Class 1 - 20240831 - The Origins of Cinema

Screened Entertainment Before Cinema

1659 - the Magic Lantern - Christian Huygens
- 1857 - Magic lantern theatre
1834 - an Optical Toy named Zoetrope - Developed in Great Britain
Came from Two Optical Phenomena

Two Optical Phenomena

Persistence of Vision
The brain retains images the eye sees for 1/20th of a second longer than the image remains in view.
The Phi Phenomenon
The optical illusion of perceiving continuous motion between separate objects viewed rapidly in succession.

Cameras Development

1826 - The First Camera - Joseph Niepce
Needed 8 hours of exposure time to create an image.
The ability to print photographs
Early cameras used glass and metal plates, which were not able to pass before the lens fast enough to create successive images.
A machine able to project the images
It would need an intermittent mechanism to separate the images.

The Movies

Series Photography

First Attempt

In 1877, California Gov. Leland Stanford bet $25,000 that there was a moment when all four hooves of a running horse were off the ground.
He hired British born photographer Eadweard Muybridge to prove his point.
Series Photography machine in Palo Alto, California
The images were painted onto a glass disk as silhouettes.
He then designed the Zoopraxiscope which projected the images in rapid succession.
Muybridge's experiments proved Stanford was right.
However, they had a falling-out when Stanford published a book called The Horse In Motion which gave no credit to Muybridge despite containing his photos.
Still, Muybridge saw dollar signs and kept tweaking his apparatus, developing the ability to transfer his photos directly onto the glass disks.

Chronophotographe - Series Photographs With 1 Single camera

Étienne-Jules Marey, a scientist and inventor eager to study the biomechanics of birds in flight, became the first to record series photographs with 1 single camera.
1882 - Chronophotographe

The images of the birds in flight were imprinted on a rotating glass plate.

Celluloid Film - A Key Advance for Cinema

1886 - Hannibal Goodwin - Celluloid Film
Soon thereafter - George Eastman - Kodak

Motion Picture Camera

1891 - Kinetograph - The First True Motion Picture Camera - Thomas Edison

On October 1888, Edison files a preliminary patent for a motion picture camera with the U.S. Patents Office.
He assigns his lab assistant W.K.L Dickson to work on what he calls the "motion picture project".
At first Dickson tried the cylinder approach to creating motion pictures since it was successful with Edison's phonograph.
In 1891, Edison and Dickson introduced the Kinetoscope Camera, the Kinetoscope Viewing Box, and the 35mm Film.
In 1893, Edison opened the NJ based, Black Maria Studio. It was covered with tar paper and had a slanted roof to let in sunlight. The studio was built with the goal of making 20 second films they could exploit with their viewing box.
The Kinetograph camera weighed 100 pounds and was attached to 400 pounds of batteries. It was short-sighted in projection.

1895 - Cinematographe - Projection of Images - Lumiere Brothers

This camera shot the film, printed the film, then was mounted with a magic lantern to become part of the projector, which allowed for large audiences, hurting the popularity of Edison's machines.

Thomas Edison - Vitascope - The Phantoscope + The Latham Loop

Edison became very aware that the future of motion pictures was in projection. So, he commissioned the invention of a projection device in the summer of 1895.
Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat invented The Phantoscope. Edison buought the rights to this device.
Edison also bought the projection innovation called The Latham Loop, invented by Otway Latham, Woodville Latham, and Grey Latham.
Edison combined the Phantoscope and the Latham Loop, and named "his" new machine The Vitascope.

Films for Sale

The Lumiere Brothers

On December 28, 1895, the Lumiere Brothers rented a basement room in the Grand Cafe in Paris and presented a program of 10 films becoming the first to project films for a paying audience.
The first film screened in public - Workers Leaving the Lumiere factory (1895).
The first comedy film - The Hoser Hosed (1895)
The Lumieres called their short, nonfiction films actualites.
They eventually sent reps all over the world to film exotic locals which they would then show to a growing audience.
They opened cinematographe theaters in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York as their film catalogues continued to grow, reaching over 2,000 films in the 1900s.

Thomas Edison

Edison's screen on April 23, 1896, marks the beginning of projected cinema in the US
The Kiss (1896)
The lead performers of the Broadway musical The Widow Jones visited The Black Maria to recreate the closing moments of their stage show for the camera.
- The Kiss caused a sensation, arousing immediate calls for censorship.
- It also spawned many Imitators, creating a mini-genre of kissing films.
- Edison's improved cameras and projectors made the Lumiere system obsolete; by 1905, he had driven the brothers out of the movie business.

Tell Stories Through Films

Alice Guy-Blanche - First Narrative Film

The Cabbage Fairy (1896)
During her career, she often made films which spotlighted women.
Her 1906 film The Consequences Of Feminism imagined a world where gender roles are reversed.
But in 1910, Alice formed the Solax Company and began making movies in Flushing, New York. In 1912, Solax invested $100,000 for a new studio in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
A Fool And His Money (1912)
Probably the first film to feature an all-African-American cast.

George Melies - Editing Films

Melies was a French magician who owned and operated the Theater Robert-Houdin in Paris.
He had been using magic lanterns in his act for years but after attending a public viewing of Lumiere's Cinematographe in 1895, he realized the illusionist possibilities film could provide his show.
He immediately realized the possibilities of manipulating time and space inherent in editing film. At first, his films were magic tricks, created with stop motion, which he would use in his stage show.
He built a glass-enclosed studio to make his films, and he began experimenting with film's that told a story and became one of cinema's first narrative film artists making over 500 story-based films, mostly fantasies.
In 1902 Melies made the film that would define his legacy: A Trip to the Moon. For its day, it was a sprcial effects extravaganza with trick shots, inventive editing, lush painted scenery and tinting.
However, while embracing editing, and the manipulation of time and space, he based these techniques on what he knew best, the theater.
- His scenes play out from beginning to end, in one long shot, rather than shots cut together.
- His actors moved from side to side as they would on stage in the theater.
- His editing besides being used to create special effects, is only visible between the scenes.
- His camera was placed in a fixed location, at eye level, not unlike a spectator watching a performance of live theater from center stage.
While his use of innovative camera angles was not influential to the development of cinema, Melies did illustrate the potential that existed in editing film and pointed the way to the future by guiding cinema toward a narrative, rather than documentary medium.
By 1913, Meliles went bankrupt; his style had become old-fashioned. He finished his working years running a candy shop with his wife at a train station in Paris.

Edwin S Porter - American industry's first real director

In 1907, Edison builds a glass studio in Bronx, NY. He would produce movies there until 1918.
Edison hired Edwin S Porter to improve his film equipment and make films. He would become the American industry's first real director and its most influential, completing over 250 films in his career.
Porter encountered Trip to the Moon, while duplicating it for distribution in the States and it inspired him to make to make films telling a narrative story.
In 1903, Porter made Life of an American Fireman.
Later that same year, Porter made a big move toward improving continuity with the first western - The Great Train Robbery. It's the first film to exploit the violence of armed crime.
Porter features innovative:
- Camera Placement - Sometimes looking up or down on the action.
- Actor Blocking - Moving them diagonally across the frame rather than horizontally.
- Camera Movement - panning is used during the bandit's escape.
- Location Shooting - A first in narrative film.
- Cross-cutting - Cutting from one location to another for action happening simultaneously.
- Cutting Between Scenes - Without dissolving and without playing the scenes out to the end.
Porter provides the beginning of cinematic language by identifying the most important element of film: the individual shot. He also hit upon the idea that cinematic narration depends on the arrangement of shots in relation to one another: the editing.

Early Movie Going Experience

The enormous profits of The Great Train Robbery spurred the opening of the first permanent exhibition spaces dedicated to movies - Nickelodeon.
By 1910, there were 10,000 nickelodeons across the country. In Now York City there were "as many as five" nickelodeons on every block.
Future movie moguls who started with nickelodeons:
- The Warner Brothers
- Louis B. Mayer of MGM
- Willian Fox of 20th Century Fox
- Carl Laemmle of Universal
- Adolf Zukor of Paramount