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The studio system From the 1920s to the 1950s, Hollywood was dominated by eight major studios. - The 'Big Five' consisted of MGM, Warner, Paramount, RKO and Fox, who produced and distributed films, and also owned cinemas. - The ' Little Three' consisted of Universal, Columbia and United Artists. These did not own their own cinemas. These studios controlled distribution of 95% of films shown in the US. The Big Five were vertically integrated, meaning that they controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of their film. This gave them complete creative control. Commercial features were produced on studio lots. The cast and crew worked under contract. Each studio developed a house style, determined by it's chief executives. In this way, it could be argued that the director had less autonomy over the films. This might amount for the fact that Casablanca's director, Michael Curtiz, is by no means a household name, even though he directed on...

The Cahiers Group During WW2, foreign imported films were limited due to the nazi occupation of France. After the war was over, though, a huge number of Hollywood films made their way into the country, and these strongly influenced the Caheirs group, a collective formed of cinephiles obsessed with filmmaking. Amongst others, the group contained celebrated filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, both of whom became associated with the French Nouvelle Vague (new wave). With the arrival of so many imported Hollywood films, the Cahiers group recognised that certain directors (though not all) displayed common traits across their respective films, in spite of studio stipulations. In Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Francais (1954), Truffaut developed 'la politique des auteurs', or auteur policy, with two overriding principles: - Mise-en-scene is crucial to the reading of cinema and essential in film analysis and criticism - The director's personal expression is...

How far your chosen films reflect aesthetic qualities associated with a particular movement The film  Man with a Movie Camera  comes under the artistic branch of constructivism, specifically soviet montage. Constructivism stresses the importance of the power of industry, usually through construction itself. Its a utilitarian art form in theory and seeks to return art to the worker/ proletariat from the bourgeoisie reflected in its industrial focus; often using industrial materials unlike the canvas paintings before. Soviet montage was a form of propaganda developed by Russian filmmakers, such as Vertov, which aimed to celebrate the proletariat role within the Soviet industrial system. Man with a Movie Camera  embodies constructivism through its depiction of industry and man within industry, seen through the use of editing and various techniques. This includes a sequence with a close up on a rolling mechanism which is juxtaposed in the next scene by a rolling wave,...