Some people (this writer included) take their love of cinema to an entirely new level by studying film history and theory for a whopping four years as a college major, which has as much practical real world application as majors like philosophy, liberal arts, and creative writing combined. Yes, spending all those years watching and analyzing movies while learning their history might seem like a colossal waste of time to anyone who doesn’t live and breathe cinema, but let’s face it, trying to cram an entire major’s worth of film history into a six-minute YouTube video is also a daunting task, but the good folks at Now You See It seem to have found a simple yet effective way of pulling it off.
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The video, titled “The Rise (and Fall) of Hollywood,” chronicles every distinct era in Hollywood’s almost century-and-a-half past, with two or three-sentences of information about what each era meant for the rise (or fall) of Tinseltown: The East Coast beginnings, the studio system, the popularity of epic cinema, New Hollywood, and the modern blockbuster period we’re still in today. Of course there’s absolutely no new information here for even the most beginner-level film buff, but this succinctly edited video could work as the perfect entry point for anyone who wants to learn more about film history.
Worst case scenario, you’ll waste six minutes of your time while watching perhaps the only video on YouTube that contains clips from both 1903’s “The Great Train Robbery” and 2015’s “Tangerine”. You can check out the video below.