150-586: Suresh Productions (also known as Suresh Movies , Vijaya Suresh Combines ) is an Indian film production and distribution company known for its works in Telugu cinema . It is established in 1964 by D. Ramanaidu . It is one of India's largest film production companies with over 50 years of experience. The production house is located in Ramanaidu Studios, Hyderabad . Suresh Productions has produced more than 150 films in 13 Indian languages , majority of them in
300-470: A Pathé -Natan film, it is generally regarded as the initial French feature talkie, though it was shot, like Blackmail , at the Elstree studio , just outside London. The production company had contracted with RCA Photophone and Britain then had the nearest facility with the system. The Braunberger-Richebé talkie La Route est belle ( The Road Is Fine ), also shot at Elstree, followed a few weeks later. Before
450-546: A communist inclination, began to take shape through the 1940s and the 1950s. IPTA plays, such as Nabanna (1944), prepared the ground for realism in Indian cinema, exemplified by Khwaja Ahmad Abbas 's Dharti Ke Lal ( Children of the Earth , 1946). The IPTA movement continued to emphasise realism in films Mother India (1957) and Pyaasa (1957), among India's most recognisable cinematic productions. Following independence,
600-444: A "musical." (Griffith's Dream Street had essentially been a "goat gland.") Expectations swiftly changed, and the sound "fad" of 1927 became standard procedure by 1929. In February 1929, sixteen months after The Jazz Singer' s debut, Columbia Pictures became the last of the eight studios that would be known as " majors " during Hollywood's Golden Age to release its first part-talking feature, The Lone Wolf's Daughter . In late May,
750-514: A Warner Bros. movie. This second Jolson screen smash demonstrated the movie musical's ability to turn a song into a national hit: inside of nine months, the Jolson number " Sonny Boy " had racked up 2 million record and 1.25 million sheet music sales. September 1928 also saw the release of Paul Terry 's Dinner Time , among the first animated cartoons produced with synchronized sound. Soon after he saw it, Walt Disney released his first sound picture,
900-464: A Western Electric sound-on-film system. None of these pictures made much impact. The first successful European dramatic talkie was the all-British Blackmail . Directed by twenty-nine-year-old Alfred Hitchcock , the movie had its London debut June 21, 1929. Originally shot as a silent, Blackmail was restaged to include dialogue sequences, along with a score and sound effects, before its premiere. A British International Pictures (BIP) production, it
1050-524: A contract with Warner Brothers and W. J. Rich, a financier, giving them an exclusive license for recording and reproducing sound pictures under the Western Electric system. To exploit this license the Vitaphone Corporation was organized with Samuel L. Warner as its president. Vitaphone , as this system was now called, was publicly introduced on August 6, 1926, with the premiere of Don Juan ;
1200-607: A demonstration of the Western Electric sound-on-disc system and was sufficiently impressed to persuade his brothers to agree to experiment with using this system at New York City's Vitagraph Studios , which they had recently purchased. The tests were convincing to the Warner Brothers, if not to the executives of some other picture companies who witnessed them. Consequently, in April 1926 the Western Electric Company entered into
1350-670: A few songs performed by Richard Tauber . The movie was made with the sound-on-film system controlled by the German-Dutch firm Tobis , corporate heirs to the Tri-Ergon concern. With an eye toward commanding the emerging European market for sound film, Tobis entered into a compact with its chief competitor, Klangfilm, a joint subsidiary of Germany's two leading electrical manufacturers. Early in 1929, Tobis and Klangfilm began comarketing their recording and playback technologies. As ERPI began to wire theaters around Europe, Tobis-Klangfilm claimed that
1500-515: A furious pace on sophisticated sound amplification technology that would allow recordings to be played back over loudspeakers at theater-filling volume. The new moving-coil speaker system was installed in New York's Warners Theatre at the end of July and its patent submission, for what Western Electric called the No. 555 Receiver, was filed on August 4, just two days before the premiere of Don Juan . Late in
1650-456: A generation. The primary issue was synchronization: pictures and sound were recorded and played back by separate devices, which were difficult to start and maintain in tandem. Sufficient playback volume was also hard to achieve. While motion picture projectors soon allowed film to be shown to large theater audiences, audio technology before the development of electric amplification could not project satisfactorily to fill large spaces. Finally, there
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#17328769050961800-413: A gradual transition to sound—allowing the studios to spread out the capital costs of conversion and their directors and technical crews time to become familiar with the new technology. The Mandarin-language Gēnǚ hóng mǔdān ( 歌 女 紅 牡 丹 , Singsong Girl Red Peony ), starring Butterfly Wu, premiered as China's first feature talkie in 1930. By February of that year, production was apparently completed on
1950-470: A large effect on world cinema since the second half of the 20th century. Indian cinema is made up of various film industries , each producing films in different languages, including Hindi , Telugu , Tamil , Kannada , Malayalam , Marathi , Bengali , Punjabi , Bhojpuri and others. Major centres of film production across the country include Mumbai , Hyderabad , Chennai , Kolkata , Kochi , Bangalore , Bhubaneswar - Cuttack , and Guwahati . For
2100-456: A large section of the industry still saw the silent as a viable artistic and commercial prospect till about 1935." The situation was particularly acute in the Soviet Union; as of May 1933, fewer than one out of every hundred film projectors in the country was as yet equipped for sound. During the 1920s and 1930s, Japan was one of the world's two largest producers of motion pictures, along with
2250-426: A lead actor was solidified by crime-action films Zanjeer and Sholay (1975). The devotional classic Jai Santoshi Ma (1975) was made on a low budget and became a box office success and a cult classic. Another important film was Deewaar (1975, Yash Chopra ), a crime film with brothers on opposite sides of the law which Danny Boyle described as "absolutely key to Indian cinema". The term " Bollywood "
2400-406: A light valve, a thin ribbon of sensitive metal over a tiny slit. The sound reaching this ribbon would be converted into light by the shivering of the diaphragm, focusing the resulting light waves through the slit, where it would be photographed on the side of the film, on a strip about a tenth of an inch wide. In 1908, Lauste purchased a photographophone from Ruhmer, with the intention of perfecting
2550-668: A major Hollywood studio. The Jazz Singer had its European sound premiere at the Piccadilly Theatre in London on September 27, 1928. According to film historian Rachael Low , "Many in the industry realized at once that a change to sound production was inevitable." On January 16, 1929, the first European feature film with a synchronized vocal performance and recorded score premiered: the German production Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame ( I Kiss Your Hand, Madame ). Dialogueless, it contains only
2700-562: A number of companies were making progress with systems that recorded movie sound on phonograph discs. In sound-on-disc technology from the era, a phonograph turntable is connected by a mechanical interlock to a specially modified film projector , allowing for synchronization. In 1921, the Photokinema sound-on-disc system developed by Orlando Kellum was employed to add synchronized sound sequences to D. W. Griffith 's failed silent film Dream Street . A love song, performed by star Ralph Graves,
2850-632: A number of years, the Indian film industry has ranked first in the world in terms of annual film output. In 2022, Indian cinema earned ₹ 15,000 crore ($ 1.9 billion) at the box-office. Ramoji Film City located in Hyderabad is certified by the Guinness World Records as the largest film studio complex in the world measuring over 1,666 acres (674 ha ). Indian cinema is composed of multilingual and multi-ethnic film art. The term ' Bollywood ', often mistakenly used to refer to Indian cinema as
3000-412: A poll conducted by CNN-IBN among those 100 films, Mayabazar was voted by the public as the "Greatest Indian film of all time". K. Viswanath , one of the prominent auteurs of Indian cinema, he received international recognition for his works, and is known for blending parallel cinema with mainstream cinema. His works such as Sankarabharanam (1980) about revitalisation of Indian classical music won
3150-485: A screen. The phonograph was connected by an intricate arrangement of pulleys to the film projector, allowing—under ideal conditions—for synchronization. However, conditions were rarely ideal, and the new, improved Kinetophone was retired after little more than a year. By the mid-1910s, the groundswell in commercial sound motion picture exhibition had subsided. Beginning in 1914, The Photo-Drama of Creation , promoting Jehovah's Witnesses ' conception of humankind's genesis,
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#17328769050963300-445: A sound version of The Devil's Playground , arguably qualifying it as the first Australian talking motion picture; however, the May press screening of Commonwealth Film Contest prizewinner Fellers is the first verifiable public exhibition of an Australian talkie. In September 1930, a song performed by Indian star Sulochana , excerpted from the silent feature Madhuri (1928), was released as
3450-600: A stage play by Mylavaram Bala Bharathi Samajam. The film received an honorary diploma at the 2nd Venice International Film Festival . Chittoor Nagayya was one of the first multilingual filmmakers in India. Jumai Shasthi was the first Bengali short film as a talkie . Jyoti Prasad Agarwala made his first film Joymoti (1935) in Assamese, and later made Indramalati . The first film studio in South India, Durga Cinetone,
3600-476: A subsidiary of British Talking Pictures, which purchased the primary Phonofilm assets. By the end of 1930, the Phonofilm business would be liquidated. In Europe, others were also working on the development of sound-on-film. In 1919, the same year that DeForest received his first patents in the field, three German inventors, Josef Engl (1893–1942), Hans Vogt (1890–1979), and Joseph Massolle (1889–1957), patented
3750-559: A synchronized-sound short, the country's first. The following year, Ardeshir Irani directed the first Indian talking feature, the Hindi-Urdu Alam Ara , and produced Kalidas , primarily in Tamil with some Telugu. Nineteen-thirty-one also saw the first Bengali-language film, Jamai Sasthi , and the first movie fully spoken in Telugu, Bhakta Prahlada . In 1932, Ayodhyecha Raja became
3900-550: A system that recorded sound on a separate filmstrip running parallel with the image reel. Gaumont licensed the technology and briefly put it to commercial use under the name Cinéphone. US competition eclipsed Phonofilm. By September 1925, De Forest and Case's working arrangement had fallen through. The following July, Case joined Fox Film , Hollywood's third largest studio , to found the Fox-Case Corporation. The system developed by Case and his assistant, Earl Sponable, given
4050-407: A talkie: G'schichten aus der Steiermark ( Stories from Styria ), an Eagle Film–Ottoton Film production. On September 30, the first entirely German-made feature-length dramatic talkie, Das Land ohne Frauen ( Land Without Women ), premiered. A Tobis Filmkunst production, about one-quarter of the movie contained dialogue, which was strictly segregated from the special effects and music. The response
4200-506: A third of all movies produced in Japan were shot without dialogue. The enduring popularity of the silent medium in Japanese cinema owed in great part to the tradition of the benshi , a live narrator who performed as accompaniment to a film screening. As director Akira Kurosawa later described, the benshi "not only recounted the plot of the films, they enhanced the emotional content by performing
4350-471: A truthful King and its success led many to consider him a pioneer of Indian cinema. Phalke used an all Indian crew including actors Anna Salunke and D. D. Dabke . He directed, edited, processed the film himself. Phalke saw The Life of Christ (1906) by the French director Alice Guy-Blaché , While watching Jesus on the screen, Phalke envisioned Hindu deities Rama and Krishna instead and decided to start in
4500-415: A variety of ways. An increasing number of motion picture systems relied on gramophone records —known as sound-on-disc technology. The records themselves were often referred to as "Berliner discs", after one of the primary inventors in the field, German-American Emile Berliner . In 1902, Léon Gaumont demonstrated his sound-on-disc Chronophone, involving an electrical connection he had recently patented, to
4650-650: A whole, is only the Hindi-language segment, with Indian cinema being an umbrella term that includes various film industries, each offering films in diverse languages and styles. In 2021, Telugu cinema emerged as the largest film industry in India in terms of box office. In 2022, Hindi cinema represented 33% of box office revenue, followed by Telugu representing 20%, Tamil representing 16%, Kannada representing 8%, and Malayalam representing 6%. Other prominent film industries are Marathi , Punjabi , Bengali , Gujarati , Bhojpuri , and Odia cinema . As of 2022,
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4800-537: A wrestling match at the Hanging Gardens in Bombay, was the first film to be shot by an Indian and the first Indian documentary film. From 1913 to 1931, all the movies made in India were silent films , which had no sound and had intertitles . In 1913, Dadasaheb Phalke released Raja Harishchandra (1913) in Bombay, the first film made in India. It was a silent film incorporating Marathi and English intertitles. It
4950-425: Is particularly revered for its use of technology. The use of special effects, innovative for the 1950s, like the first illusion of moonlight, showcased technical brilliance.. Powerful performances and relatable themes ensure Mayabazar stays relevant, a classic enjoyed by new generations. On the centenary of Indian cinema in 2013, CNN-IBN included Mayabazar in its list of "100 greatest Indian films of all time". In
5100-488: Is the only Bollywood actor to have starred in a top 10 grossing film each year of her active career (1983–1997). K. V. Reddy 's Mayabazar (1957) is a landmark film in Indian cinema, a classic of Telugu cinema that inspired generations of filmmakers. It blends myth, fantasy, romance and humour in a timeless story, captivating audiences with its fantastical elements. The film excelled in various departments like cast performances, production design, music, cinematography and
5250-515: The 7th Busan ; Rajnesh Domalpalli's Vanaja (2006) won "Best First Feature Award" at the 57th Berlinale . Sound film A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film . The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before sound motion pictures became commercially practical. Reliable synchronization
5400-723: The British Raj banned Wrath (1930) and Raithu Bidda (1938) for broaching the subject of the Indian independence movement . The Indian Masala film —a term used for mixed-genre films that combined song, dance, romance, etc.—arose following the Second World War. During the 1940s, cinema in South India accounted for nearly half of India's cinema halls, and cinema came to be viewed as an instrument of cultural revival. The Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA), an art movement with
5550-681: The French Photographic Society . Four years later, Gaumont introduced the Elgéphone, a compressed-air amplification system based on the Auxetophone, developed by British inventors Horace Short and Charles Parsons. Despite high expectations, Gaumont's sound innovations had only limited commercial success. Despite some improvements, they still did not satisfactorily address the three basic issues with sound film and were expensive as well. For some years, American inventor E. E. Norton's Cameraphone
5700-527: The Indian Cinematograph Enquiry Committee . The ICC consisted of three British and three Indians, led by T. Rangachari , a Madras lawyer. This committee failed to bolster the desired recommendations of supporting British Film, instead recommending support for the fledgling Indian film industry, and their suggestions were set aside. The first Indian sound film was Alam Ara (1931) made by Ardeshir Irani . Ayodhyecha Raja (1932)
5850-554: The Kinetophone in 1895, but individual, cabinet viewing of motion pictures was soon to be outmoded by successes in film projection. In 1899, a projected sound-film system known as Cinemacrophonograph or Phonorama, based primarily on the work of Swiss-born inventor François Dussaud, was exhibited in Paris; similar to the Kinetophone, the system required individual use of earphones. An improved cylinder-based system, Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre,
6000-457: The Mickey Mouse short Steamboat Willie . Over the course of 1928, as Warner Bros. began to rake in huge profits due to the popularity of its sound films , the other studios quickened the pace of their conversion to the new technology. Paramount, the industry leader, put out its first talkie in late September, Beggars of Life ; though it had just a few lines of dialogue, it demonstrated
6150-526: The Motion Picture Association of America , all with live-recorded sound. These were the first true sound films exhibited by a Hollywood studio. Warner Bros.' The Better 'Ole , technically similar to Don Juan , followed in October. Sound-on-film would ultimately win out over sound-on-disc because of a number of fundamental technical advantages: Nonetheless, in the early years, sound-on-disc had
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6300-499: The Palme d'Or at Cannes and Indian films competed for the award most years in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ray is regarded as one of the greatest auteurs of 20th century cinema , along with his contemporaries Dutt and Ghatak. In 1992, the Sight & Sound Critics' Poll ranked Ray at No. 7 in its list of Top 10 Directors of all time. Multiple films from this era are included among
6450-563: The Tri-Ergon sound system. On September 17, 1922, the Tri-Ergon group gave a public screening of sound-on-film productions—including a dramatic talkie, Der Brandstifter ( The Arsonist ) —before an invited audience at the Alhambra Kino in Berlin. By the end of the decade, Tri-Ergon would be the dominant European sound system. In 1923, two Danish engineers, Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen, patented
6600-476: The greatest films of all time in various critics' and directors' polls, including The Apu Trilogy , Jalsaghar , Charulata Aranyer Din Ratri , Pyaasa , Kaagaz Ke Phool , Meghe Dhaka Tara , Komal Gandhar , Awaara , Baiju Bawra , Mother India , Mughal-e-Azam and Subarnarekha (also tied at No. 11). Sivaji Ganesan became India's first actor to receive an international award when he won
6750-520: The "Prize of the Public" at the Besançon Film Festival of France in the year 1981. Forbes included J. V. Somayajulu 's performance in the film on its list of "25 Greatest Acting Performances of Indian Cinema". Swathi Muthyam (1986) was India's official entry to the 59th Academy Awards . Swarna Kamalam (1988) the dance film choreographed by Kelucharan Mohapatra , and Sharon Lowen
6900-442: The 1947 partition of India divided the nation's assets and a number of studios moved to Pakistan. Partition became an enduring film subject thereafter. The Indian government had established a Films Division by 1948, which eventually became one of the world's largest documentary film producers with an annual production of over 200 short documentaries, each released in 18 languages with 9,000 prints for permanent film theatres across
7050-503: The 1960s, Indira Gandhi supported the production of off-beat cinema through the FFC. Baburao Patel of Filmindia called B. N. Reddy 's Malliswari (1951) an "inspiring motion picture" which would "save us the blush when compared with the best of motion pictures of the world". Film historian Randor Guy called Malliswari scripted by Devulapalli Krishnasastri a "poem in celluloid, told with rare artistic finesse, which lingers long in
7200-674: The 1970s. Madhumati (1958, Bimal Roy ) popularised the theme of reincarnation in Western popular culture . Actor Dilip Kumar rose to fame in the 1950s, and was the biggest Indian movie star of the time. He was a pioneer of method acting , predating Hollywood method actors such as Marlon Brando . Much like Brando's influence on New Hollywood actors, Kumar inspired Hindi actors, including Amitabh Bachchan , Naseeruddin Shah , Shah Rukh Khan and Nawazuddin Siddiqui . Neecha Nagar (1946) won
7350-666: The Best Actor award at the Afro-Asian film festival in 1960 and was awarded the title of Chevalier in the Legion of Honour by the French Government in 1995. Tamil cinema is influenced by Dravidian politics , with prominent film personalities C N Annadurai , M G Ramachandran , M Karunanidhi and Jayalalithaa becoming Chief Ministers of Tamil Nadu . By 1986, India's annual film output had increased to 833 films annually, making India
7500-662: The Bollywood directors and producers held the rights to their films in Northern India, Salim–Javed retained the rights in South India, where they sold remake rights for films such as Zanjeer , Yaadon Ki Baarat and Don . Several of these remakes became breakthroughs for actor Rajinikanth . Sridevi is widely regarded as the first female superstar of Indian cinema due to her pan-Indian appeal with equally successful careers in Hindi , Tamil , Malayalam , Kannada and Telugu cinema . She
7650-568: The Gallows ). Several European nations with minor positions in the field also produced their first talking pictures—Belgium (in French), Denmark, Greece, and Romania. The Soviet Union's robust film industry came out with its first sound features in December 1930: Dziga Vertov 's nonfiction Enthusiasm had an experimental, dialogueless soundtrack; Abram Room 's documentary Plan velikikh rabot ( The Plan of
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#17328769050967800-731: The Great Works ) had music and spoken voiceovers. Both were made with locally developed sound-on-film systems, two of the two hundred or so movie sound systems then available somewhere in the world. In June 1931, the Nikolai Ekk drama Putevka v zhizn ( The Road to Life or A Start in Life ), premiered as the Soviet Union's first true talking picture. Throughout much of Europe, conversion of exhibition venues lagged well behind production capacity, requiring talkies to be produced in parallel silent versions or simply shown without sound in many places. While
7950-664: The Indian box office since the 1990s. Shah Rukh Khan was the most successful for most of the 1990s and 2000s, while Aamir Khan has been the most successful since the late 2000s; according to Forbes , Shah Rukh Khan is "arguably the world's biggest movie star" as of 2017, due to his immense popularity in India and China. Other notable Hindi film stars of recent decades include Arjun Rampal , Sunny Deol , Akshay Kumar , Ajay Devgn , Hrithik Roshan , Anil Kapoor , Sanjay Dutt , Sridevi , Madhuri Dixit , Juhi Chawla , Karisma Kapoor , Kajol , Tabu , Aishwarya Rai , Rani Mukerji and Preity Zinta . Haider (2014, Vishal Bhardwaj ),
8100-455: The Mouse (31 minutes of dialogue) in May. On July 6, 1928, the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York , premiered. The film cost Warner Bros. only $ 23,000 to produce, but grossed $ 1,252,000, a record rate of return surpassing 5,000%. In September, the studio released another Al Jolson part-talking picture, The Singing Fool , which more than doubled The Jazz Singer' s earnings record for
8250-482: The Paris studios were fully sound-equipped—a process that stretched well into 1930—a number of other early French talkies were shot in Germany. The first all-talking German feature, Atlantik , had premiered in Berlin on October 28. Yet another Elstree-made movie, it was rather less German at heart than Les Trois masques and La Route est belle were French; a BIP production with a British scenarist and German director, it
8400-521: The Royal Hungarian Patent Court in 1918; the patent award was published four years later. Whether sound was captured on cylinder, disc, or film, none of the available technology was adequate for big-league commercial purposes, and for many years the heads of the major Hollywood film studios saw little benefit in producing sound motion pictures. A number of technological developments contributed to making sound cinema commercially viable by
8550-420: The Telugu language. The first film produced by the company was Ramudu Bheemudu with N. T. Rama Rao in 1964. Suresh Productions launched the careers of directors such as B. Gopal , Jayanth C. Paranjee , Muppalaneni Shiva , Tirupathi Swamy , and Uday Shankar and four music directors. Cinema of India The Cinema of India , consisting of motion pictures made by the Indian film industry , has had
8700-481: The United States ). In Europe (and, to a lesser degree, elsewhere), the new development was treated with suspicion by many filmmakers and critics, who worried that a focus on dialogue would subvert the unique aesthetic virtues of silent cinema. In Japan , where the popular film tradition integrated silent movie and live vocal performance ( benshi ), talking pictures were slow to take root. Conversely, in India, sound
8850-469: The United States. By 1930, only half of the theaters had been wired for sound. Initially, all ERPI-wired theaters were made Vitaphone-compatible; most were equipped to project Movietone reels as well. However, even with access to both technologies, most of the Hollywood companies remained slow to produce talking features of their own. No studio besides Warner Bros. released even a part-talking feature until
9000-601: The United States. Though the country's film industry was among the first to produce both sound and talking features, the full changeover to sound proceeded much more slowly than in the West. It appears that the first Japanese sound film, Reimai ( Dawn ), was made in 1926 with the De Forest Phonofilm system. Using the sound-on-disc Minatoki system, the leading Nikkatsu studio produced a pair of talkies in 1929: Taii no musume ( The Captain's Daughter ) and Furusato ( Hometown ),
9150-456: The Vitaphone system, most of the film does not contain live-recorded audio, relying, like Sunrise and Don Juan , on a score and effects. When the movie's star, Al Jolson , sings, however, the film shifts to sound recorded on the set, including both his musical performances and two scenes with ad-libbed speech—one of Jolson's character, Jakie Rabinowitz (Jack Robin), addressing a cabaret audience;
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#17328769050969300-649: The Western Electric system infringed on the Tri-Ergon patents, stalling the introduction of American technology in many places. Just as RCA had entered the movie business to maximize its recording system's value, Tobis also established its own production operations. During 1929, most of the major European filmmaking countries began joining Hollywood in the changeover to sound. Many of the trend-setting European talkies were shot abroad as production companies leased studios while their own were being converted or as they deliberately targeted markets speaking different languages. One of Europe's first two feature-length dramatic talkies
9450-451: The all-talking Niebezpieczny romans ( Dangerous Love Affair ) in October. In Italy, whose once vibrant film industry had become moribund by the late 1920s, the first talkie, La Canzone dell'amore ( The Song of Love ), also came out in October; within two years, Italian cinema would be enjoying a revival. The first movie spoken in Czech debuted in 1930 as well, Tonka Šibenice ( Tonka of
9600-476: The banner of De Forest Phonofilms . The set included the 11-minute short film From far Seville starring Concha Piquer . In 2010, a copy of the tape was found in the U.S. Library of Congress , where it is currently preserved. Critics attending the event praised the novelty but not the sound quality which received negative reviews in general. That June, De Forest entered into an extended legal battle with an employee, Freeman Harrison Owens , for title to one of
9750-402: The biggest Bollywood movie star of the period. Another landmark was Amar Akbar Anthony (1977, Manmohan Desai ). Desai further expanded the genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Commercial Hindi cinema grew in the 1980s, with films such as Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981), Disco Dancer (1982), Himmatwala (1983), Tohfa (1984), Naam (1986), Mr India (1987), and Tezaab (1988). In
9900-625: The business of "moving pictures". In South India , film pioneer Raghupathi Venkaiah Naidu , credited as the father of Telugu cinema , built the first cinemas in Madras (now Chennai ), and a film studio was established in the city by Nataraja Mudaliar. In 1921, Naidu produced the silent film, Bhishma Pratigna , generally considered to be the first Telugu feature film . The first Tamil and Malayalam films , also silent films, were Keechaka Vadham (1917–1918, R. Nataraja Mudaliar ) and Vigathakumaran (1928, J. C. Daniel Nadar ). The latter
10050-417: The camera for particular shots. The necessity of staying within range of still microphones meant that actors also often had to limit their movements unnaturally. Show Girl in Hollywood (1930), from First National Pictures (which Warner Bros. had taken control of thanks to its profitable adventure into sound), gives a behind-the-scenes look at some of the techniques involved in shooting early talkies. Several of
10200-733: The combined revenue of South Indian film industries has surpassed that of the Mumbai-based Hindi-language film industry (Bollywood). As of 2022, Telugu cinema leads Indian cinema with 23.3 crore (233 million) tickets sold, followed by Tamil cinema with 20.5 crore (205 million) and Hindi cinema with 18.9 crore (189 million). Indian cinema is a global enterprise, and its films have attracted international attention and acclaim throughout South Asia . Since talkies began in 1931, Hindi cinema has led in terms of box office performance, but in recent years it has faced stiff competition from Telugu cinema. Overseas Indians account for 12% of
10350-403: The commercialization of sound cinema were taken in the mid-to-late 1920s. At first, the sound films which included synchronized dialogue, known as " talking pictures ", or " talkies ", were exclusively shorts. The earliest feature-length movies with recorded sound included only music and effects. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie (although it had only limited sound sequences)
10500-514: The country. The period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s is regarded by film historians as the Golden Age of Indian cinema. This period saw the emergence of the parallel cinema movement, which emphasised social realism . Mainly led by Bengalis, early examples include Dharti Ke Lal (1946, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas ), Neecha Nagar (1946, Chetan Anand ), Nagarik (1952, Ritwik Ghatak ) and Do Bigha Zamin (1953, Bimal Roy), laying
10650-707: The crucial Phonofilm patents. Although De Forest ultimately won the case in the courts, Owens is today recognized as a central innovator in the field. The following year, De Forest's studio released the first commercial dramatic film shot as a talking picture—the two-reeler Love's Old Sweet Song , directed by J. Searle Dawley and featuring Una Merkel . However, phonofilm's stock in trade was not original dramas but celebrity documentaries, popular music acts, and comedy performances. President Calvin Coolidge , opera singer Abbie Mitchell , and vaudeville stars such as Phil Baker , Ben Bernie , Eddie Cantor and Oscar Levant appeared in
10800-531: The device into a commercial product. Though sound-on-film would eventually become the universal standard for synchronized sound cinema, Lauste never successfully exploited his innovations, which came to an effective dead end. In 1914, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt was granted German patent 309,536 for his sound-on-film work; that same year, he apparently demonstrated a film made with the process to an audience of scientists in Berlin. Hungarian engineer Denes Mihaly submitted his sound-on-film Projectofon concept to
10950-460: The early 1970s, Hindi cinema was experiencing thematic stagnation, dominated by musical romance films . Screenwriter duo Salim–Javed ( Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar ) revitalised the industry. They established the genre of gritty, violent, Bombay underworld crime films with Zanjeer (1973) and Deewaar (1975). They reinterpreted the rural themes of Mother India and Gunga Jumna in an urban context reflecting 1970s India, channelling
11100-404: The edge over sound-on-film in two substantial ways: As sound-on-film technology improved, both of these disadvantages were overcome. The third crucial set of innovations marked a major step forward in both the live recording of sound and its effective playback: In 1913, Western Electric , the manufacturing division of AT&T, acquired the rights to the de Forest audion , the forerunner of
11250-435: The film "a good gimmick, but that's all it was." Not until May 1928 did the group of four big studios (PDC had dropped out of the alliance), along with United Artists and others, sign with ERPI for conversion of production facilities and theaters for sound film. It was a daunting commitment; revamping a single theater cost as much as $ 15,000 (the equivalent of $ 220,000 in 2019), and there were more than 20,000 movie theaters in
11400-434: The film's soundtrack consisted of a musical score and sound effects (including, in a couple of crowd scenes, "wild", nonspecific vocals). Then, on October 6, 1927, Warner Bros.' The Jazz Singer premiered. It was a smash box office success for the mid-level studio, earning a total of $ 2.625 million in the United States and abroad, almost a million dollars more than the previous record for a Warner Bros. film. Produced with
11550-538: The firm's pictures. Hollywood remained suspicious, even fearful, of the new technology. As Photoplay editor James Quirk put it in March 1924, "Talking pictures are perfected, says Dr. Lee De Forest. So is castor oil ." De Forest's process continued to be used through 1927 in the United States for dozens of short Phonofilms; in the UK it was employed a few years longer for both shorts and features by British Sound Film Productions,
11700-507: The first all-color, all-talking feature, Warner Bros.' On with the Show! , premiered. Yet most American movie theaters, especially outside of urban areas, were still not equipped for sound: while the number of sound cinemas grew from 100 to 800 between 1928 and 1929, they were still vastly outnumbered by silent theaters, which had actually grown in number as well, from 22,204 to 22,544. The studios, in parallel, were still not entirely convinced of
11850-465: The first commercial motion picture exhibition, he proposed a scheme for sound cinema that would combine his image-casting zoopraxiscope with Edison's recorded-sound technology. No agreement was reached, but within a year Edison commissioned the development of the Kinetoscope , essentially a "peep-show" system, as a visual complement to his cylinder phonograph . The two devices were brought together as
12000-423: The first feature-length movie to employ a synchronized sound system of any type throughout, its soundtrack contained a musical score and added sound effects , but no recorded dialogue—in other words, it had been staged and shot as a silent film. Accompanying Don Juan , however, were eight shorts of musical performances, mostly classical, as well as a four-minute filmed introduction by Will H. Hays , president of
12150-570: The first movie in which Marathi was spoken to be released (though Sant Tukaram was the first to go through the official censorship process); the first Gujarati-language film, Narsimha Mehta , and all-Tamil talkie, Kalava , debuted as well. The next year, Ardeshir Irani produced the first Persian-language talkie, Dukhtar-e-loor . Also in 1933, the first Cantonese-language films were produced in Hong Kong— Sha zai dongfang ( The Idiot's Wedding Night ) and Liang xing ( Conscience ); within two years,
12300-542: The first reported U.S. demonstration of a sound-on-film motion picture to members of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers . As with Lauste and Tigerstedt, Tykociner's system would never be taken advantage of commercially; however, De Forest's soon would. On April 15, 1923, at the New York City's Rivoli Theater, the first commercial screening of motion pictures with sound-on-film took place. This would become
12450-436: The foundations for Indian neorealism The Apu Trilogy (1955–1959, Satyajit Ray ) won prizes at several major international film festivals and firmly established the parallel cinema movement. It was influential on world cinema and led to a rush of coming-of-age films in art house theatres. Cinematographer Subrata Mitra developed the technique of bounce lighting , to recreate the effect of daylight on sets, during
12600-526: The front-runners came up with. In May, Warner Bros. sold back its exclusivity rights to ERPI (along with the Fox-Case sublicense) and signed a new royalty contract similar to Fox's for use of Western Electric technology. Fox and Warners pressed forward with sound cinema, moving in different directions both technologically and commercially: Fox moved into newsreels and then scored dramas, while Warners concentrated on talking features. Meanwhile, ERPI sought to corner
12750-420: The fundamental problems caused by the transition to sound were soon solved with new camera casings, known as " blimps ", designed to suppress noise and boom microphones that could be held just out of frame and moved with the actors. In 1931, a major improvement in playback fidelity was introduced: three-way speaker systems in which sound was separated into low, medium, and high frequencies and sent respectively to
12900-411: The future standard. It consisted of a set of short films varying in length and featuring some of the most popular stars of the 1920s (including Eddie Cantor , Harry Richman , Sophie Tucker , and George Jessel among others) doing stage performances such as vaudevilles , musical acts, and speeches which accompanied the screening of the silent feature film Bella Donna . All of them were presented under
13050-607: The globe, compared to Hollywood 's 2.6 billion tickets sold. Realistic parallel cinema continued throughout the 1970s, practised in many Indian film cultures. The FFC's art film orientation came under criticism during a Committee on Public Undertakings investigation in 1976, which accused the body of not doing enough to encourage commercial cinema. Hindi commercial cinema continued with films such as Aradhana (1969), Sachaa Jhutha (1970), Haathi Mere Saathi (1971), Anand (1971), Kati Patang (1971) Amar Prem (1972), Dushman (1972) and Daag (1973). By
13200-461: The growing discontent and disillusionment among the masses, unprecedented growth of slums and urban poverty, corruption and crime, as well as anti-establishment themes. This resulted in their creation of the "angry young man", personified by Amitabh Bachchan , who reinterpreted Kumar's performance in Gunga Jumna and gave a voice to the urban poor. By the mid-1970s, Bachchan's position as
13350-890: The highest number of mainstream Indian hit movies that decade. At the end of the decade, Yash Chopra 's Chandni (1989) created a new formula for Bollywood musical romance films, reviving the genre and defining Hindi cinema in the years that followed. Commercial Hindi cinema grew in the late 1980s and 1990s, with the release of Mr. India (1987), Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), Chaalbaaz (1989), Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), Lamhe (1991), Saajan (1991), Khuda Gawah (1992), Khalnayak (1993), Darr (1993), Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! (1994), Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Pyar Kiya Toh Darna Kya (1998) and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). Cult classic Bandit Queen (1994) directed by Shekhar Kapur received international recognition and controversy. In
13500-688: The industry's revenue. The history of cinema in India extends to the beginning of the film era. Following the screening of the Lumière and Robert Paul moving pictures in London in 1896, commercial cinematography became a worldwide sensation and these films were shown in Bombay (now Mumbai ) that same year. In 1897, a film presentation by filmmaker Professor Stevenson featured a stage show at Calcutta's Star Theatre. With Stevenson's camera and encouragement, Indian photographer Hiralal Sen filmed scenes from that show, exhibited as The Flower of Persia (1898). The Wrestlers (1899), by H. S. Bhatavdekar , showing
13650-476: The late 1920s. Two involved contrasting approaches to synchronized sound reproduction, or playback: In 1919, American inventor Lee De Forest was awarded several patents that would lead to the first optical sound -on-film technology with commercial application. In De Forest's system, the sound track was photographically recorded onto the side of the strip of motion picture film to create a composite, or "married", print. If proper synchronization of sound and picture
13800-455: The late 1980s, Hindi cinema experienced another period of stagnation, with a decline in box office turnout, due to increasing violence, decline in musical melodic quality, and rise in video piracy, leading to middle-class family audiences abandoning theatres. The turning point came with Indian blockbuster Disco Dancer (1982) which began the era of disco music in Indian cinema. Lead actor Mithun Chakraborty and music director Bappi Lahiri had
13950-547: The late 1990s, there was a resurgence of parallel cinema in Bollywood, largely due to the critical and commercial success of crime films such as Satya (1998) and Vaastav (1999). These films launched a genre known as "Mumbai noir", reflecting social problems in the city. Ram Gopal Varma directed the Indian Political Trilogy , and the Indian Gangster Trilogy ; film critic Rajeev Masand had labelled
14100-456: The latter directed by Kenji Mizoguchi . The rival Shochiku studio began the successful production of sound-on-film talkies in 1931 using a variable-density process called Tsuchibashi. Two years later, however, more than 80 percent of movies made in the country were still silents. Two of the country's leading directors, Mikio Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu , did not make their first sound films until 1935 and 1936, respectively. As late as 1938, over
14250-480: The latter series as one of the "most influential movies of Bollywood. The first instalment of the trilogy, Satya , was also listed in CNN-IBN 's 100 greatest Indian films of all time. Since the 1990s, the three biggest Bollywood movie stars have been the " Three Khans ": Aamir Khan , Shah Rukh Khan , and Salman Khan . Combined, they starred in the top ten highest-grossing Bollywood films , and have dominated
14400-535: The lines are of varying width.) By October, the FBO-RCA alliance would lead to the creation of Hollywood's newest major studio, RKO Pictures . Meanwhile, Warner Bros. had released three more talkies, all profitable, if not at the level of The Jazz Singer : In March, Tenderloin appeared; it was billed by Warners as the first feature in which characters spoke their parts, though only 15 of its 88 minutes had dialogue. Glorious Betsy followed in April, and The Lion and
14550-481: The local film industry had fully converted to sound. Korea, where pyonsa (or byun-sa ) held a role and status similar to that of the Japanese benshi, in 1935 became the last country with a significant film industry to produce its first talking picture: Chunhyangjeon ( Korean : 춘향전 ; Hanja : 春香傳 ) is based on the seventeenth-century pansori folktale " Chunhyangga ", of which as many as fifteen film versions have been made through 2009. In
14700-439: The low-budget-oriented Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) premiered The Perfect Crime on June 17, 1928, eight months after The Jazz Singer . FBO had come under the effective control of a Western Electric competitor, General Electric 's RCA division, which was looking to market its new sound-on-film system, Photophone . Unlike Fox-Case's Movietone and De Forest's Phonofilm, which were variable-density systems, Photophone
14850-424: The market by signing up the five allied studios. The big sound film sensations of the year all took advantage of preexisting celebrity. On May 20, 1927, at New York City's Roxy Theater , Fox Movietone presented a sound film of the takeoff of Charles Lindbergh 's celebrated flight to Paris, recorded earlier that day. In June, a Fox sound newsreel depicting his return welcomes in New York City and Washington, D.C.,
15000-506: The masses (admission as low as an anna [one-sixteenth of a rupee] in Bombay). Young producers began to incorporate elements of Indian social life and culture into cinema, others brought new ideas from across the world. Global audiences and markets soon became aware of India's film industry. In 1927, the British government, to promote the market in India for British films over American ones, formed
15150-461: The memory". Commercial Hindi cinema began thriving, including acclaimed films Pyaasa (1957) and Kaagaz Ke Phool (1959, Guru Dutt ) Awaara (1951) and Shree 420 (1955, Raj Kapoor ). These films expressed social themes mainly dealing with working-class urban life in India; Awaara presented Bombay as both a nightmare and a dream, while Pyaasa critiqued the unreality of city life. Epic film Mother India (1957, Mehboob Khan )
15300-582: The name Movietone , thus became the first viable sound-on-film technology controlled by a Hollywood movie studio. The following year, Fox purchased the North American rights to the Tri-Ergon system, though the company found it inferior to Movietone and virtually impossible to integrate the two different systems to advantage. In 1927, as well, Fox retained the services of Freeman Owens, who had particular expertise in constructing cameras for synch-sound film. Parallel with improvements in sound-on-film technology,
15450-403: The other an exchange between him and his mother. The "natural" sounds of the settings were also audible. Though the success of The Jazz Singer was due largely to Jolson, already established as one of U.S. biggest music stars, and its limited use of synchronized sound hardly qualified it as an innovative sound film (let alone the "first"), the movie's profits were proof enough to the industry that
15600-521: The pace of conversion was relatively swift in Britain—with over 60 percent of theaters equipped for sound by the end of 1930, similar to the U.S. figure—in France, by contrast, more than half of theaters nationwide were still projecting in silence by late 1932. According to scholar Colin G. Crisp, "Anxiety about resuscitating the flow of silent films was frequently expressed in the [French] industrial press, and
15750-466: The redubbed Vitaphone operation, leading to the production of Don Juan and its accompanying shorts over the following months. During the period when Vitaphone had exclusive access to the patents, the fidelity of recordings made for Warners films was markedly superior to those made for the company's sound-on-film competitors. Meanwhile, Bell Labs —the new name for the AT&;T research operation—was working at
15900-431: The running time of 1000 ft of film at 90 ft/min (24 frames/s). Because of the larger diameter the minimum groove velocity of 70 ft/min (14 inches or 356 mm/s) was only slightly less than that of a standard 10-inch 78 rpm commercial disc. In 1925, the company publicly introduced a greatly improved system of electronic audio, including sensitive condenser microphones and rubber-line recorders (named after
16050-603: The second film of the trilogy and later pioneered other effects such as the photo-negative flashbacks and X-ray digressions. During the 1950s, Indian cinema reportedly became the world's second largest film industry, earning a gross annual income of ₹ 250 million (equivalent to ₹ 26 billion or US$ 320 million in 2023) in 1953. The government created the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) in 1960 to provide financial support to filmmakers. While serving as Information and Broadcasting Minister of India in
16200-562: The selenium's resistance to electrical currents, which was used to modulate the sound produced in a telephone receiver. He called this invention the photographophone , which he summarized as: "It is truly a wonderful process: sound becomes electricity, becomes light, causes chemical actions, becomes light and electricity again, and finally sound." Ruhmer began a correspondence with the French-born, London-based Eugene Lauste , who had worked at Edison's lab between 1886 and 1892. In 1907, Lauste
16350-457: The short term, the introduction of live sound recording caused major difficulties in production. Cameras were noisy, so a soundproofed cabinet was used in many of the earliest talkies to isolate the loud equipment from the actors, at the expense of a drastic reduction in the ability to move the camera. For a time, multiple-camera shooting was used to compensate for the loss of mobility and innovative studio technicians could often find ways to liberate
16500-666: The sound quality was very poor and no other theaters could show the sound version of the film as no one had the Photokinema sound system installed. On Sunday, May 29, Dream Street opened at the Shubert Crescent Theater in Brooklyn with a program of short films made in Phonokinema. However, business was poor, and the program soon closed. In 1925, Sam Warner of Warner Bros. , then a small Hollywood studio with big ambitions, saw
16650-473: The sound-on-disc system were able to draw on expertise that Western Electric already had in electrical disc recording and were thus able to make faster initial progress. The main change required was to increase the playing time of the disc so that it could match that of a standard 1,000 ft (300 m) reel of 35 mm film. The chosen design used a disc nearly 16 inches (about 40 cm) in diameter rotating at 33 1/3 rpm. This could play for 11 minutes,
16800-462: The studio's recognition of the new medium's power. Interference , Paramount's first all-talker, debuted in November. The process known as "goat glanding" briefly became widespread: soundtracks, sometimes including a smatter of post-dubbed dialogue or song, were added to movies that had been shot, and in some cases released, as silents. A few minutes of singing could qualify such a newly endowed film as
16950-466: The sublicense, both Warners and ERPI received a share of Fox's related revenues. The patents of all three concerns were cross-licensed. Superior recording and amplification technology was now available to two Hollywood studios, pursuing two very different methods of sound reproduction. The new year would finally see the emergence of sound cinema as a significant commercial medium. In 1929 a "new RCA Photophone portable sound and picture reproducing system"
17100-479: The talkies' universal appeal—until mid-1930, the majority of Hollywood movies were produced in dual versions, silent as well as talking. Though few in the industry predicted it, silent film as a viable commercial medium in the United States would soon be little more than a memory. Points West , a Hoot Gibson Western released by Universal Pictures in August 1929, was the last purely silent mainstream feature put out by
17250-437: The technology was worth investing in. The development of commercial sound cinema had proceeded in fits and starts before The Jazz Singer , and the film's success did not change things overnight. Influential gossip columnist Louella Parsons ' reaction to The Jazz Singer was badly off the mark: "I have no fear that the screeching sound film will ever disturb our theaters," while MGM head of production Irving Thalberg called
17400-1505: The third instalment of the Indian Shakespearean Trilogy after Maqbool (2003) and Omkara (2006), won the People's Choice Award at the 9th Rome Film Festival in the Mondo Genere making it the first Indian film to achieve this honour. The 2000s and 2010s also saw the rise of a new generation of popular actors like Shahid Kapoor , Ranbir Kapoor , Ranveer Singh , Ayushmann Khurrana , Varun Dhawan , Sidharth Malhotra , Sushant Singh Rajput , Kartik Aaryan , Arjun Kapoor , Aditya Roy Kapur and Tiger Shroff , as well as actresses like Vidya Balan , Priyanka Chopra , Kareena Kapoor , Katrina Kaif , Kangana Ranaut , Deepika Padukone , Sonam Kapoor , Anushka Sharma , Shraddha Kapoor , Alia Bhatt , Parineeti Chopra and Kriti Sanon with Balan, Ranaut and Bhatt gaining wide recognition for successful female-centric films such as The Dirty Picture (2011), Kahaani (2012), Queen (2014), Highway (2014), Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), Raazi (2018) and Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022). Salim–Javed were highly influential in South Indian cinema . In addition to writing two Kannada films , many of their Bollywood films had remakes produced in other regions, including Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam cinema. While
17550-407: The transmitting arc-light as varying shades of light and dark bands onto a continuous roll of photographic film. He then determined that he could reverse the process and reproduce the recorded sound from this photographic strip by shining a bright light through the running filmstrip, with the resulting varying light illuminating a selenium cell. The changes in brightness caused a corresponding change to
17700-567: The triode vacuum tube . Over the next few years they developed it into a predictable and reliable device that made electronic amplification possible for the first time. Western Electric then branched-out into developing uses for the vacuum tube including public address systems and an electrical recording system for the recording industry. Beginning in 1922, the research branch of Western Electric began working intensively on recording technology for both sound-on-disc and sound-on film synchronised sound systems for motion-pictures. The engineers working on
17850-415: The use of a rubber damping band for recording with better frequency response onto a wax master disc ). That May, the company licensed entrepreneur Walter J. Rich to exploit the system for commercial motion pictures; he founded Vitagraph, in which Warner Bros. acquired a half interest, just one month later. In April 1926, Warners signed a contract with AT&T for exclusive use of its film sound technology for
18000-421: The voices and sound effects and providing evocative descriptions of events and images on the screen.... The most popular narrators were stars in their own right, solely responsible for the patronage of a particular theatre." Film historian Mariann Lewinsky argues, The end of silent film in the West and in Japan was imposed by the industry and the market, not by any inner need or natural evolution.... Silent cinema
18150-526: The world's largest film producer. Hindi film production of Bombay, the largest segment of the industry, became known as "Bollywood". Summary of the 2022 box office revenues. By 1996, the Indian film industry had an estimated domestic cinema viewership of 600 million people, establishing India as one of the largest film markets, with the largest regional industries being Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil films. In 2001, in terms of ticket sales, Indian cinema sold an estimated 3.6 billion tickets annually across
18300-474: The year, AT&T/Western Electric created a licensing division, Electrical Research Products Inc. (ERPI), to handle rights to the company's film-related audio technology. Vitaphone still had legal exclusivity, but having lapsed in its royalty payments, effective control of the rights was in ERPI's hands. On December 31, 1926, Warners granted Fox-Case a sublicense for the use of the Western Electric system; in exchange for
18450-465: Was The Jazz Singer , which premiered on October 6, 1927. A major hit, it was made with Vitaphone , which was at the time the leading brand of sound-on-disc technology. Sound-on-film, however, would soon become the standard for talking pictures. By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. In the United States, they helped secure Hollywood's position as one of the world's most powerful cultural/commercial centers of influence (see Cinema of
18600-461: Was Kisan Kanya (1937, Moti B). Viswa Mohini (1940) was the first Indian film to depict the Indian movie-making world. Swamikannu Vincent , who had built the first cinema of South India in Coimbatore , introduced the concept of "tent cinema" in which a tent was erected on a stretch of open land to screen films. The first of its kind was in Madras and called Edison's Grand Cinema Megaphone. This
18750-425: Was a highly pleasurable and fully mature form. It didn't lack anything, least in Japan, where there was always the human voice doing the dialogues and the commentary. Sound films were not better, just more economical. As a cinema owner you didn't have to pay the wages of musicians and benshi any more. And a good benshi was a star demanding star payment. By the same token, the viability of the benshi system facilitated
18900-416: Was a variable-area system—a refinement in the way the audio signal was inscribed on film that would ultimately become the standard. (In both sorts of systems, a specially-designed lamp, whose exposure to the film is determined by the audio input, is used to record sound photographically as a series of minuscule lines. In a variable-density process, the lines are of varying darkness; in a variable-area process,
19050-453: Was achieved in recording, it could be absolutely counted on in playback. Over the next four years, he improved his system with the help of equipment and patents licensed from another American inventor in the field, Theodore Case . At the University of Illinois , Polish-born research engineer Joseph Tykociński-Tykociner was working independently on a similar process. On June 9, 1922, he gave
19200-497: Was also shot in English as Atlantic . The entirely German Aafa-Film production It's You I Have Loved ( Dich hab ich geliebt ) opened three and a half weeks later. It was not "Germany's First Talking Film", as the marketing had it, but it was the first to be released in the United States. In 1930, the first Polish talkies premiered, using sound-on-disc systems: Moralność pani Dulskiej ( The Morality of Mrs. Dulska ) in March and
19350-400: Was awarded the first patent for sound-on-film technology, involving the transformation of sound into light waves that are photographically recorded direct onto celluloid . As described by historian Scott Eyman, It was a double system, that is, the sound was on a different piece of film from the picture.... In essence, the sound was captured by a microphone and translated into light waves via
19500-492: Was built in 1936 by Nidamarthi Surayya in Rajahmundry , Andhra Pradesh. The advent of sound to Indian cinema launched musicals such as Indra Sabha and Devi Devyani , marking the beginning of song-and-dance in Indian films. By 1935, studios emerged in major cities such as Madras, Calcutta and Bombay as filmmaking became an established industry, exemplified by the success of Devdas (1935). The first colour film made in India
19650-451: Was coined in the 1970s, when the conventions of commercial Bombay-produced Hindi films were established. Key to this was Nasir Hussain and Salim–Javed's creation of the masala film genre, which combines elements of action , comedy , romance , drama , melodrama and musical . Their film Yaadon Ki Baarat (1973) has been identified as the first masala film and the first quintessentially Bollywood film. Masala films made Bachchan
19800-449: Was created in still a different sort of twist on multinational moviemaking: The Crimson Circle was a coproduction between director Friedrich Zelnik 's Efzet-Film company and British Sound Film Productions (BSFP). In 1928, the film had been released as the silent Der Rote Kreis in Germany, where it was shot; English dialogue was apparently dubbed in much later using the De Forest Phonofilm process controlled by BSFP's corporate parent. It
19950-813: Was described in the industry journal Projection Engineering. In Australia, Hoyts and Gilby Talkies Pty., Ltd were touring talking pictures to country towns. The same year the White Star Line installed talking picture equipment on the s.s. Majestic. The features shown on the first voyage were Show Boat and Broadway . In February 1927, an agreement was signed by five leading Hollywood movie companies: Famous Players–Lasky (soon to be part of Paramount ), Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer , Universal , First National , and Cecil B. DeMille 's small but prestigious Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC). The five studios agreed to collectively select just one provider for sound conversion, and then waited to see what sort of results
20100-609: Was developed by Clément-Maurice Gratioulet and Henri Lioret of France, allowing short films of theater, opera, and ballet excerpts to be presented at the Paris Exposition in 1900. These appear to be the first publicly exhibited films with projection of both image and recorded sound. Phonorama and yet another sound-film system—Théâtroscope—were also presented at the Exposition. Three major problems persisted, leading to motion pictures and sound recording largely taking separate paths for
20250-411: Was difficult to achieve with the early sound-on-disc systems, and amplification and recording quality were also inadequate. Innovations in sound-on-film led to the first commercial screening of short motion pictures using the technology, which took place in 1923. Before sound-on-film technology became viable, soundtracks for films were commonly played live with organs or pianos. The primary steps in
20400-572: Was due to the fact that electric carbons were used for motion picture projectors. Bombay Talkies opened in 1934 and Prabhat Studios in Pune began production of Marathi films. Sant Tukaram (1936) was the first Indian film to be screened at an international film festival, at the 1937 edition of the Venice Film Festival. The film was judged one of the three best films of the year. However, while Indian filmmakers sought to tell important stories,
20550-605: Was featured at the Ann Arbor Film Festival , fetching three Indian Express Awards . B. Narsing Rao , K. N. T. Sastry , and A. Kutumba Rao garnered international recognition for their works in new-wave cinema. Narsing Rao's Maa Ooru (1992) won the " Media Wave Award " of Hungary; Daasi (1988) and Matti Manushulu (1990) won the Diploma of Merit awards at the 16th and 17th MIFF respectively. Sastry's Thilaadanam (2000) received "New Currents Award" at
20700-509: Was given a British trade screening in March 1929, as was a part-talking film made entirely in the UK: The Clue of the New Pin , a British Lion production using the sound-on-disc British Photophone system. In May, Black Waters , which British and Dominions Film Corporation promoted as the first UK all-talker, received its initial trade screening; it had been shot completely in Hollywood with
20850-548: Was premiered in Coronation cinema in Girgaon . Although some claim Shree Pundalik (1912) of Dadasaheb Torne is the first ever film made in India, some film scholars have argued that Pundalik was not a true Indian film because it was simply a recording of a stage play, filmed by a British cameraman and it was processed in London. Raja Harishchandra of Phalke had a story based on Hindu Sanskrit legend of Harishchandra ,
21000-462: Was recorded on RCA Photophone, General Electric having bought a share of AEG so they could access the Tobis-Klangfilm markets. Blackmail was a substantial hit; critical response was also positive—notorious curmudgeon Hugh Castle, for example, called it "perhaps the most intelligent mixture of sound and silence we have yet seen." On August 23, the modest-sized Austrian film industry came out with
21150-422: Was recorded, as was a sequence of live vocal effects. Apparently, dialogue scenes were also recorded, but the results were unsatisfactory and the film was never publicly screened incorporating them. On May 1, 1921, Dream Street was re-released, with love song added, at New York City's Town Hall theater, qualifying it—however haphazardly—as the first feature-length film with a live-recorded vocal sequence. However,
21300-474: Was screened around the United States: eight hours worth of projected visuals involving both slides and live action, synchronized with separately recorded lectures and musical performances played back on phonograph. Meanwhile, innovations continued on another significant front. In 1900, as part of the research he was conducting on the photophone , the German physicist Ernst Ruhmer recorded the fluctuations of
21450-507: Was shown. These were the two most acclaimed sound motion pictures to date. In May, as well, Fox had released the first Hollywood fiction film with synchronized dialogue: the short They're Coming to Get Me , starring comedian Chic Sale . After rereleasing a few silent feature hits, such as Seventh Heaven , with recorded music, Fox came out with its first original Movietone feature on September 23: Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans , by acclaimed German director F. W. Murnau . As with Don Juan ,
21600-420: Was the challenge of recording fidelity. The primitive systems of the era produced sound of very low quality unless the performers were stationed directly in front of the cumbersome recording devices (acoustical horns, for the most part), imposing severe limits on the sort of films that could be created with live-recorded sound. Cinematic innovators attempted to cope with the fundamental synchronization problem in
21750-473: Was the first Indian film to be nominated for the US-based Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and defined the conventions of Hindi cinema for decades. It spawned a new genre of dacoit films . Gunga Jumna (1961, Dilip Kumar ) was a dacoit crime drama about two brothers on opposite sides of the law, a theme that became common in Indian films in
21900-503: Was the first Indian social drama film and featured the first Dalit -caste film actress. The first chain of Indian cinemas, Madan Theatre , was owned by Parsi entrepreneur Jamshedji Framji Madan , who oversaw the production and distribution of films for the chain. These included film adaptations from Bengal's popular literature and Satyawadi Raja Harishchandra (1917), a remake of Phalke's influential film. Films steadily gained popularity across India as affordable entertainment for
22050-529: Was the first sound film of Marathi cinema . Irani also produced South India's first sound film, the Tamil–Telugu bilingual talking picture Kalidas (1931, H. M. Reddy ). The first Telugu film with audible dialogue, Bhakta Prahlada (1932), was directed by H. M. Reddy , who directed the first bilingual (Telugu and Tamil) talkie Kalidas (1931). East India Film Company produced its first Telugu film, Savitri (1933, C. Pullayya ), adapted from
22200-650: Was the primary competitor to the Gaumont system (sources differ on whether the Cameraphone was disc- or cylinder-based); it ultimately failed for many of the same reasons that held back the Chronophone. In 1913, Edison introduced a new cylinder-based synch-sound apparatus known, just like his 1895 system, as the Kinetophone. Instead of films being shown to individual viewers in the Kinetoscope cabinet, they were now projected onto
22350-452: Was the transformative element that led to the rapid expansion of the nation's film industry . The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the concept of cinema itself. On February 27, 1888, a couple of days after photographic pioneer Eadweard Muybridge gave a lecture not far from the laboratory of Thomas Edison , the two inventors met privately. Muybridge later claimed that on this occasion, six years before
22500-465: Was underwhelming. Sweden's first talkie, Konstgjorda Svensson ( Artificial Svensson ), premiered on October 14. Eight days later, Aubert Franco-Film came out with Le Collier de la reine ( The Queen's Necklace ), shot at the Épinay studio near Paris. Conceived as a silent film, it was given a Tobis-recorded score and a single talking sequence—the first dialogue scene in a French feature. On October 31, Les Trois masques ( The Three Masks ) debuted;
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