ARTS
The
History of Film
One
of the major reasons for the emergence of motion pictures in
the 1890s was the late 1880s development of a camera that could
capture movement and a sprocket system that could move the film
through the camera. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, a young
assistant in Thomas Edison's laboratories, designed an early
version of a movie-picture camera (an optical lantern projector)
- named a Kinetograph - that was first patented by Edison in
1893.
Early in 1893, the world's first film studio, the "Black Maria,"
was built on the grounds of Edison's laboratories at West Orange,
New Jersey and the first successful "motion picture" was made
- a re-creation of a sneeze. In the same year, Edison demonstrated
his Kinetograph for the Brooklyn Institute's physics department
- images of a blacksmith and his co-workers forging a piece
of iron. Most of the earliest moving images were non-fictional,
unedited, crude documentary views of ordinary slices of life
- street scenes, the activities of police or firemen, or shots
of a passing train.
Then,
along came another marvelous Edison Company invention in the
mid 1890s - the Kinetoscope (1894), basically a bulky, coin-operated
movie peep show viewer for a single customer (in which the images
on a continuous film loop-belt were viewed in motion as they
were rotated in front of a shutter and a light). On Saturday,
April 14th, 1894, the Holland Brothers opened their original
Kinetoscope Parlor at 1155 Broadway in New York City and for
the first time, commercially exhibited movies as we know them
today.
Early spectators in Kinetoscope parlors were amazed by even
the most mundane moving images in very short films (between
30 and 60 seconds) - an approaching train or a parade, women
dancing, dogs terrorizing rats, and twisting contortionists.
In 1895, Edison exhibited hand-colored movies, including Annabelle,
the Dancer, in Atlanta, Georgia at the Cotton States Exhibition.
In one of Edison's 1896 films, entitled The Widow Jones (1896)
- often called The Kiss, May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted
a scene from a Broadway play - it was a close-up of a cinematic
kiss.
The
Lumiere brothers in France, Louis and Auguste, who had become
inspired by Edison's work, created their own combo movie camera
and projector - a more portable device dubbed the Cinematographe.
The multi-purpose device was more profitable because more than
a single spectator could watch the film. The first public demonstration
- a projection of a motion picture - was made in March of 1895
- causing a sensation with the film entitled Workers Leaving
the Lumiere Factory (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumiere),
although it only consisted of images of factory workers leaving
the gate for home or for a lunch break.
As generally acknowledged, cinema (a word derived from Cinematographe)
was born on December 28, 1895, in Paris, France. The Lumieres
presented the first commercial exhibition of a projected motion
picture in the world's first movie theatre - in the Salon Indien,
beneath the Grand Cafe Bonlevarde des Capucines.
The 20-minute program of ten short films, with twenty showings
a day, included the famous first comedy of a gardener with a
watering hose (The Sprinkler Sprinkled or L'Arrouseur Arrose),
the factory worker short, and a sequence of a horse-drawn carriage
galloping toward the camera. By 1896, Edison had purchased US
inventor Thomas Armat's perfected projection machine called
a Vitascope.
On April 23, 1896, the date of the first Vitascope projection
for an audience, paying customers watched the Edison Company's
Vitascope project a ballet sequence in a New York amusement
arcade during a vaudeville act.
Audiences
would soon need larger theaters to watch screens with projected
images from Vitascopes after the turn of the century. In 1897,
the first real cinema building was built in Paris, solely for
the purpose of showing films. The same did not occur until 1902
in downtown Los Angeles where Thomas L. Talley's storefront,
200-seat Electric Theater became the first US theater to exclusively
show movies - it charged patrons a dime.
Aside
from technological achievements, another Frenchman who was a
member of the Lumiere's viewing audience, Georges Melies, developed
Europe's first film studio in 1897 and created about 500 films
(one-reelers usually) over the next 15 years.
An illusionist and stage magician, his pioneering science fiction
work, Le Voyage Dans la Lune - A Trip to the Moon (1902) was
his most popular work, with scenes called tableaux. He incorporated
surrealistic special effects, including the memorable image
of a rocketship landing and gouging out the eye of the 'man
in the moon.' Melies also introduced the idea of narrative storylines,
plots, character development, illusion, and fantasy into film,
including trick photography, hand-tinting, dissolves, 'magical'
super-impositions and double exposures, stop motion, slow-motion
and fadeouts.
Further US Development: The major movie production companies
- the pioneering firms - were the Edison Company, Biograph (1896)
and Vitagraph (1899).
Biograph competed with Edison by devising a camera that didn't
use sprocket holes or perforations in the motion-picture film.
The key years in the development of the cinema in the U.S. were
in the early 1900s. "Moving pictures" were increasing in length,
and taking on fluid narrative forms.
Inventor Edwin S. Porter, who in 1898 had patented an improved
Beadnell projector with a steadier and brighter image, was also
using film cameras to record news events. Porter was one of
the resident Kinetoscope operators and directors at the Edison
Company Studios and was responsible for directing the first
American documentary The Life of an American Fireman (1903).
The six-minute film was dramatically edited with a combination
of re-enacted scenes and documentary footage.
By combining film editing and the telling of narrative stories,
Porter produced one of the most important and influential films
of the time revealing the possibility of fictional stories on
film. The film was the one-reel, 14-scene, approximately 10-minute
long "The Great Train Robbery (1903)".
It
was based on a real-life train heist. His film - not particularly
artistic by today's standards - set many milestones at the time:
it was the first narrative film with a storyline, the first
film shot out of chronological sequence and utilizing revolutionary
cross-cutting or parallel action, the first western (?) (Edison's
Cripple Creek BarRoom Scene may actually be the first), and
the first real motion picture smash hit. In an effective, scary
closeup (placed at either the beginning or at the end of the
film), a bandit shot directly into the audience.
Porter
also developed the process of film editing - a crucial film
technique that would further the cinematic art. Most early films
were not much more than short, filmed stage productions. In
the early days of film-making, actors were usually unidentified
workers.
The earliest actors in movies, that were dubbed "flickers,"
supplemented their stage incomes by acting in moving pictures.
Nickelodeons:
Motion pictures were soon becoming an entertainment medium,
and one could spend an evening at the cinema for a nickel. The
normal admission charge was a nickel (sometimes a dime). [Sherlock
Holmes made his screen debut in a film entitled Sherlock Holmes
Baffled (1903).]
The first nickelodeon, a small storefront theater to view films
-
the first permanent movie theatre, was opened in Pittsburgh
by Harry Davis in June of 1905, showing The Great Train Robbery.
Urban, foreign-born audiences loved the cheap form of entertainment
- a short, silent film was usually accompanied with piano playing,
songs, lectures, other kinds of slide shows or vaudeville-type
acts. But newspaper critics soon denounced movies as morally
objectionable and as the cause of social unrest - and they called
for censorship.
D.W. Griffith: Early Film Pioneer
The greatest American pioneer/auteur in film was D.W. Griffith,
"the father of film," the first cinematic storyteller. An unsuccessful
actor, he had appeared in Edwin S. Porter's Rescued From the
Eagle's Nest (1907) and other one-reelers. Inspired by the experience,
Griffith joined Biograph as a director in 1908 and went on to
directing over 60 short films the following year.
Griffith's first two films, released by Biograph in 1908, were
titled The Adventures of Dollie and The Fatal Hour. In many
of these short films, he experimented with early techniques
(closeups, establishing shots, medium shots, etc.) that he would
later bring to perfection. Inventing the language of cinema,
he used the camera and film in new, more functional ways with
composed shots, camera movement, split-screens, flashbacks,
cross-cutting (showing two simultaneous actions that build toward
a climax), fades, irises, intercutting, parallel editing, dissolves,
changing camera angles, soft-focus, lens filters, and experimental/artificial
lighting and shading/tinting. At the time, they were innovative
cinematic techniques that we now take for granted. He also trained
and created his own company of 'players' - including such future
stars as Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, and Lionel Barrymore.
Griffith went on to direct hundreds of films at Biograph over
the next few years.
