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At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened. Subjects included local scenes and activities, views of foreign lands, short comedies and newsworthy events. The films were accompanied by lectures, music and a lot of audience participation. Although they did not have synchronised dialogue, they were not ‘silent’ as they are sometimes described.

By 1914, several national film industries were established. At this time, Europe, Russia and Scandinavia were the dominant industries; America was much less important. Films became longer and storytelling, or narrative, became the dominant form. As more people paid to see movies, the industry which grew around them was prepared to invest more money in their production, distribution and exhibition, so large studios were established and dedicated cinemas built. The First World War greatly affected the film industry in Europe, and the American industry grew in relative importance. The first 30 years of cinema were characterised by the growth and consolidation of an industrial base, the establishment of the narrative form, and refinement of technology.

Photographic colour entered the cinema at approximately the same time as sound. In the midst of the Depression, conversion to color was slow and incomplete because of the unwieldy process. After three-colour Technicolor was used successfully in Disney’s cartoon short The Three Little Pigs (1933), the live-action short La Cucaracha (1934), and Rouben Mamoulian’s live-action feature Becky Sharp (1935), it gradually worked its way into mainstream feature production (The Garden of Allah, 1936; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937; The Adventures of Robin Hood, 1938; The Wizard of Oz, 1939; Gone with the Wind, 1939), although it remained strongly associated with fantasy and spectacle.

The first attempts to add synchronised sound to projected pictures used phonographic cylinders or discs. The first feature-length movie incorporating synchronised dialogue, The Jazz Singer (USA, 1927), used the Warner Brothers’ Vitaphone system, which employed a separate record disc with each reel of film for the sound. This system proved unreliable and was soon replaced by an optical, variable density soundtrack recorded photographically along the edge of the film, developed originally for newsreels such as Movietone.

By the early 1930s, nearly all feature-length movies were presented with synchronised sound and, by the mid-1930s, some were in full colour too. The advent of sound secured the dominant role of the American industry and gave rise to the so-called ‘Golden Age of Hollywood’. During the 1930s and 1940s, cinema was the principal form of popular entertainment, with people often attending cinemas twice a week. Ornate ’super’ cinemas or ‘picture palaces’, offering extra facilities such as cafés and ballrooms, came to towns and cities; many of them could hold over 3,000 people in a single auditorium. In Britain, the highest attendances occurred in 1946, with over 31 million visits to the cinema each week.

The introduction of television in America prompted a number of technical experiments designed to maintain public interest in cinema. In 1952, the Cinerama process, using three projectors, a curved screen, and surround sound, was premiered. It had a large aspect ratio, giving audiences a greater sense of immersion. However, Cinerama was expensive to produce and show. Widescreen cinema was not widely adopted by the industry until the invention of CinemaScope in 1953 and Todd‑AO in 1955. Both processes used single projectors in their presentation. By the end of the 1950s, these innovations had effectively changed the shape of the cinema screen, with aspect ratios of either 2.35:1 or 1.66:1 becoming standard. Stereo sound also became part of the new widescreen experience. The most successful large-screen system has been IMAX, which as of 2020 has over 1,500 screens around the world.

In the past 20 years, film production has been profoundly altered by the impact of rapidly improving digital technology. Most mainstream productions are now shot on digital formats with subsequent processes, such as editing and special effects, undertaken on computers. Cinemas have invested in digital projection facilities capable of producing screen images that rival the sharpness, detail and brightness of traditional film projection. Only a small number of more specialist cinemas have retained film projection equipment. In the past few years there has been a revival of interest in 3D features, sparked by the availability of digital technology. Whether this will be more than a short-term phenomenon (as previous attempts at 3D in the 1950s and 1980s had been) remains to be seen, though the trend towards 3D production has seen greater investment and industry commitment than before.