Cinema can be treated as a kind of art formed on a technical basis of cinematography. Film art is the synthesis of literature, fine arts, theatre and music. And it is just as important as painting, literature, music or any other art.
The cinema began its history in 1890s. However in different countries cinema was not started at the same time. It depended largely on the level of economic development, availability of material and technical resourses. 
The cinema in Britain is often regarded as not quite as a part of 'the arts' at all - it is simply entertainment. Partly for this reason Britain is unique among large European countries in giving almost no financial help to its film industry. Therefore, although cinema-going is a regular habit for a much larger number than is theatre-going, British-film directors often have to go to Hollywood because the resourses they need are not available in Britain. As a result comparatively few films of quality are made in the country and this is not because expertise in filmmaking doesn't exist, it does. American productions often use studios and technical facilities in Britain. Moreover, some of the films which Britain does manage to make become highly respected around the world. 
Cinema doesn't only depend on historical conditions, it also reflects all historical events, people's life in the past, their problems and relations. Cinema is a great source of knowledge and also a great power. It's, maybe, one of the most widespread and popular art. Most people can't imagine their life today without cinema and television. 
Modern cinema is generally regarded as descending from the work of the French Lumiere brothers in 1892, and their show first came to London in 1896. The first people to build and run a working 35 mm camera in Britain were Robert W. Paul and Birt Acres. They made the first British film "Incident at Clovelly Cottage" in February 1895, shortly before falling out over the camera's patent. Part of the film shows Acres' wife Annie pushing a baby in a pram past the front of the house. The baby was their son, Sidney Birt Acres, father of Alan B. Acres. Soon several British film companies had opened to meet the demand for new films, such as Mitchell and Kenyon in Blackburn. From 1898 American producer Charles Urban expanded the London-based Warwick Trading Company to produce British films, mostly documentary and news. He later formed his own Charles Urban Trading Company, which also produced early colour films. G.A.Smith devised the first colour system, Kinemacolor, in 1908.
Britain had foreign influences practically from the start. Leon Gaumont and Charles Pathe had both opened film companies by 1909 and there were many films flooded onto the British market from Europe.
As Paul Rotha, an English film maker, stated, the British film lacked conception, it had no other aim than that of the imitation of the cinema in other countries. He was assured that the British film would never prosper, save as a child of the American cinema, until British producers brought themselves to recognize the value of experiment. England was the most fertile country imaginable for pure filmic material. The wealth of materials was immense. Their railways, their industries, their towns and their countryside were waiting for incorporation into narrative films. Oxford, Cambridge, Liverpool, Shrewsbury, Exeter, the mountains of Wales and the highlands of Scotland were all admirable for filmic environment. But nothing of any value had yet been made in London, probably the richest city in the world for cinematic treatment.
It seemed obvious in the post-war years that American companies were determined to crush British competition and in 1923 a group of interested people in the film industry, alarmed at the situation, began a campaign to force legislation making is compulsory for British exhibitors to show an interesting proportion of British-made films on their screens. In 1921 the British National Film League had been formed, with the object of encouraging the production of British films and to attempt to shorten the period between the trade-show of a film and its general release.
In the years preceding the eventful 1927 the number of home-made films had dwindled considerably. In 1924 the total number of films made in England was thirty-four, while in 1925 this fell to twenty-tree! It really seemed as if British films were coming to an end. But in 1927 the Cinematograph Film Act – the Magna Carta of British film production – was presented in Parliament. When the Act became a law in 1928, it began at once to have a decisive effect upon British film production
The advent of sound offered more challenges to the British Film Industry's financial stability. In 1929 138 films were made, in 1933 - 159. Most of which were abysmal, the exceptions that stand out are, "Juno and the Paycock" (1930); "Hindle Wakes", "Tell England"; (1931), "Rome Express", (1932) and the brilliantly successful Korda production "The Private Life of Henry VIII" with Charles Laughton.
Alexander Korda had failed in Hollywood, and when the boom started in the UK, he decided to try his luck there. He won wide praise from the critics for his witty direction of Wedding Rehearsal, the first film of his own company, London Film Productions. 
Alexander Korda produced and directed in the following years a number of other successes, including: "Catherine the Great", "The Scarlet Pimpernel", "Sanders of the River", "Rembrandt", "Knight Without Armour", "The Four Feathers", "The Thief of Baghdad", "The Ghost Goes West" and others of this calibre, films in which players like Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Clements, Conrad Veidt, Robert Donat, Sabu, Flora Robson, Roger Livesey,Gertrude Laurence, Mary Morris and Rex Harrison were brought into world prominence.
The constraints imposed by the World War II seemed to give new energy to the British film industry. British films began to make increasing use of documentary techniques and former documentary film-makers to make more realistic films, many of which helped to shape the popular image of the nation at war. Among the best known of these films are “In Which We serve” (1942), “When the Day Well?”(1942), “We Dive at Dawn”(1943), “Millions Like Us”(1944).  
Towards the end of the 1940s, the Rank Organisation, founded in 1937 by J. Arthur Rank, became the dominant force behind British film-making. It acquired a number of British studios, and bank-rolled some of the great British film-makers which were emerging in this period.
Building on the success British cinema had enjoyed during World War II, the industry hit new heights of creativity in the immediate post-war years. Among the most significant films produced during this period were "David Lean's Brief Encounter" (1945) and his Dickens adaptations "Great Expectations" (1946) and "Oliver Twist" (1948), Carol Reed's thrillers "Odd Man Out" (1947) and "The Third Man" (1949), and Powell and Pressburger's "A Matter of Life and Death" (1946), "Black Narcissus" (1946) and "The Red Shoes" (1948). British cinema's growing international reputation was enhanced by the success of "The Red Shoes", the most commercially successful film of its year in the U.S., and by Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet", the first non-American film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. 
The war films were often based on true stories and made in a similar low-key style to their wartime predecessors. They helped to make stars of actors like John Mills, Jack Hawkins and Kenneth More, and some of the most successful included "The Cruel Sea" (1953), "The Dambusters" (1954), "The Colditz Story" (1955) and "Reach for the Sky" (1956).
Popular comedy series included the St Trinians films and the "Doctor" series, beginning with Doctor in the House in 1954. The latter scries starred Dirk Bogarde, probably the British industry's most popular star of the 1950s. Bogarde was later replaced by Michael Craig and Leslie Phillips, and the series continued until 1970. The Rank Organisation also produced some other notable comedy successes, such as "Genevieve" in 1953.
The writer/director/producer team of twin brothers John and Roy Boulting also produced a series of successful satires on British life and institutions, beginning with "Private's Progress" (1956), and continuing with "Brothers in Law" (1957), "Carlton-Browne of the F.O " (1958), "I'm All Right Jack" (1959) and "Heavens Above!" (1963). The Italian director-producer Mario Zampi also made a number of comedies including "Laughter in Paradise" (1951), "The Naked Truth" (1957) and "Too Many Crooks" (1958).
After a string of successful films, including the comedies "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1951), "The Titfield Thunderbolt" (1953) and "The Lady killers" (1955), as well as dramas like "Dead of Night", "Scott of the Antarctic" and "The Cruel Sea", Ealing Studios finally ceased production in 1958, and the studios were taken over by the BBC for television production.
In the 1960s British studios begun to enjoy major success in the international market with a string of films that displayed a more liberated attitude to sex, capitalising on the "swinging London" image propagated by Time magazine. Films like "Darling", "Aifie” "Georgy Girl", and "The Knack" all explored this phenomenon, while "Blowup", "Repulsion" and later "Women in Love", broke taboos around the portrayal of sex and nudity on screen.
At the same time, producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli combined sex with exotic locations, casual violence and self-referential humour in the phenomenally successful James Bond series. The first film "Dr. No" was a sleeper hit in Britain in 1962, and the second, "From Russia with Love" (1963), was a hit worldwide. By the time of the third film, "Goldfinger" (1964), the series had become a global phenomenon, reaching its commercial peak with "Thunderball" the following year.
The series success led to a spy film boom, with "The Liquidator" (1965), "Modesty Blaise" (1966), "Sebastian" (1968) and the "Bulldog Drummond spoofs", "Deadlier Than the Male" (1967) and "Some Girls Do" (1968) among the results. Meanwhile, Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman had also instigated a rival series of more realistic spy films based on the novels of Len Deighton. Michael Caine starred as bespectacled spy Harry Palmer in "The Ipcress File" (1965), "Funeral in Berlin" (1966) and "Billion Dollar Brain" (1967), and the success of these ushered in a cycle of downbeat espionage films in the manner of the novels of John Le Carre, including "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965) and "The Deadly Affair" (1966).
The late 1970s saw a revival of the James Bond series with "The Spy Who Loved Me" in 1977. However, the next film, "Moonraker" (1979), broke with tradition by filming at studios in France to take advantage of tax incentives there. Some American productions did return to the major British studios in 1977-79 though, including Star Wars at Elstree Studios, Superman at Pinewood, and Alien at Shepperton.
British film in the eighties was barely more than a cottage industry, it had accepted that it couldn't compete with the huge American budgets post-Star "Wars" (1977) but could still exist on a smaller scale, even if it was starved into producing, what were regarded in some quarters as overblown TV movies. Despite low budgets many of Film on Four's, and the other independent companies, productions were very high quality cinema.
Between 1990 and 1994, the UK was one of only four countries among the top 20 film making nations to show an increase in the number of films produced' (in the same period France had a drop of 21% and the US dropped 12%). This growth has been attributed to the input of TV to film production.
Film production in Britain hit one of its all-time lows in 1989. While cinema audiences were climbing in the UK in the early 1990s, few British films were enjoying significant commercial success, even in the home market. Among the more notable exceptions were the Merchant Ivory productions "Howards End" (1992) and "The Remains of the Day" (1993). Richard Attenborough's "Chaplin" (1992) and "Shadowlands" (1993) and Neil Jordan's acclaimed thriller "The Crying Game" (1992). The latter was generally ignored on its initial release in Britain, but was a considerable success in the United States, where it was picked up by the distributor Miramax. The same company also enjoyed some success releasing the BBC period drama Enchanted April (1992). Kenneth Branagh's filmed "Shakespeare" adaptations were also gaining some attention, including his 1989 version of "Henry V", and "Much Ado About Nothing" in 1993.
However, the enthusiastic reception given to "The Madness of King George" (1994) proved there was still a market for the traditional British costume drama, and a large number of other period films followed, including "Sense and Sensibility" (1995), "Restoration" (1995), "Emma" (1996), "Mrs. Brown" (1997), "The Wings of the Dove" (1997, "Shakespeare in Love" (1998) and "Topsy- Turvy" (1999). Several of these were funded by Miramax Films, who also took over Anthony Minghella's "The English Patient" (1996) when the production ran into difficulties during filming. Although technically an American production, the success of this film, including its 9 Academy Award wins would bring further prestige to British film-makers.
The new century has so far been a relatively successful one for the British film industry. Many British films have found a wide international audience, and some of the independent production companies, such as Working Title Films have secured financing and distribution deals with major American studios. Working Title scored three major international successes with the romantic comedies "Bridget Jones's Diary" (2001), which grossed $254 million world-wide; the sequel "Bridget Jones:The Edge of Reason", which earned $228 million worldwide; and Richard Curtis’s directorial debut "Love Actually" (2003), which grossed $239 million world-wide. At the same time, critically-acclaimed films such as "Gosford Park" (2001), "Pride and Prejudice" (2005), "The Constant Gardener" (2005) and "The Queen" (2006) also brought prestige to the British film industry.
The new decade saw a major new film series in the US-backed but British made Harry Potter films, beginning with "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" in 2001. David Heymanfs company Heyday Films has produced three sequels, "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire", with three more films planned.
The film industry remains an important export earner for the British economy. According to a UK Film Council press release of July 22, 2006: "The UK film industry exported £843 million worth of services in 2004, £399 million came from royalties and £444 million from film production services and continued to make a positive contribution to the UK balance of payments, with a trade surplus in 2004 of 91 million pounds.