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PAGE CONTENTS: 1903 - The First Silent Movie
How "Motion Pictures" Came to Be A Brief History of the Movies More Movie History The Birth of Cinema
Influential Silent Films
1903 - The First Silent Movie - "The Great
Train Robbery"
By Jennifer Rosenberg, About.com Guide
Produced by Thomas Edison,
but directed and filmed by Edison Company employee Edwin S. Porter, The Great Train Robbery was the first narrative
movie, one that told a story. The film is a classic western with four bandits who rob a train and its passengers of their
valuables and then make their grand escape only to be killed in a shootout by a posse sent after them.
The film does
not spare on violence as there are both several shootouts and one man being bludgeoned with a piece of coal. Surprising to
many audience members was the special effect of throwing the bludgeoned man over the side of the train (a dummy was used).
Also first seen in The Great Train Robbery was a character forcing a man to dance by shooting at his feet - a scene
that has been often repeated in future westerns. To the audience's fear and then delight, there was a scene in which the
leader of the outlaws looks directly at the audience and fires his pistol at them. (This scene appeared either at the beginning
or at the end of the film, a decision left up to the operator.)
The Great Train Robbery not only was
the first narrative film, it also introduced several new editing techniques. Rather than staying on one set, Porter took
his crew to ten different locations, including Edison's New York studio, Essex County Park in New Jersey, and along the
Lackawanna railroad. Unlike other film attempts which kept a stable camera position, Porter included a scene in which he panned
the camera to follow the characters as they ran across a creek and into the trees to fetch their horses. However, the most
innovative editing technique introduced in The Great Train Robbery was the inclusion of crosscutting. Crosscutting
is when the film cuts between two different scenes that are happening at the same time.
The Great Train Robbery
was hugely popular with audiences. The approximately twelve minutes of film that starred Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy"
Anderson was played across the country in 1904 and then played in the first nickelodeons (theaters in which movies cost a
nickel to see) in 1905. The Great Train Robbery's popularity lead directly to the opening up of permanent movie
theaters and opened up the possibility of a future film industry.
©2010 About.com, a part
of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved.
How "Motion Pictures" Came to Be
Are today's summer blockbusters not tempting you into the theater? Then take
a trip with us back into movie history. We don't mean recent history, or even the days when William Faulkner created screenplays
from novels by Ernest Hemingway for directors like Howard Hawks. We mean the days when the technology of movies was just a
gleam in Aristotle's eye. We mean how "motion pictures" came to be.
4th century BC - The Greek philosopher Aristotle,
standing beneath a tree during an eclipse, notices that an image of the sun has been projected onto the ground through a hole
in the leaves. He experiments and finds that the smaller the hole, the sharper the image. From this, he figures that light
moves in a straight line and that when it meets a surface with a small hole in it, the rays cross to form an inverted image
on the other side. This principle, which is at the basis of the camera, goes unexploited for nearly 2,000 years.
16th century - Giambattista della Porta builds on
Aristotle's idea by constructing a large room with a small hole in one wall--a camera obscura. He then has actors
perform outside the room so that their images are projected inside for spectators. Viewers flee in panic at the sight, and
della Porta is brought up on charges of sorcery.
1802 - Thomas Wedgwood reports success in capturing
images using light-sensitive materials. But since there is no way to fix the image, his results are short-lived (unlike your
high-school yearbook photos, which are eternal).
1826 - Frenchman Joseph Niépce captures the first
true photograph, calling it a heliograph. But his method requires an 8-hour exposure. Happily, he takes on a partner named
Louis Daguerre, who reduces the exposure time to 30 minutes with daguerreotypes, which are introduced to the world in 1839.
1839 - In a banner year for shutterbugs, English scientist
William Fox Talbot unveils the calotype process, which makes negatives. This allows for an unlimited number of prints. Daguerreotypes,
by contrast, are one-of-a-kind affairs.
mid-19th century - New optical toys (such as the thaumatrope,
phenakistoscope, and zoetrope) exploit the way human brains process a quick succession of images. The toys put a series of
still images on a disk or in a drum. Spin the disk or drum rapidly and, voilà, you see moving pictures!
1878 - British-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge
settles once and for all the question of whether a galloping horse's legs all leave the ground at the same time. By 1878,
exposure time had been reduced to less than 1/100th of a second, so Muybridge set up a series of cameras triggered by tripwires
and had a horse gallop by. Viewed in sequence, the images proved that a horse's legs do all leave the ground. The sensation
they caused paved the way for movies.
1887 - The idea of recording photographs on celluloid
roll film is implemented by Hannibal Goodwin, then taken up and mass-produced by George Eastman the following year. The innovation
makes it possible to put thousands of sequential images onto one roll of film.
1888 - Thomas Edison, looking for a sequel to his
phonograph, orders an assistant in his lab, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to invent a movie camera. Dickson produces the
Kinetograph to record the film and the Kinetoscope to play it back. Viewers looked through an eyepiece, so only one person
could watch at a time.
1895 - Inspired by a Kinetoscope display in Paris,
the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière perfect a commercially viable film projector and screen movies in front of ticket-buying
crowds. Their multi-purpose machine--camera, printer, and projector all in one--was called the cinématographe and
is the source of the modern term "cinema."
1915 - The first 3D films debut before a paying audience.
The spectators wear red and green glasses that create a single image from two images photographed slightly apart. 3D never
conquers the movie business, but it never dies either.
1919 - Lee De Forest develops a method called Phonofilm
for recording sound onto motion picture film. He tries to market it to studio executives, but they wonder why in the world
people would want to hear movies talk.
1925 - Warner Brothers, a small studio struggling
to expand, buys a competing sound technology called Vitaphone to market as a short-term novelty. Popular response is so strong
for WB's sound-enabled pictures, including The Jazz Singer (1927), that the silent film era effectively ends. The
change kills the careers of several silent movie stars, whose voices prove to be considerably less appealing than their looks.
1929 - The first Academy Awards are presented by the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize achievement in the film industry. The award for best picture goes
to Wings, a WWI dogfighting drama with spectacular aerial footage. Producers of other action flicks immediately take
heart that they too might someday win "best picture."
1932 - Herbert Kalmus perfects the Technicolor process,
using light-splitting optics to simultaneously record the reds, greens, and blues of life on three separate, specially treated
black-and-white negatives. Each negative was dyed to bring out the color and then superimposed on one emulsion to create a
color-accurate print.
1952 - 3D not only refuses to die, it achieves its
greatest success: Bwana Devil, a thriller about two man-eating lions in Kenya. The film's popularity triggers a boom
in 3D filmmaking, with nearly fifty 3D movies released in three years.
1967 - At the Montreal International Exposition, several
pavilions display short films that, through the use of multiple projectors, stretch across several screens to fill viewers'
field of vision. Afterward, three Canadian filmmakers agree to develop a process to achieve the same effect with a single
projector. Their efforts ultimately result in the creation of the IMAX format, which debuts in 1970.
1993 - The Neil Simon comedy Lost in Yonkers
becomes the first movie to be edited digitally. This technological step--invisible to most moviegoers--paves the way for a
Lucasian time when movies will involve no film at all, just sound and images captured and manipulated electronically. Skeptics
shake their heads and yearn for simpler days.
--Mark Diller
KnowledgeNews is brought to you by Every Learner, Inc., an independent small
business dedicated to supporting lifelong learners. Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights reserved.
A Brief History of the Movies
We'll tell you how the movie biz was born--and how a sleepy California
town became the global epicenter of celluloid dream-making.
Today, "Hollywood" and "the movie industry" are nearly synonymous.
Yet this needn't have been the case. The first motion pictures were made in the early 1890s by employees of Thomas Edison's
laboratories in New Jersey. And for moviemaking's first 15 years, the New York/New Jersey area dominated the industry. Back
then, Hollywood was little more than a farm town a few miles northwest of Los Angeles--itself a relatively small city in a
relatively new state (California joined the union in 1850).
The man behind the development of the first commercially viable
motion picture camera was William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a young assistant at Edison's labs. Called the Kinetograph, this
camera created the first-ever "movie"--a celluloid recording of a sneeze.
Dickson quickly improved upon his invention, adding a device called
a Kinetoscope, which let a single viewer peer through a sort of peephole and watch a film loop that ran continuously on spools.
In 1894, the first Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City, and the movie industry was up and running.
Before 10 years had passed, new technology projected movies onto
screens that crowds could view simultaneously. And business practices took shape, including the mass production of 15-minute,
single-reel films, churned out at the rate of 20 to 30 per week.
By 1908, the industry was booming, and competition for market
share was fierce. More than 8,000 permanent movie theaters dotted the United States--mostly nickelodeons, or "nickel theaters"
("odeon" is Greek for "theater").
Fearing he'd lose control of the burgeoning business to movie
distributors and exhibitors, Edison joined forces with several other production companies. Together, they formed the Motion
Picture Patents Company, which attempted to create a moviemaking monopoly.
"The Trust," as it was called, had some initial success, but it
had effectively failed by 1914--partly because Edison and Company failed to foresee that film's future lay not in single-reel
"shorts" but in multi-reel "features." In 1911, only two feature-length films were released. By 1919, studios produced more
than 600 per year.
Despite its mistakes, "the Trust" exerted enough control in the
East to push independent moviemakers to search for new outlets--in new environments. At the time, movies could only be made
in natural light, so Hollywood's 320 yearly days of sunshine made it an attractive spot.
Along with the sun came a temperate climate, a substantial labor
market, the proximity of L.A.'s established theaters, and a highly varied terrain--everything from desert to mountains in
the space of 50 miles. Hollywood was, in short, an ideal place to make movies, a fact the L.A. Chamber of Commerce was quick
to point out to movie moguls back in New York.
The first movie studio in Hollywood was built in 1911. Within
a decade, Hollywood had become the undisputed capital of moviemaking. By 1918, it was home to the production of roughly four
out of every five movies, and to as many as 20 different movie companies, including Columbia, Warner Brothers, Paramount,
MGM, and 20th Century Fox.
Steve Sampson
KnowledgeNews is brought to you by Every Learner, Inc., an independent small
business dedicated to supporting lifelong learners. Copyright © 2007, Every Learner, Inc. All rights reserved.
More Movie History
by Mary Bellis
The first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures
or movies was a device called the "wheel of life" or "zoopraxiscope". Patented in 1867 by William Lincoln, moving drawings
or photographs were watched through a slit in the zoopraxiscope. However, this was a far cry from motion pictures as we know
them today. Modern motion picture making began with the invention of the motion picture camera.
The Frenchman Louis Lumiere is often credited as inventing the first motion
picture camera in 1895. But in truth, several others had made similar inventions around the same time as Lumiere. What Lumiere
invented was a portable motion-picture camera, film processing unit and projector called the Cinematographe, three functions
covered in one invention.
The Cinematographe made motion pictures very popular, and it could be better
be said that Lumiere's invention began the motion picture era. In 1895, Lumiere and his brother were the first to present
projected, moving, photographic, pictures to a paying audience of more that one person.
The Lumiere brothers were not the first to project film. In 1891, the Edison
company successfully demonstrated the Kinetoscope, which enabled one person at a time to view moving pictures. Later in 1896,
Edison showed his improved Vitascope projector and it was the first commercially, successful, projector in the U.S..
"The cinema is an invention without a future" - Louis Lumière
©2007 About, Inc., A part of The New York Times Company. All rights reserved
The Birth of Cinema By Denis Mueller The growth of cinema as an art form is unparalleled. Its beginnings
stretch back to the early days of photography. Yet it is different in that cinema was relieved from the restric- tions of
time and space and its mass appeal changed the world's notion of art. It is the first art form which could only have existed
in a modern industrial society. For the first time in history movement was freed from the living performance and even more
importantly; the order of reality can be altered. But its main impact on the world was its
mass appeal. Short films were first shown at Paris in 1895 and 1896. The cinema quickly spread to New York, London, Brussels
and Berlin and within ten short years 26 million Americans visited the cin- ema. At first the nickelodeons, as they were called,
catered to a male audience but its mass appeal soon crossed gender lines. The popularity of film helped lead to a mass culture
and to modern day society. All this was due to, in many ways, to the interest of the early pioneers in nothing other than
profit. Those who entered the field were not artists, but Jewish merchants who catered to the newly arriving immigrants from
Europe. In fact recognition from the art world would be slow and grudging. Cinema's appeal to this mass audience of Americans
allowed the US to capture the film world and create the entertainment industry that now dominates the culture of the world.
How did
this happen? Film enjoyed a unique advantage in that in its early stages it was silent. This meant that linguistic constraints
did not effect it. Therefore, cinema developed its own language, which made it possible for it to exploit a glob- al market.
But during the early days of film it was not pre- destined for the United States to become its world leader. French films
dominated much of the early days of film but the advent of World War I and the shortage of raw materials allowed the US film
industry to fill the gap. Cinema developed simple stories that drew wide audiences. The 19th century avant-garde was quickly
left behind but did re-emerge during the 1920's and then became part of what would be the European art film. American
films were quite simple stories usually of a melo- dramatic nature. The exception to this was the comedy. It is interesting
to note that the comedies of people like Charlie Chaplin are the only films from that era those still interest audiences.
So the
art form that changed the world was created without the constraints of a cultural elite. That was different. Its aim was to
make money. This meant that it would be always constrained and tied to its profitability and cinema would have to appeal to
a worldwide audience. This has helped create a worldwide culture that was unheard of in the 19th century. The arts world would
be forever changed. Art no longer would be the sole province of an elite but now every- day people would have their say. Sources:
Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Empire
Influential Silent Films
According to ListVerse, here are some
of the best and most influential silent films ever made.
The Phantom of the
Opera
Lon Chaney, 1925
An adaptation of Gaston
Leroux’s famous novel. The film itself is most well-known for star Lon Chaney’s self-applied make-up. Chaney
painted his eye sockets black, giving a skull-like impression to them. He also pulled the tip of his nose up and pinned that
in place with wire, enlarging his nostrils with black paint, and putting a set of jagged false teeth into his mouth to complete
the ghastly deformed look of the Phantom. The make-up was painful, but effectively horrific. From this Lon Chaney gained the
reputation of being the “Man of 1,000 Faces.” His son, Lon Chaney, Jr., later became a horror legend in his own
right by starring in “The Wolf Man” (1947). Sherlock, Jr. Buster Keaton,
1924
An early comedy from the legendary Buster Keaton. It features Keaton as a movie projectionist and janitor
who is studying to become a detective. It is among Keaton’s funniest films and helped to establish his unique style. Greed Erich von Stroheim,
1924
The most expensive picture of its time, “Greed” started out as a nearly 9 hour film before
being cut down drastically. It exists today at just under 4 hours in length. The remaining footage is considered to be the
most tragic loss in all of cinema. The plot follows a dentist whose wife wins a lottery ticket, only to become obsessed with
money.
The Birth of a Nation D.W. Griffith, 1915
The movie that invented movies as we know them. Things like
close-ups, camera pans, and eyeline matches were unheard of until D.W. Griffith’s 3 hour Civil War epic. It was incredibly
successful upon release, which can be attributed to its well-known controversy regarding its racist depictions of slaves after
the war. It is also credited as having inspired the reformation of the Ku Klux Klan in 1914. Overall, a fascinating and well-made
film that has a very unfortunate background. Still a must-see for anybody interested in film. Nosferatu F W Murnau,
1922
Nosferatu was an early German Expressionist film that helped to define the horror genre. Intended as an
adaptation of “Dracula,” numerous alterations had to be made as the producers
could not properly secure the rights. The film is praised for director F. W. Murnau’s unique use of shadows and silhouettes
to enhance the sheer terror of Max Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire.
The Gold Rush Charlie Chaplin, 1925
One
of Charlie Chaplin’s best films. Chaplin’s famous Tramp character heads to Alaska to participate in the gold rush,
and finds more than he bargained for. This is the film Chaplin has said he would most like to be remembered for. It is also
well-known for its poster, which depicts the Tramp cold and alone, sitting on top of a stove in the corner of a room. Hardly
a poster for a comedy, “The Gold Rush” is nonetheless heartwarming and hilarious. The General Buster Keaton, 1927
Another
Buster Keaton comedy. This one stars Keaton as a young railroad engineer that aspires to become a soldier in the Civil War,
he is unfortunately turned down. He returns home, downtrodden. A year later, his beloved train (the eponymous “The General”) is hijacked by Union soldiers, and he decides to stop them himself, single handedly.
“The General” is best known for its humor and impressive action sequences, which utilize real, running steam trains.
The climax of the film includes a spectacular moment where a bridge (sabotaged by Johnnie) collapses as a railroad train crosses
it. This scene went on to inspire numerous other films, such as "The Bridge on the River Kwai" and
“The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Intolerance
D
W Griffith, 1916
D.W. Griffith’s response to the detractors of the "Birth of a Nation". He
was offended by their attacks on his films and decided to make a movie depicting how intolerance led to tragedy throughout
history. Intolerance is a complex film that tells four separate stories about intolerance that are interwoven together. The
movie constantly cuts back and forth between the four stories: a modern tale depicting the struggles of workers during the
industrial revolution; the story of the Passion of the Christ; the fall of Babylon (which includes one of the biggest sets
ever built); and the Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France. As the movie reaches its climax, the cutting between stories
becomes faster and more intense. A marked improvement over his previous film, this is the movie D.W. Griffith should be remembered
for.
Metropolis Fritz Lang, 1927
The first modern science-fiction film. It has influenced all subsequent
SF movies from Star Wars to Blade Runner. Metropolis was one
of the last German Expressionist films, and is to this date the most expensive silent film ever made. Metropolis is set in
a futuristic urban dystopia and examines the social crisis between workers and owners in capitalism. The film was heavily
edited upon release, and its cut footage was long considered lost. However, on July 1, 2008, a complete cut of the film was
discovered in a film museum in Argentina. Some of the missing shots, however, remain beyond restoration. City Lights Charlie Chaplin, 1931
This
was Charlie Chaplin’s last silent film (“Modern Times”’s status as
a silent film is debatable, or else I would have included it on this list) In “City Lights,” the Little Tramp
falls in love with a blind flower salesgirl who believes him to be a rich man. Desperate to maintain the illusion, he attempts
to obtain enough money to pay for an expensive operation that can restore her eyesight. Its ending is often considered to
be the greatest in film history. The Passion of Joan of Arc Carl Dreyer, 1928
When I first saw this movie, it was completely silent. No soundtrack,
no anything. And it was perhaps the most haunting film experience of my life. The film depicts the final hours of French national
hero and saint, Joan of Arc. The film was considered lost until a nearly complete print was found hidden in a mental institution.
The movie is influential for its use of close-ups and complete lack of make-up (for realism). Renée Jeanne Falconetti’s
performance as Joan is also considered one of the best in screen history.
Sunrise:
A Song of Two Humans F W Murnau, 1927
Sunrise was made by F. W.
Murnau, the director of Nosferatu. Murnau was invited by William Fox to make an Expressionist film in Hollywood. It tells
the tale of a broken marriage; the husband is enamored by a beautiful, young tramp from the city that tries to persuades him
to drown his wife. He is unable to go through with it, and he begins to realize how much he loves his wife. So they take a
dreamy, mesmerizing romp through the big city and learn what they truly mean to each other. It is a wonderful, life-affirming
film that still impresses and enthralls its viewers to this day.
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