1910-1919: The birth of Hollywood

According to Hollywood myth, the first film made there was Cecil B DeMille's The Squaw Man in 1914, after the director decided not to alight in a snowbound Flagstaff, Arizona, but to proceed to Los Angeles. In fact, four years earlier the prolific DW Griffith had come west to take advantage of the California sunshine, and the 17-minute In Old California, an adventure set in Spanish colonial days, was the first to be filmed in its entirety in the village of Hollywood. Now commemorated by a monument at 1713 Vine Street, it was released on 10 March 1910, one of Griffith's 98 films of that year.

Within six years Griffith had directed the first two towering masterpieces of American cinema – The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) – and Charlie Chaplin's two-reel comedies had made his tramp persona world famous. By 1919 the pair had joined stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to form their own company, United Artists, provoking the remark, "the lunatics have taken charge of the asylum".

By then, "Hollywood" had become synonymous with American cinema and its burgeoning glamour. That year Griffith left California to work in New York; when he returned to the west coast a decade later, he found the place transformed and himself a Victorian anachronism.

French's best film of the decade:

Intolerance (DW Griffith, 1916)

Brilliantly interweaving four stories of social oppression, from ancient Babylon to the present, Intolerance is epic in scale and ambition. Griffith helped to create the grammar of film, and with the poisonous Birth of a Nation and the magnificent Intolerance he took the American cinema from cave painting to quattrocento, catching up with and surpassing Europe's cinematic achievement.

1920-1929: The advent of sound

After the first world war, a business created piecemeal by semi-literate immigrants, most of them Jewish, was shaped into an industry dominated by a handful of studios that not only made films, but also distributed and exhibited them, and had established offices worldwide. The movie colony gained a reputation for hedonistic lifestyles and conspicuous consumption, and threats of strict censorship from puritanical organisations, many of them antisemitic, were kept at bay by the appointment of Presbyterian elder Will Hays as head of the new Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, known informally as the industry's tsar.

Some of Europe's greatest talents were lured to Hollywood, while silent cinema was refined into a new art in the comedies of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd and the psychological dramas of Erich von Stroheim and King Vidor. To aggrandise the business and fend off unionisation, Louis B Mayer founded the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and its Oscars. Then Hollywood was hit by two earthquakes. The first was the accidental introduction of speech by Warner Brothers in The Jazz Singer (1927); within two years silent movies were assigned to archives and art houses, and the industry faced massive bills for soundproofing studios and re-equipping cinemas. The second was the Wall Street crash of 1929 that threatened bankruptcy and handed control of the studios to the bankers.

French's best film of the decade:

The Gold Rush (Charles Chaplin, 1925)

Chaplin was the most famous man on the planet when his tramp, a balletic farceur admired equally by Nijinsky and Einstein, sought his fortune in the Yukon in this, his first feature-length comedy. This technically simple, endlessly inventive film balanced laughter and pathos; its cabin fever sequence is unsurpassed. Chaplin was the only moviemaker powerful enough to challenge the coming of sound.

1930-1939: The age of Technicolor

Hollywood's greatest decade began with the advertising slogan "Garbo talks!". Sound pictures brought a flood of new writers to Tinseltown, ranging from wisecracking newspapermen to William Faulkner. A new frankness in plots and dialogue led to the enforcement in 1934 of the Hays Office Production Code, initiating a battle of wits between censors and film-makers that lasted 30 years.

The Depression was confronted through double bills and cheaper tickets, and responded to by escapism and sharp social criticism. The New Deal polarised the industry politically, the moguls moving to the right, the actors, writers and directors to the left: in 1934 the industry's leaders united to defeat the socialist Upton Sinclair when he ran for governor of California. The studios developed different visual and dramatic styles: Gothic horror at Universal; social conscience and crime at Warner; glitz at MGM, which boasted "more stars than there are in the heavens''; Mae West, the Marx Brothers and Dietrich at Paramount; Capra at Columbia; Astaire, Rogers and Art Deco at RKO. Genres were codified. Disney moved from programme-filling shorts to the feature-length Snow White. The decade peaked in 1939 when Technicolor came into its own; this was the greatest year in Hollywood's history, with Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind among its peaks.

French's best film of the decade:

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939)

The story of Dorothy, the midwestern farm girl swept away to the land of Oz, was an established national favourite when the expertise of MGM transformed it into a magical musical that moved from the dustbowl of the Depression years to a Technicolor future. Its songs became perennial favourites, and Judy Garland was transformed into a star and then an icon.

1940-1949: The movies go to war

The Hollywood novel, taking the industry as a metaphor for capitalism or America itself, became firmly established in 1941, with Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? and F Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. That year Hollywood re-tooled for war. Stars, directors and technicians joined the armed forces; those staying behind sold war bonds and appeared in propagandist entertainments. Two new genres appeared – the patriotic war movie demonising Japs and Germans, and the dark thriller (later dubbed the film noir) much influenced by brilliant refugees from Nazi Germany versed in expressionism. Hollywood enjoyed immense public approval and vast box-office returns, despite the loss of key foreign markets. Then came peace and the cold war. The external enemy was attacked in anti-communist pictures such as The Iron Curtain (1948). But an internal enemy in the form of anti-communist witchhunters, most famously the House Committee on Un-American Activities(Huac), met with craven submission from studio bosses. The writers and directors known as "the Hollywood 10", who refused to reveal their political affiliations, went to jail for contempt of Congress.

French's best film of the decade:

The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)

This tale of war and peace was made in that small window of hope between the end of the second world war and the onset of the cold war. It's about three servicemen adjusting to civilian life in a typical American city and is Hollywood prestige film-making at its best, if perhaps less bold than it once seemed.

1950-1959: The battle with television

In 1950 the cold war went hot in Korea, Huac's pressure on the industry increased, and an arbitrarily compiled blacklist drove many leftwing artists out of Hollywood to work elsewhere or sell scripts cheaply for others to take the credit. This atmosphere of suspicion, fear and cowardice (allegorically reflected in High Noon) was exacerbated by the spread of TV, eroding the popular core audience, and by the effect of anti-monopoly legislation that compelled the big studios to divest themselves of their cinema chains. The industry fought back with bigger screens (Cinerama, CinemaScope, VistaVision) and 3-D, the latter a passing novelty, and with expensive blockbusters such as DeMille's The Ten Commandments and inexpensive quickies aimed at teenagers. Elvis Presley, considered a national menace, was brought to Hollywood, domesticated, sent off on military service and welcomed back as a national treasure. Eventually the movie business switched from boycotting TV to enthusiastically embracing it.

French's best film of the decade:

High Noon (Fred Zinnemann, 1952)

The western came into its own as an adult genre in the anxious postwar years, and this pared-down allegory dared to attack McCarthyism in Hollywood and the nation at large in a way that cheered liberals and slipped under conservative barriers. John Wayne hated it and later appeared in the rightwing riposte, Rio Bravo.

1960-1969: The European threat

The decade opened on a hopeful note with Otto Preminger (Exodus) and Stanley Kubrick (Spartacus) both giving the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, a leading member of the Hollywood 10, his first screen credits since the 1940s. But front office men were still running scared. They refused to confront the war in Vietnam that was dividing the nation (only superpatriot John Wayne got a chance to make his gung-ho The Green Berets) and were confused in the face of foreign competition that was more innovative, imaginative and liberated than a Hollywood hobbled by censorship and led by veterans (many now hailed as auteurs by influential French writers) approaching the end of their careers. Thus in 1966, following the example of their 1920s predecessors, canny studio executives brought in tough Texas lawyer Jack Valenti, chief adviser to President Lyndon Johnson, to be their new tsar. He began restoring Hollywood's confidence by replacing the Production Code with a more relaxed system of self-regulation. The decade ended with the surprise success of wild boy Dennis Hopper's hippie road movie, Easy Rider, made for a pittance, earning a fortune, and in complete breach of the old code.

French's best film of the decade:

The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962)

This seminal conspiracy movie, set in Washington DC, mocked both McCarthyite witch-hunters and naive liberal fellow travellers alike. It recognised the growing influence of TV on politics and anticipated the string of assassinations that would come to dominate the decade. President John F Kennedy helped get it made and allowed John Frankenheimer to use the White House in his next film, Seven Days in May, a thriller about an attempted rightwing coup.

1970-1979: Hollywood strikes back

The success of Easy Rider led to Hopper being given carte blanche to make the incoherent The Last Movie, which proved just that for him when Universal didn't release it, despite a prize at Venice. But young directors, the bearded so-called movie brats, graduates of film schools and obsessed with movies, were given their heads. They understood European cinema and had learned from the Cahiers du Cinéma critic-directors to respect American masters such as Hawks, Hitchcock, Ford, Walsh et al. They dominated the decade after Coppola had brought together the Hollywood gangster tradition, Visconti's historic grandeur and Roger Corman's exploitation style in The Godfather (1972). A new form of blanket distribution was brought into play to launch Steven Spielberg's Jaws (1975), which, along with George Lucas's Star Wars (1977), helped renew the cinema-going habit and started a vogue for childlike special-effects blockbusters. Woody Allen countered by providing more adult fare in Annie Hall, in the course of which he explicitly showed his distaste for the drug-fuelled Hollywood world. The decade ended with Hollywood finally confronting the Vietnam experience in The Deer Hunter, Coming Home and Apocalypse Now.

French's best film of the decade:

The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

Coppola's first two Godfather films brought Hollywood up to international speed by melding European art-house sophistication with American genre narrative and giving Brando his first challenging role in years. Coppola was the dominant film-maker of his decade, creating his own mini-studio, and directing the small-scale thriller The Conversation (1974), the first picture to plug into Watergate paranoia, and Apocalypse Now (1979), the most expansive of the Vietnam movies, both Palme d'Or winners at Cannes.

1980-1989 The suits regain control

A succession of expensive failures, among them Scorsese's New York, New York (1977) and Spielberg's 1941 (1979), culminated in the 1980 disaster of Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, which brought United Artists to its knees. The movie brats were overreaching themselves, and accountants and other fiscally responsible folk brought them to heel. The lunatics were back in their place as acquiescent inmates of the asylum, rather than its managers, but the stars and their agents were in the ascendant. In 1980 Robert Redford created the Sundance Institute in Utah to encourage independent film, and it seemed as if US cinema was developing on parallel lines. One was the Hollywood way: commercial, conventional, and exorbitantly expensive. The other, which some thought more authentically American, was the independent track: experimental, offbeat, moderately budgeted. Some companies set out to straddle the two. The most successful was Miramax, created in 1979 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the new moguls most like the early pioneers, who released and produced some of the outstanding pictures of the 1980s and 90s. Miramax achieved near-major status after becoming an independent subsidiary of Disney in 1993.

French's best film of the decade:

Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1980)

Robert De Niro was the dominant American screen actor of the 1970s and 80s. He won an Oscar for best supporting actor in 1975 as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, thus establishing himself as the natural successor to Marlon Brando, who had played the older Corleone in The Godfather. He won a second Oscar for his complex portrayalof the Italian-American middleweight boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, the fourth of his nine collaborations with Scorsese, and it remains his greatest performance. The film was made in black-and-white, something which directors had had to fight for since the mid-1960s, and it showed the depth and intensity that Hollywood films were still capable of. It has since been voted the best American picture of the 80s in a number of critics' polls.

1990-1999: Animation makes a comeback

Paris, where the Lumière Brothers put on the first show of films projected before a paying audience in 1895, was the focus of centennial celebrations that attracted less attention in the States than the creation in 1994 of DreamWorks SKG, the first new major studio for decades. The founders (the eponymous SKG) were Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg from Disney and pop music tycoon David Geffen and the company was to be as much involved with computer games and music as with TV and film. The 1990s saw a succession of major studios changing hands and the setting up of subsidiaries (eg 20th Century Fox's Fox Searchlight, Sony-Columbia's Sony Classics) to finance or distribute smaller-scale independent productions, often bought directly at the Sundance Festival. Animated films made a major comeback at Disney and at a new company, Pixar, specialising in computer animation, which Disney soon acquired. A number of American horror films suggested that Satan himself might take over the world as the millennium dawned. Titanic, the movie that could have been a warning against the hubris attending the exaggerated expectations for a new century, proved to be an overblown romantic weepie that rapidly became the most lucrative picture made up to that date.

French's best film of the decade:

Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994)

Tarantino's first film, Reservoir Dogs, was nurtured at the Sundance Institute. His second, Pulp Fiction, won the Palme d'Or from a Cannes jury presided over by Clint Eastwood and Catherine Deneuve, and revived the flagging careers of Bruce Willis and John Travolta. This postmodern thriller, a knowing combination of art-house and popular culture, made him the most influential director of his generation.

2000-2009: A sense of déjà-vu

Nobody knew exactly how this decade should be pronounced or what to make of it. And the movie moguls have been driving down Sunset Boulevard, their eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror while facing a smoggy future. Five of the eight big studios that dominated Hollywood's Golden Age are still there – 20th Century-Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, Columbia, under new conglomerate management of course, and their familiar, much-loved logos given fashionable makeovers. RKO has fallen by the wayside, and MGM and United Artists have only a shadowy existence, but Disney has now a major standing. TV and videos keep the past close to us, and remakes and sequels abound, giving the not entirely inaccurate impression that everything has been done and can now only be repeated. Actors and everyday reality are being pushed aside by computers, and 3-D is back. The moguls talk as much about technical matters as about actual films, and the time between a film's premiere in the cinema and its appearance on the domestic screen grows ever shorter. It is perhaps appropriate that Hollywood's centenary is being marked by James Cameron's Avatar, the most expensive film ever, the most profitable film ever, made in 3-D, its story a mishmash of borrowings from all over, and almost every frame of it indebted to an army of special effects technicians. It's a picture economically dependent on being shown to a gigantic global audience.

French's best film of the decade:

Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima (Clint Eastwood, 2006)

This complementary diptych of thoughtful films about the second world war is a high point of an illustrious Hollywood career. It now spans 55 years, from bit-part actor via minor TV lead and spaghetti western hero to industrial mover and shaker as major star, producer and director. F Scott Fitzgerald, who died in Hollywood a burnt-out case aged 44, said: "There are no second acts in American lives." Eastwood proves there could be a five-act drama.