth studies.
Of Rausch, a Kansas-based film critic and freelance writer, the author blurb at the back of Turning Points in Film History fearlessly reports that he “has worked on a number of B movies in various capacities, including executive producer, screenwriter, and actor.” Look up Rausch’s name on the Internet Movie Database, and you’ll find that his credits include movies like Zombiegeddon (2003) and Slaughter Party (2006). Yes, those titles definitely convey that B-movie vibe.
But it does not follow, from Rausch’s participation in B-movie projects, that he cannot write well about A-level movies; and Turning Points in Film History does provide a helpful introduction to a number of cinematic movements (the classical Hollywood “studio system,” film noir, Italian neorealism, “blaxploitation” films, the “New Hollywood,” Dogme 95) and cinematically important historical moments (the Hays Code, the beginnings of sound cinema, the establishment of the Academy Awards, the advent of the MPAA ratings system, and the technological and cultural impact of television, home video, and computer-generated imagery).
I liked Rausch’s emphasis on how, particularly toward the beginnings of cinema, filmmakers used innovative thinking to overcome technical and economic challenges. In the chapter on German expressionism, for example, Rausch places appropriate emphasis on how impoverished the German film industry was in the wake of imperial Germany’s defeat in the First World War.
With so little money to work with, Austrian artist Carl Mayer and Czechoslovak poet Hans Janowitz presented to producer Erich Pommer a brilliant idea for the set design for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919): “[I]t was Mayer and Janowitz who first suggested the idea of doing Caligari in an Expressionistic style. Mayer and Janowitz then suggested the idea of filming the entire movie on one set with stylishly painted canvas backdrops. Pommer considered this suggestion for several days, and ultimately agreed. After all, what could be more economic than filming on one set against painted backdrops?” (p. 50) More than 100 years later, film aficionados can still see how those painted backdrops, with all their visual distortions, contribute to the surrealistic, nightmarish quality of Caligari.
Rausch places comparable, and appropriate, emphasis on the landmark status of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), seeking to give American cinema’s original “bad boy” credit where credit is due: “Welles’s detractors have always been quick to pass off Kane’s massive achievements by calling attention to the enormous level of talent that surrounded him at every turn. What they fail to realize is that filmmaking is a collaborative act, something Welles himself was very much aware of. Whether one loves him or hates him, one must credit Welles’s decision to surround himself with extraordinary talent” (p. 106).
And, as Rausch chronicles, Citizen Kane’s innovations are many: deep-focus photography, low-angle shooting, and overlapping dialogue, among others. And if you like the use of long uninterrupted shots in movies like Sam Mendes’s 1917, or in the films of Alfonso Cuarón, then it’s good to be aware that that too is a Citizen Kane innovation – and one for which the thoughtful viewer of cinema should be grateful, as “one of the benefits of unbroken shots is that the viewer is given the choice of looking at whatever he or she chooses in the frame, rather than be guided by the filmmaker” (p. 112).
Which chapters of Turning Points in Film History work best for you will depend upon what you like best in cinema. Admirers of international art cinema will cry out Magnifique! at the chapter on “La Nouvelle Vague: The French New Wave,” for the manner in which Rausch praises how innovative French filmmakers like François Truffaut not only “craft[ed] inexpensive films by shooting primarily on location with portable equipment, using unknown actors, and employing miniscule crews” (p. 156), but also joined critics like André Bazin in championing the scholarly and critical examination of cinema as a serious art form.
Meanwhile, those who enjoy studying popular culture at its most tacky will get a kick out of the chapter on “American International Pictures: A Blueprint for Success,” with its stories about the ways in which AIP, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, squeezed out cheap, quickly produced pictures with lurid titles that were meant to draw in the large and emerging market of teenage moviegoers, as with AIP’s The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (1956): “Because producer Roger Corman had gone over budget with his previous film, he was given a paltry $29,000 with which to complete the film. Because of his limited budget Corman decided to eliminate the monster from the film entirely – this in a film entitled The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes!” (p. 150)
And anyone who decries the “superhero-ization” of contemporary megaplex cinema – with one new Marvel Comics Universe or DC Comics Universe release treading upon another’s heels, so fast they follow – will relate to Rausch’s chapter “A Shark, a Jedi Knight, and the Modern Blockbuster,” in which Rausch discusses the factors that contributed to the extraordinary financial success of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977).
Rausch points out that even though Steven Spielberg was lukewarm about the Jaws project (evidently, he despised Peter Benchley’s source novel), Universal Studios took the young director’s shark-attack picture and applied all the tools of modern marketing to its release – “a promotional campaign the likes of which had never been seen before, including the unprecedented use of $700,000 worth of saturation television advertising”, as well as booking the film “into 490 theatres – more than any film had ever been booked in simultaneously – for its opening weekend in June 1975” (p. 204).
Jaws made over $100 million at the box office – the first film ever to earn that distinction – and established many of the parameters for a summer blockbuster: a special effects-heavy, action-laden film with a strong horror, science-fiction, or fantasy element; relentless advertising; and a summer release date to lure in students who are out of school and looking for something to do. Two years later, Star Wars (there was no Episode IV: A New Hope subtitle on it at the time) joined Jaws as a $100 million box office bonanza, and additionally “taught Hollywood just how lucrative movie tie-ins and merchandising can be”, with “fans quickly snatch[ing] up seemingly anything and everything with the Star Wars logo on it, from lunch boxes to action figures” (p. 207).
At the time of this book’s publication in 2004, Star Wars merchandise had brought in almost $3 billion, much more than the box-office take for the five Star Wars films that had been released as of that time; now, with Disney taking over Star Wars, and applying to the franchise the company’s characteristic merchandising brilliance, one shudders to think about how much money all those films and all that merchandise are gathering. The latest estimated totals are $9.4 billion for the films, plus $262 billion (!) for the merchandise. Perhaps Lucas’s Galactic Empire has already taken over, with a world of moviegoers willingly participating in the rise of the Sith.
Rausch gives greater emphasis to some films, for their supposed innovations, than I would have; I would not, for example, have devoted an entire chapter to Toy Story (1995). Yet overall, this brief, 230-page book provides a good, quick introduction to cinematic history, with a fine bibliography that can lead the reader toward more in-depth studies.
June 28, 2013
Tried to like this. Rausch does just fine in the early going and gets us to the middle of the twentieth century. And then no end of who-cares WTF moments.
Any Cinema History that mentions Steven Spielberg a thousand times and Stanley Kubrick zero times--- that's zero times--gets tossed out the window around here.
And the merest mention of Quentin Tarantino, the Jerry Springer of filmmaking-- in any context north of disdain-- closes that window and latches it.
I had in mind to do a humorous review of the underwhelming and the overstated aspects of this book, perhaps with my own joke chapter titles, but this was really too dire to merit that treatment, or effort.
On the very last page of the book, the author-bio states that Andrew Rausch "writes about movies for several publications and has worked on numerous B movies in various capacities". As though, perhaps, the golden glow of erudition contained within the covers lingered so pervasively that it needed knocking down a notch.
No such need, really, trust me.
Any Cinema History that mentions Steven Spielberg a thousand times and Stanley Kubrick zero times--- that's zero times--gets tossed out the window around here.
And the merest mention of Quentin Tarantino, the Jerry Springer of filmmaking-- in any context north of disdain-- closes that window and latches it.
I had in mind to do a humorous review of the underwhelming and the overstated aspects of this book, perhaps with my own joke chapter titles, but this was really too dire to merit that treatment, or effort.
On the very last page of the book, the author-bio states that Andrew Rausch "writes about movies for several publications and has worked on numerous B movies in various capacities". As though, perhaps, the golden glow of erudition contained within the covers lingered so pervasively that it needed knocking down a notch.
No such need, really, trust me.
August 6, 2016
A wealth of fascinating information for film enthusiasts. Written in compact, sessionable sections.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews