America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark
A Smithsonian magazine special report
Five Advances That Helped Turn a Night Out at the Movies Into the All-Enveloping Experience It Has Become
The power of film is often in its ability to feel larger than life. Movie makers have been developing ways to accentuate that aspect for more than a century
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The Close-Up: American cinema arguably owes the close-up to controversial filmmaker D.W. Griffith, a director perhaps best known today as the racist auteur behind Birth of a Nation. In his 1912 short film Friends, Griffith moves his camera from standard “medium shots” of the era to a tighter crop on his star, Mary Pickford, whose character is torn between two suitors. The close shot of Pickford’s stony expression intimately conveys the character’s ambivalence about her final decision.
!["Friends" (1912) [Full Film]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4JDVc9Bhgts/maxresdefault.jpg)
The Vitaphone: The Vitaphone debuted in 1926, allowing sound, recorded on vinyl platters, to play simultaneously with a projected image in movie theaters. Developed by engineers at Western Electric, the Vitaphone was deployed to astonishing effect in that year’s Don Juan, starring John Barrymore; a reviewer hailed the technology as a “marvelous modern synchronizer of sound and action.” It would usher in the era of sound motion pictures, or “talkies.”
CinemaScope: In the 1950s, home TVs were stealing audiences from cinemas. The response, developed in part by Bausch and Lomb, was to make movies bigger. Using unique lenses fashioned for both film cameras and theater projectors, filmmakers captured panoramic scenes on 35-millimeter film. And the projected image was about twice the width of the previous standard. Spectacles like Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) lured audiences back into theaters.
“MTV” Editing: The first music videos appeared on MTV in 1981. These promotional works, marked by flashy graphics and rapid-fire jump-cuts between short shots, influenced movies: The sense of energy increased, at the expense of old-fashioned virtues like continuity. Within a couple of years, films like Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun (1986) incorporated these speedy new rhythms, creating a visual language that would come to dominate pop culture.
Did you know? The Return of VistaVision
- VistaVision, a high-resolution film format, was developed by Paramount Pictures in the 1950s. White Christmas was the first movie shot in VistaVision to hit theaters.
- The film negative is twice as large as regular film, giving directors the chance to create richer and more detailed images.
- It fell out of favor within a decade and was only sparingly used for specific special effects.
- In recent years, auteur directors such as Brady Corbet, Paul Thomas Anderson and Yorgos Lanthimos have resuscitated the format for their Oscar-nominated films, sparking a resurgence of interest in film during the digital age.
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This article is a selection from the Summer 2026 issue of Smithsonian magazine