- Paris, 10 January: René Clair has taken on the young journalist Marcel Carné as assistant director for his film Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris).
- Vienna, 15 January: The National Austrian Library has decided to set up film archives to store copies of the best films -- documentary, fiction and educational.
- New York, 19 January:
 Maurice Chevalier has seduced the US with his Gallic charm, Parisian accent and his mischievous smile. The Love Parade, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, the French singer's second Hollywood film after Innocents of Paris, is currently playing in 200 theaters. Paramount, who was looking for a "young singing star," signed him to a contract last March to make 10 films in three years. Thus Chevalier entered talking pictures after having already appeared in 13 silents since his screen debut in 1908 in Jean Durand's production of Trop cr&ecute;dule. Born in 1888, Chevalier left school when he was only 10 years old and worked in a drawing-pin factory to help support his mother. Performing as a singer at a cafe in Paris from the age of 12, he went on to the Folies-Bergère in 1908, becoming Mistinguett's partner four years later. When he returned from a POW camp in 1918, he resumed his top position at the side of "La Miss" on the stage of the Casino de Paris. It was here that he wore his famous straw hat and carried a cane for the first time. These props have become part of his personality, which is brilliantly on display in The Love Parade, Lubitsch's first sound film.
- Geneva, 31 January: According to the International Trade Organization, capital investment in the film industry is $4 billion. Half of this is accounted for in the US where there are 225,000 workmen, 30,000 extras and several thousand actors working in the industry.
- Berlin, 4 February: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), made by Robert Siodmak in collaboration with Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer and Fred Zinnemann, has been well-received here.
- Paris, 1 February:
 The first French talking picture, La Nuit est à nous (The Night Is Ours), has been filmed in the UFA studios in Berlin, and the result is a worthy tribute to the French and German technicians who have mastered the techniques of sound. Presently 23 prints are ready for distribution. This Franco-German co-production has been filmed in two versions: a French one directed by Roger Lion, and a German version (Die Nacht gehört uns) handled by Henri Roussel and Carl Froelich, who established his name in newsreels in the early days of cinema and now has his own production company. This German version was presented in Berlin last December, where it was warmly received by the critics and public alike.
- New York, 15 February: The president of the MPPDA, Will H. Hays, gave a preliminary review of sound cinema at the city's Trade Organization banquet. According to him, the new technique has attracted 10 million more spectators to American movie theaters than in 1929. This success reflects the enormous effort and investment spent: $500 million in two years to install the equipment necessary to make talkies.
 - Paris, 17 February: There was a lively evening at the Sorbonne, where a large audience had gathered to see Sergei Eisentstein's The General Line, in the presence of the director. But the Police Commissioner, Chiappe, fearing disturbances, banned the projection of the film just as it was about to start. The expected uproar did not, however, take place. Eisenstein, who gave a lecture on Soviet cinema, was heartily applauded. But what is he doing in Paris? It all began six months ago. On 19 August 1929, Eisenstein and his close collaborators -- his assistant Grigori Alexandrov and his camera expert Edouard Tissé -- left Moscow to familiarize themselves with sound techniques abroad. On the way to Hollywood, they visited various European countries, where the director gave lectures to help them with their finances. During these wanderings, Eisenstein was able to meet, among others, Josef von Sternberg, George Bernard Shaw, Jean Cocteau, Luigi Pirandello and Albert Einstein. But the Sorbonne incident has placed in doubt the continued presence of the three Soviets in France, and in fact, they risk expulsion.
- Hollywood, 17 February: The leading American film studios, as represented by Will B. Hays, president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), have now apparently accepted in principle a new Code of Production. This is actually a form of self-censorship, which has been proposed by Martin Quigley, editor of the Motion Picture Herald, and the Reverend Daniel A. Lord, the well-known Catholic priest who also edits a prominent religious publication. This new decision is meant to silence, once and for all, those many vociferous critics of the film industry, making it clear that producers plan to turn over a new leaf after the kind of excesses and sagging moral standards seen on the screen in recent years, not to mention the personal scandals of the 1920s. The wide-ranging provisions of the new Code refer not only to crime, brutality and sex as portrayed in movies, but also deals with such contentious subjects as vulgarity, obscenity, blasphemy and profanity, in addition to the handling of national feelings, race, religion and the treatment of animals.
Use this link to see the text of the MPPDA Production Code.
- New York, 9 March: Such Men Are Dangerous, a William Fox presentation that opens today, is a dark drama that manages to steer itself toward a satisfactory happy ending. The making of this movie, however, ended in appalling tragedy, with the loss of 10 lives. On 2 January at Santa Monica, with filming already completed, director Kenneth Hawks (brother of Howard) embarked on a series of retakes for a flying scene with which he was dissatisfied. Two airplanes, carrying the film crew to photograph a third plane which features in the movie, collided in the air, burst into flame and hurtled into the Pacific Ocean below. Director Hawks was killed, together with his two cameramen, the property man, the grip, and several assistants. It is hard to conceive that the producers or leading players Warner Baxter and Catherine Dale Owen will be able to take pleasure in viewing the finished product.
- Hollywood, 10 March: John Gilbert's career, unlike his parnter Greta Garbo's, appears to be seriously jeopardized by talking pictures: his two voice tests are reported to be disastrous.
- New York, 14 March:
 The build-up to Greta Garbo's long-delayed debut in the talkie from Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie has been dominated by the main slogan "Garbo Talks!", but audiences have to sit through almost a quarter of an hour of the picture before Garbo says in seductive contalto tones, "Gimme a visky with a ginger ale on the side -- and don't be stingy baby." Her fans can breathe again.
- Paris, 21 March: The critics are protesting over the toning down of the French version of G. W. Pabst's German-made film Pandora's Box.
 - Berlin, 1 April: UFA's first talking picture is Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), directed by Josef von Sternberg. He returned from Hollywood to handle the picture, adapted from the Heinrich Mann novel Professor Unrath, at the request of UFA and The Blue Angel's star, actor Emil Jannings. So far so good, but Sternberg immediately ran into a problem over his choice of leading lady to play Lola Lola, the promiscuous dance-hall singer who first enslaves then destroys Jannings' stuffy schoolmaster. Jannings and producer Erich Pommer had their own candidates for the role, but Sternberg insisted on casting the 28-year-old Marlene Dietrich, whom he had spotted in a Berlin revue, Two Neckties. To just about everybody else involved in the film, Dietrich's screen test appeared quite unexceptional; however, Sternberg saw in Dietrich, already a familiar figure in German films, the quality of cheap but overpowering sexuality that makes Lola Lola so compelling a figure. Sternberg's judgment was proved correct as soon as the cameras began to roll. Dietrich's peformance is a masterpiece of indolent, sluttish sensuality. As she sings in the film, she is "made for love from head to foot." Jannings, however, was less impressed during filming. Enraged that Dietrich was stealing the film from him, he nearly throttled his co-star on the set when the script called for him to attack her.
- New York, 5 April: The board of directors has dismissed William Fox as president of the company he founded in 1915. This move is the consequence of months of his costly though unsuccessful attempts to take control of MGM.
- Moscow, 8 April:
 The Soviet authorities have censored a number of scenes from Alexader Dovshenko's latest film Zemlya (Earth). In this story of collectivization in the Ukraine in the face of opposition from the Kulaks (landowners), there were particular episodes that displeased the powers that be: when a dead man's betrothed mourns him, naked and hysterical, and when the peasants urinate into the radiator of a tractor. Nevertheless, even in this truncated version, the film's poetic images make an enormous impact. Dovzhendo has created an indelible picture of a rural paradise earned by the blood of the peasants.
- Paris, 10 April: The young director Luis Buñuel has returned from Spain where he has just finished shooting his second film L'Age d'or (The Golden Age). It was supposed to be a sequel to Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog), but the quarrel between Buñuel and Salvador Dali led to changes in the original project.
 - Paris, 25 April: René Clair's first sound film, Sous les toits de Paris (Under the Roofs of Paris), has just opened at the Moulin Rouge. As nothing has been heard from the director of The Italian Straw Hat in regard to the talkies, his debut in this new field has been awaited with impatience. Produced by the French subsidiary Tobis, and shot last January and February in the Epinay studio using sets designed by Lazare Meerson, the film has immediately become a success. Billboards announce it as "one hundred percent French singing and speaking." The scenario tells of the adventures of a street singer (Albert Préjean) in love with a very pretty Romanian girl (Pola Illery), whom he protects from her lecherous lover (Gaston Modot), but he is accused of theft. The cast is filled out by some typically French characters. The use of sound and Clair's atmospheric direction allows one to forget the slightness of the subject. The catchy title song is rendered by various Parisians, with the camera moving from singer to singer and from house to house.
- Paris, 29 April: The painter Marc Chagall is hostile to color films, which "will take away the charm of the cinema, for, by getting closer to reality, the cinema moves away from life. It thus becomes but artifice."
- Hollywood, 29 April: Irene Mayer, the daughter of Louis B. Mayer, has married David O. Selznick, the son of producer Lewis Selznick, who is himself a producer at Paramount.
- Berlin, 23 May:
 It is in the time of peace that pacifism is most expressed. The memory of the war that tore people apart is still vivid and painful. For G. W. Pabst and Lewis Milestone, there is neither a just war nor heroes -- nothing but victims. Westfront 1918, adapted from a novel by Ernst Johannsen, depicts the daily life of German soldiers in the last months of the war against France. Pabst reveals the horror and futility of life in the trenches by concentrating on four soldiers, and the ignorance at home of the reality at the Front. All Quiet on the Western Front, from a novel by Erich Remarque, contains a message that can only be displeasing to warmongers. Milestone denounces the tragedy of the Great War, but also the blind fanaticism of the military hierarchy. Particularly effective are the tracking shots of soldiers attacking enemy lines, and the counter-attacks with deaths on both sides.
- Hollywood, 15 June: The success being enjoyed by The Virginian, directed by Victor Fleming with Gary Cooper in the lead, marks the return to popularity of cowboy films.
- New York, 10 July:
 Director Howard Hawks' first talking picture, The Dawn Patrol, tells the story of a beleaguered fighter squadron in the Great War, whose leader (Richard Barthelmess) is hated by his officers because of the high death rates in his unit. Hawks is still coming to terms with the technical demands of the talkies. The film soars when aircraft are dueling over the trenches, but comes to earth with a bump on the ground, mainly because of the stilted script written by the director, with Dan Totheroh and Seton I. Miller. Nevertheless, Hawks' message that war is a synonym for waste comes over loud and clear. But legal trouble is brewing over the picture. Writer R. C. Sheriff is to sue Warner Bros. for shoehorning "substantial portions" of his play Journey's End into The Dawn Patrol. And Howard Hughes, the producer-director of another aerial saga called Hell's Angels, is also threatening to take Warners to court, claiming that entire sections of his film appear in The Dawn Patrol. Things are shaping up for a legal battle over The Dawn Patrol every bit as lively as it spectacularly choreographed dogfights.
- Le Havre, 5 August: Erich von Stroheim has returned to Europe with the filmmaker William Wyler on board the steamer Ile-de-France. This is his first visit since he left for the US in 1909. He intends to visit his homeland Austria.
- New York, 25 August: Release of Abraham Lincoln, D. W. Griffith's first talking film.
- Hollywood, 7 September:
 Saucer-eyed singing comic Eddie Cantor, along with the rest of the cast of Whoopee!, come direct from Florenz Ziegfeld's Broadway hit. Ziegfeld sold the rights to Samuel Goldwyn, who then produced this Technicolor musical. Goldwyn also brought in Broadway dance director Busby Berkeley to choreograph the musical numbers. Aside from Cantor's hilarious clowning, the inventive dance routines stand out, especially the opening number.
 - Berlin, 15 September: UFA has filmed its first operetta, and it is directed by William Thiele. The theme of Three Men and Lillian is hardly new, but audiences have been charmend by its sprightly tunes, its lavish sets and the romantic pairing of English-born songbird Lilian Harvey and Willy Fritsch. In the French version Henri Garat takes over from Fritsch.
- France, 7 October: The engineer René Barthélemy has just given a demonstration at Montrouge of his research in the field of television. For the first time an acted scene has been filmed, transmitted at a distance and projected onto a screen in front of an audience.
- Hollywood, 24 October:
 Everything about director Raoul Walsh's Western, The Big Trail, is on an epic scale that befits this tale of a pioneering wagon train in Oregon. It has been shot in a 70-mm wide-screen process by 14 cameramen. There are a staggering 80 featured players and 2,000 Indians. The Fox studio, which has been financially ailing of late, has been pouring money into the production in an attempt to repeat the huge success scored seven years ago by James Cruze's The Covered Wagon. Hopes are high for the star of The Big Trail, a 23-year-old actor by the name of John Wayne. Born Marion Michael Morrison in Iowa in 1907, Wayne moved out West as a child. After he attended college at USC on a football scholarship, cowboy star Tom Mix found him a job at the Fox property department. There he met and befriended director John Ford, and even worked as a set decorator on Ford's Mother Machree. Ford gave him a bit part in that film and then used him again in three more pictures. People began to take notice of this husky young man whose physique is perfectly suited to action pictures. It was Ford who suggested to Walsh that he cast Wayne, known to all his friends as "Duke," as the lead in The Big Trail. Walsh, who had originally intended to play the lead himself, seized the opportunity. Most of the picture's budget was earmarked for location shooting, the large cast and expensive new equipment, and he couldn't afford a big-name star. Anyway, as Walsh has observed, "Duke sits better on a horse than anyone I've ever seen, knows how to handle a gun and isn't spooked by Indians or buffaloes." Among the set-piece perils he faces in The Big Trail, as the trapper leading the wagon train of settlers through Indian territory, are Indian attacks, blizzards, raging rivers and mountains. Will Fox's investment pay off?
- Paris, 25 October: The writer Jean Cocteau's first experimental film, The Blood of the Poet (originally The Life of a Poet) has been given a private screening.
- New York, 31 October: MGM's new Western, Billy the Kid, starring Johnny Mack Brown and filmed in the new "Realife" wide-screen process, has been exhibited for the first time. However, the result met with little enthusiasm from audiences.
- Paris, 1 November:
 Charles Chaplin is the last great star to hold out against the arrival of sound, and it is perhaps a measure of his greatness that he can still defy the march of progress. Chaplin continues to believe that the talkies are only a passing fad, and one of which he clearly disapproves. In an interview for the American magazine Silver Screen, he predicts the imminent disappearance of pictures that are "100 percent talking." Remaining an implacable opponent of the films with sound he adds, "There is nothing that I could tell you about the talking pictures that would be more eloquent than my silence." In his latest film City Lights, which he has just completed, he has made only limited use of the technical resources of sound. City Lights is a silent film with explanatory titles. Synchronized music and simplistic sound effects accompany the action, leaving Chaplin vigorously unrepentant: "The talkies! You can say that I detest them!"
 - Hollywood, 4 November: Paramount's film Morocco brings the second collaboration between director Josef von Sternberg and his sensational German protégée, Marlene Dietrich. Before the premiere of The Blue Angel, Sternberg had shown a rough cut to Paramount, for whom he had worked in Hollywood, and the studio agreed to sign Dietrich for one film. To nobody's surprise, she is again cast as a cabaret singer, this time playing merry hell with the Foreign Legion, giving up commanding officer Adolphe Menjou for the handsome young Gary Cooper, and tottering after him into the desert in her evening dress. Morocco has been premiered in New York on the same day as the English-language version of The Blue Angel, and the colossal public excitement this has generated has made Paramount determined to keep their new star at any price. The studio is also sinking millions of dollars into a feverish publicity campaign to buid up Dietrich as the newest rival to MGM's biggest imported star, Garbo. Battle royal has been joined.
- Paris, 10 November: Jean Choux has begun filming Jean de la lune (John of the Moon) at the Epinay studios. The film is an adaptation of the play by Marcel Achard and stars Madeleine Renaud and Michel Simon.
- Portugal, 15 November: The filmmaker José Leitao de Barros, who became known this year with Maria Do Mar, is making the first Portuguese talking film entitled A Severa, produced by the German company Tobis.
- Hollywood, 15 November: Darryl F. Zanuck has been named the head of production for Warner Bros.-First National.
- Hollywood, 18 November:
 Autumn has started in a somber manner for Sergei Eisenstein and his two compatriots, Grigori Alexandrov and Edouard Tissé, now that the State Department is refusing to prolong the visas of the Soviet trio. It seems that the authorities have given in to the pressure of the anti-Communist campaign to have them deported. It is little more than a year since they left Moscow. One remembers how they traveled to various European countries, where Eisenstein gave numerous lectures. Sometimes their presence was judged to be inopportune, as in Paris. They left Cherbourg on 8 April last on the Europa bound for New York, and arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of Paramount. Since their trip to Moscow in 1926, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford have had nothing but praise for the Soviet master. On the basis of this flattering report, Paramount hired Eisenstein "to direct several films at the convenience of the contractee." Eisenstein was full of hope on arrival in Hollywood with his colleagues and the English writer Ivor Montagu. He was given the full-scale studio publicity treatment but, alas, all the projects the director proposed were rejected, among them H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, Gold by Blaise Cendrars, and An American Tragedy from Theodore Dreiser. As might have been anticipated, his scripts for Gold (retitled Sutter's Gold) and An American Tragedy were regarded as unsuitable by the executives at Paramount -- too long, too socially conscious, not commercial enough, too expensive, etc. Clearly, the brilliant Russian director and the giant Hollywood studio have been unable to find a common ground, and Eisenstein's contract has not been canceled.
- China, 30 November: The censorship law aimed at "protecting the national industry" and also "preventing any attacks on the dignity of the Chinese" has been promulgated.
- Tokyo, 12 December: Release of Ojosan (Young Miss), directed by Yasujiro Ozu.
- Paris, 12 December:
 The police commisioner Jean Chiappe yesterday banned showings of the surrealist Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'or after the screen was splattered with ink by a fascist group. Copies were seized this morning. This film, made thanks to the patronage of the Viscount Charles de Noailles, was released on 2 October last at Studio 28, and has undergone many cuts since. Because of the originality of form the violence of subject, the condemnation of bourgeois morality, and also the fierce anti-clericalism, the film created a sensation. Members of the Anti-Jewish League interrupted a showing nine days ago with the cry, "Death to the Jews!" There could be more than 8,000 francs' worth of damage done by demonstrators who destroyed the paintings on exhibition in the theatre, among them works by Salvador Dali, Juan Miro, Max Ernst and Man Ray. Capitalizing on the indicent, Le Figaro and L'Ami du Peuple demanded the banning of the film, and Chiappe has been more than happy to oblige them.
 - Paris, 19 December: Mistinguett's leading man, the 26-year-old Jean Gabin, has made his screen debut in Chacun sa chance, a musical directed by René Pujol and Hans Steinhoff. Starring alongside Gabin is his wife Gaby Basset. The son of a cafe entertainer, Gabin began his working life as a laborer, but at the age of 19 was persuaded by his father to launch his stage career as a dancer at the Folies-Bergère. Still enjoying live theater, the busy Gabin is currently appearing on stage with Simone Simon and Edwige Feuillère.
- France, 31 December: Four hundred eighty-four full-length films have been shown this year in the 4,221 movie theaters here: 100 French, 113 German and 231 American.
- Paris, December: Well-known director and archivist Jean Painlevé has founded the Institute of Scientific Film in association with the School of Applied Arts and Crafts.
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24 January - Detroit, MI,