The Birth of the Movies

The Birth of the Movies

PAGE CONTENTS:

How "Motion Pictures" Came to Be

A Brief History of the Movies

More Movie History

The Birth of Cinema

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

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

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

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

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