Narrative film , fictional film or fiction film is a motion picture that tells a fictional or fictionalized story, event or narrative . Commercial narrative films with running times of over an hour are often referred to as feature films , or feature-length films. The earliest narrative films, around the turn of the 20th century, were essentially filmed stage plays and for the first three or four decades these commercial productions drew heavily upon the centuries-old theatrical tradition .
29-416: A feature film or feature-length film (often abbreviated to feature ), also called a theatrical film , is a narrative film ( motion picture or "movie") with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term feature film originally referred to the main, full-length film in a cinema program that included a short film and often
58-644: A newsreel . Matinee programs, especially in the US and Canada, in general, also included cartoons , at least one weekly serial and, typically, a second feature-length film on weekends. The first narrative feature film was the 60-minute The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906, Australia). Other early feature films include Les Misérables (1909, U.S.), L'Inferno , Defence of Sevastopol , The Adventures of Pinocchio (1911), Oliver Twist (American version), Oliver Twist (British version), Richard III , From
87-466: A Movie Camera by Dziga Vertov , or films by Chantal Akerman ). In some instances pure documentary films, while nonfiction , may nonetheless recount a story. As genres evolve, from fiction film and documentary a hybrid one emerged, docufiction . Many films are based on real occurrences, however these too fall under the category of a “narrative film” rather than a documentary . This is because films based on real occurrences are not simply footage of
116-549: A different Passion Play in May 1903, The Life and Passion of Jesus Christ , in 32 parts, totaling 44 minutes. Defined by length, the first dramatic feature film was the Australian 60-minute film The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906). Similarly, the first European feature was the 90-minute film L'Enfant prodigue (France, 1907), although that was an unmodified record of a stage play; Europe's first feature adapted directly for
145-456: A feature's running time is 60 minutes or longer. The Centre National de la Cinématographie in France defines it as a 35 mm film longer than 1,600 metres (5,200 ft), which is exactly 58 minutes and 29 seconds for sound films . The term feature film came into use to refer to the main film presented in a cinema and the one which was promoted or advertised. The term was used to distinguish
174-541: Is often called realist fiction) is central to this popular definition. This key element of this invisible film making lies in continuity editing . Siegmund Lubin Siegmund Lubin (born Zygmunt Lubszyński , April 20, 1851 – September 11, 1923) was an American motion picture pioneer who founded the Lubin Manufacturing Company (1902–1917) of Philadelphia . Siegmund Lubin
203-667: The Heidelberg University and in 1876 emigrated to the United States , where he settled in Philadelphia and worked as an optometrist . Around 1881, he shortened his surname from the Polish Lubszyński to Lubin. He soon progressed to making his own camera and projector combination, which he sold. In 1896 he began distributing films for Thomas Edison . In 1897 he started making films and in 1902 formed
232-633: The Lubin Manufacturing Company , incorporating it in 1909. He made the film Meet Me at the Fountain in 1904. His company also sold illegally copied prints of many films by other directors, notably those of Georges Méliès , making Lubin one of the foremost early practitioners of film piracy . By 1910 his company had built a film studio , "Lubinville", in Philadelphia, at Twentieth and Indiana Streets. A fire at its studio in June 1914 destroyed
261-454: The screenplays of narratives, as these films rarely deviate from the predetermined behaviours and lines of the classical style of screenplay writing to maintain a sense of realism. Actors must deliver dialogue and action in a believable way, so as to persuade the audience that the film is real life. Probably the first fictional film ever made was the Lumière 's L'Arroseur arrosé , which
290-524: The Corbett-Jeffries Fight and The Jeffries-Sharkey Fight (1899). Some consider the 100-minute The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight to be the first documentary feature film, but it is more accurately characterized as a sports program as it included the full unedited boxing match. In 1900, the documentary film Army Life was produced by Robert Paul . It was a programme of 33 short films, with a total running time of around 75 minutes, following
319-815: The Manger to the Cross , Cleopatra (1912), Quo Vadis? (1913), Cabiria (1914) and The Birth of a Nation (1915). The notion of how long a feature film should be has varied according to time and place. According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences , the American Film Institute and the British Film Institute , a feature film runs for more than 40 minutes, while the Screen Actors Guild asserts that
SECTION 10
#1732772870693348-439: The Manger to the Cross , Cleopatra and Richard III (all 1912). Actor Frederick Warde starred in some of these adaptations. The first Asian feature was Japan 's The Life Story of Tasuke Shiobara (1912), the first Indian feature was Raja Harishchandra (1913), China 's first feature film was Zhang Shichuan's Nan Fu Nan Qi (1913), the first South American feature was Brazil 's O Crime dos Banhados (1913), and
377-469: The U.S. and Japan alternated as leaders in the quantity of feature film production. Since 1971, the country with the highest feature output has been India, which produces a thousand films in more than twelve Indian languages each year. In 1927, Warner Bros. released the first feature-length film with sound, The Jazz Singer , whose audio track was recorded with a proprietary technology called Vitaphone . The film's success persuaded other studios to go to
406-521: The United States and France, but were released in individual (short film) scenes. This left exhibitors the option of playing them alone, to view an incomplete combination of some films, or to run them all together as a short film series. Early features were mostly documentary-style films of noteworthy events. Some of the earliest feature-length productions were films of boxing matches, such as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897), Reproduction of
435-611: The Wind . Digital Video (or DV) has quickly changed how most films are made. First used to create special effects and animated movies, digital cameras became more common on film sets in the late 1990s. In 2002, George Lucas ' Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones became the first major studio film shot primarily on digital video. The ability to instantly play back footage and quickly transfer footage to computers for editing helped to speed up post-production time. Digital film making
464-404: The camera. Since the emergence of classical Hollywood style in the early 20th century, during which films were selected to be made based on the popularity of the genre, stars, producers, and directors involved, narrative, usually in the form of the feature film , has held dominance in commercial cinema and has become popularly synonymous with "the movies." Classical, invisible film making (what
493-419: The considerable expense of adding microphones to their sets, and scramble to start producing their own " talkies ". One of the next major advancements made in movie production was color film . Even before color was a possibility in movies, early film makers were interested in how color could enhance their stories. Early techniques included hand tinting : painting each frame by hand. Cheaper and more widely used
522-415: The first African feature was South Africa 's De Voortrekkers (1916). By 1915, over 600 feature films were produced annually in the United States. It is often incorrectly cited that The Birth of a Nation (1915) was the first American feature film. The most prolific year of U.S. feature production was 1921, with 682 releases; the lowest number of releases was in 1963, with 213. Between 1922 and 1970,
551-453: The longer film from the short films (referred to as shorts) typically presented before the main film, such as newsreels , serials , animated cartoons , live-action comedies and documentaries . There was no sudden increase in the running times of films to the present-day definitions of feature-length; the "featured" film on a film program in the early 1910s gradually expanded from two to three to four reels. Early features had been produced in
580-762: The negatives for his unreleased new films. When World War I broke out in Europe in September of that year, Lubin Studios was among the American filmmakers who lost foreign sales. The Lubin Film Company went out of business on September 1, 1917, after having made more than a thousand motion pictures. Siegmund went back to work as an optometrist. He died on September 11, 1923, at his home in Ventnor, New Jersey . He
609-411: The occurrence, but rather hired actors portraying an adjusted, often more dramatic, retelling of the occurrence (such as 21 by Robert Luketic ). Unlike literary fiction, which is typically based on characters, situations and events that are entirely imaginary/fictional/hypothetical, cinema always has a real referent, called the "pro-filmic", which encompasses everything existing and done in front of
SECTION 20
#1732772870693638-521: The screen , Les Misérables , came from France in 1909. The first Russian feature was Defence of Sevastopol in 1911. Early Italian features included L'Inferno (1911), Quo Vadis? , The Last Days of Pompeii (1913) and Cabiria (1914). The first UK features were the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India (1912), filmed in Kinemacolor and Oliver Twist (also 1912). The first American features were Oliver Twist , From
667-620: The training of British soldiers. Inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth (1901) ran for 35 minutes, "six times longer than any previous Australian film", and has been called "possibly the first feature-length documentary made in Australia". American company S. Lubin released a Passion Play titled Lubin's Passion Play in January 1903 in 31 parts, totaling about 60 minutes. The French company Pathé Frères released
696-403: The ways people received and watched media. It also gave viewers access to huge amounts of online content on demand. Narrative film In this style of film, believable narratives and characters help convince the audience that the unfolding fiction is real. Lighting and camera movement, among other cinematic elements, have become increasingly important in these films. Great detail goes into
725-546: Was toning : dying the film in a single color, used in many films in the 1920s. The film processing lab Technicolor developed the Three-Tone coloring technique that became the standard for color film. It was a complex, time consuming, and expensive process that many movie studios were not eager to try. One of the early adopters of the three-strip process was Disney . Some of the most notable films Technicolor processed with three-strip were The Wizard of Oz and Gone with
754-548: Was born as Zygmunt Lubszyński, a son of Samuel Lubszyński and Rebeka Lubszyńska, Polish Jews , in Breslau , Kingdom of Prussia (now Wrocław , Poland ) or in Poznań , Kingdom of Prussia on April 20, 1851. His father, a successful ophthalmologist , moved the family for economic reasons to Berlin soon after Zygmunt's birth. There young Zygmunt Germanicized the spelling of his first name to Siegmund . He later graduated from
783-564: Was first screened at the Grand Café Capucines on December 28, 1895. A year later in 1896, Alice Guy-Blaché directed the fictional film La Fée aux Choux . Perhaps the best known of early fictional films is Georges Méliès ’s A Trip to the Moon from 1902. Most films previous to this had been merely moving images of everyday occurrences, such as L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat by Auguste and Louis Lumière . Méliès
812-507: Was given a big boost in 2005 when the Digital Cinema Initiative created a guide for manufacturers to create a universal standard, to make the technologies more compatible with each other and more user friendly. Shooting movies on digital also led to new technologies for distributing films. Titan A.E. , released in 2000, was the first feature film to be released for viewing over the internet. Digital distribution changed
841-521: Was one of the first directors to progress cinematic technology, which paved the way for narratives as style of film. Narrative films have come so far since their introduction that film genres such as comedy or Western films, were, and continue to be introduced as a way to further categorize these films. Narrative cinema is usually contrasted to films that present information, such as a nature documentary , as well as to some experimental films (works such as Wavelength by Michael Snow , Man with
#692307