Feature film

In the film industry, a feature film is a film made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie. The term is also used for feature length, direct-to-video and television movie productions.
Contents
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* 1 Description
* 2 History
* 3 See also
* 4 References

[edit] Description

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,[1] the American Film Institute,[2] and the British Film Institute[3] all define a feature as a film with a running time of 40 minutes or longer. The Centre National de la Cinématographie in France defines it as a 35 mm film longer than 1,600 metres, which is exactly 58 minutes and 29 seconds for sound films, and the Screen Actors Guild gives a minimum running time of at least 80 minutes.[4] Today, a feature film is usually between 80 and 210 minutes[citation needed]; a children's film is usually between 60 and 120 minutes[citation needed]. An anthology film is a fixed sequence of short subjects with a common theme, combined into a feature film.
[edit] History
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The term evolved from when there was a series of short subjects before the main film. The shorts would typically include newsreels, serials, animated cartoons and live-action comedies and documentaries. These types of short films would precede the featured presentation - the film given the most prominent billing and running multiple reels. There was no sudden jump 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 proto-features had been produced in America and France, but were released in individual scenes, leaving the exhibitor the option of running them together. The American company S. Lubin released a Passion Play in January 1903 in 31 parts, totaling about 60 minutes.[5] The French company Pathé Frères released a different Passion Play, La Vie et la passion de Jésus Christ, in May 1903 in 32 parts running about 44 minutes. There were also full-length records of boxing matches, such as The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight (1897). [6]

Defined by length, the first dramatic feature film was the Australian 70-minute film The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906).[7] 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 the screen, Les Misérables, came from France in 1909.[8] The first Russian feature was Defence of Sevastopol in 1911.[9] The first UK features were the documentary With Our King and Queen Through India (1912), filmed in Kinemacolor,[10] and Oliver Twist (1912).[11] The first American features were a different production of Oliver Twist (1912), From the Manger to the Cross (1912), and Richard III (1912), the latter starring actor Frederick Warde.[12] The first Asian feature was Japan's The Life Story of Tasuke Shiobara (1912),[13] the first Indian feature was Raja Harishchandra (1913),[14] the first South American feature was Brazil's O Crime dos Banhados (1913),[15] and the first African feature was South Africa's Die Voortrekkers (1916).[16] 1913 also saw China's first feature film, Zhang Shichuan's Nan Fu Nan Qi,

By 1915 over 600 features were produced annually in the United States.[17] The most prolific year of U.S. feature production was 1921, with 682 releases; the lowest number of releases was in 1963, with 213.[18] Between 1922 and 1970, 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,[19] which produces a thousand films in more than twelve Indian languages each year.[20]
[edit] See also

* Films considered the greatest ever
* List of films considered the worst
* Feature length

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