Every Decade Of Cinema - Ranked
From Nosferatu to Avengers: Endgame, Hollywood has come a long way.
As far as art forms go, cinema is fairly recent. Music has been around for thousands of years, as have sculpting, painting, writing, and poetry. Film has only been around since the very tail end of the 19th century. The earliest surviving movie is Roundhay Garden Scene, a 1.6-second silent film from 1888.
Taking that into account, it's almost unreal how far the craft has come. In just under 150 years, movies have gone from silent, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shorts to dramatic masterworks like The Godfather and CGI extravaganzas like Avengers: Endgame. The disparity between then and now is hard to wrap your head around, and that's to be expected. As the art form evolves and new techniques are developed, it's only natural that the end product gets better and better.
In the last century, we've gotten exquisite pieces of filmmaking. In addition to the aforementioned Godfather and Avengers films, we've seen devastating war epics like Apocalypse Now and 1917; world-class superhero flicks like Logan and The Dark Knight; haunting pieces of horror perfection like The Exorcist and Hereditary; and many, many others.
What decades stand out as having the best? That's very, very subjective, but let's have a look.
11. 1910s
Notable films: The Birth of a Nation; The Homesteader; The Vagabond; The Immigrant; Intolerance; Tarzan of the Apes; Frankenstein.
These were the early days of film. In WWI, the European film industry was destroyed. Meanwhile, the American film industry relocated from New York to California, setting up shop in LA.
WB released their first film in 1918, and United Artists was formed in 1919 (the brainchild of Charlie Chaplin, D. W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford). Chaplin appeared in over 70 films this decade.
D. W. Griffith garnered praise as one of the most influential directors of his day, pioneering the feature-length film. He also directed one of the most consequential, reprehensible films of all time: 1915’s The Birth of a Nation. This was the film that partly led to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, gifting them not just the idea for their white hoods, but an enthusiastic reception among white Americans who lauded the film. It’s a shame that this is the most famous film to come out of the decade.
On the bright side, Oscar Micheaux became the first Black man to produce and direct a film when he debuted The Homesteader in 1919.