From David Puttnam - producer of such modern film classics as Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, Midnight Express, and The Mission, and the only European to have run a major Hollywood studio - an insightful and provocative history that explains the personalities and events which shaped film's transformation from a technological curiosity into one of the world's most powerful cultural and economic forces.

Puttnam's history is also an impassioned polemic: From the moment Thomas Edison stole the first crude attempt at a movie camera from the French scientist Etienne Jules Marey, Hollywood and Europe have existed, the author claims, in a state of undeclared hostility - hostility that has occasionally erupted into open battle for control of the century's most powerful artistic medium. And this battle, he contends, will ultimately determine the nature of Europe's cultural identity.

He also argues forcefully for the intelligent application of the language and techniques of cinema to education, urging filmmakers to make films that challenge and inspire as well as entertain.