Hollywood has had a penetrating effect not only on American cinema but all over the world since its very beginning. The history of Hollywood is often separated into four major periods: the silent film era, the Classical Hollywood, the New Hollywood cinema, and the contemporary period (post 1980).

The beginning of the motion picture

In 1894, the world's very first commercial motion picture was exhibited in New York City, using the Kinetoscope developed by Thomas Edison. The next year, Frenchmen Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the motion picture camera - the cinematograph.

The cinematograph was a portable, suitcase-sized three-in-one device: a camera, a printer, and a projector. The device soon took America by storm because of its convenience, and replaced Edison's bulkier version of the camera. Hence the motion picture industry was born.

The silent film era

Film producers made short silent films for the first 20 years of the twentieth century. Inventors tried to accompany the moving images with synchronous sound, but they were not able to devise practical method until the late 1920s.

Thus, movies around this time were silent, although some films were accompanied by live musicians and the dialogue and narration were presented in intertitles.

During this era, making films was considered an expensive hobby. It was later regarded as an art form. Silent films soon evolved from having simple plots into having very complex ones. The length of the films also gradually increased. Films featuring Charlie Chaplin are representative of the silent film era.

The Classical Hollywood

The Golden Age of Hollywood started from the end of the silent film period and ended in the late 1950s. This period marks the birth of star-powered Hollywood studios such as Paramount Pictures, Columbia Pictures, Warner Brothers, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th-Century Fox, and Walt Disney.

The Hollywood star system produced the likes of Clark Gable, Vivien Leigh, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, and Gene Kelly.

The New Hollywood

The invention of the television in the 1950s coupled with the ability of Hollywood stars to have their own agents eventually disintegrated the monopoly of big studios and paved the way for the New Hollywood. In this period of "post-classical cinema," new directors came into the scene, actors developed new approaches to acting, and films had better plots.

Notable films in this era include Psycho (1960), The Sound of Music (1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1967), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), Filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian de Palma, Steven Spielberg, and William Friedkin introduced new filmmaking techniques.

The contemporary period

The late 1980s and the early 1990s revitalized the independent cinema. In this period, notable filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino, and Kevin Smith made movies like Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), Do the Right Thing (1989), Reservoir Dogs (1992), and Clerks (1994), respectively.

Many films produced today are innovative in terms of directing, editing, screenwriting, and visual effects. Many of them