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History of Motion Pictures
I INTRODUCTION
History of Motion Pictures, historical development of the visual medium known as motion pictures, film, cinema, or the movies. This article covers the mediumâs history as a technology, as a business, as an art form, and as a means of delivering entertainment and information to audiences in theaters and at home. It discusses major filmmakers and their films, principal fiction and nonfiction genres, and film industries in the United States and throughout the world. For more information on the technical aspects involved in creating a film, see Motion Picture.
II ORIGINS
In the early 19th century scientists took note of a visual phenomenon: A sequence of individual still pictures, when set in motion, can give the illusion of movement. These scientists attributed this experience to what they called persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. The eyeâs retention of a visual image, now known as positive afterimage, has long been considered a founding principle of motion pictures, even though its relationship to the perception of motion is still not well understood.
A Early Experiments
The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.
Inventors began to conceive of combining the principles of these moving-image devices with the photographic recording of actual movement soon after the development of still photography in the 1830s. The most famous experiment occurred in the 1870s in California, where railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a racetrack and spread threads across the track with a contact to each cameraâs shutter. Moving along the track, the horse broke the threads and caused a sequence of photographs to be taken. The photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground, and Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope.
Muybridgeâs endeavors stimulated French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to devise equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. He built what he called a chronophotographic camera that could take multiple images superimposed on one another. His work was aided in turn by developments in photographic materials. In 1885 American inventor George Eastman introduced sensitized paper roll âfilmâ in place of the individual glass plates then in use. In 1889 Eastman replaced the paper roll with celluloid, a synthetic plastic material coated with a gelatin emulsion.
B Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson
Legendary American inventor Thomas Alva Edison drew upon the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman when he turned his attention to motion pictures in the late 1880s. In his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison assigned to a British employee, William K. L. Dickson, the task of constructing a machine for recording actual movement on film and another machine for viewing the resulting images. By 1891 Dickson had produced a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, dubbed the Kinetoscope.
The Kinetograph was operated by an electric motor that moved the celluloid film roll past the camera lens. Motor-driven cameras, which were bulky and stationary, were soon replaced by movable hand-cranked cameras. Dicksonâs key contribution was a sprocket mechanism linked to the cameraâs shutter, which momentarily stopped the film roll for each exposure. These separate still photographic images came to be called frames. Early cameras used a number of different speeds for exposing frames, but by the advent of sound film in the late 1920s the standard had become 24 frames per second.
In early 1893 Edison constructed a motion-picture studio on his laboratory grounds, dubbed the Black Maria by his staff who thought it resembled police patrol wagons known by that nickname. On May 9, 1893, he held the first public exhibition of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. But only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope. This boxlike structure contained a motor-and-shutter mechanism similar to the cameraâs. It ran a loop of positive film past an electric light source, illuminating a tiny image, which the viewer observed through a small window. Kinetoscope viewing parlors containing many machines for individual viewing began to open in cities in 1894. Edison and Dickson apparently gave little thought to a single machine that could project moving images to a large audience, something Reynaud had achieved in his Théâtre Optique. Reynaud, however, had displayed drawings rather than images photographed by a motion-picture camera.
C The Lumière Brothers
In France, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who ran a factory in Lyons that manufactured photographic equipment, sought to improve on Edisonâs accomplishment. By 1895 they developed a lightweight, hand-held camera that used a claw mechanism to advance the film roll. They named it the Cinématographe, and they soon discovered that it could also be used to show large images on a screen, when linked with projecting equipment. Throughout 1895 they shot films and projected them for select groups. Their first screening for the general public was held in Paris in December 1895.
Elsewhere other inventors were also busy. In Germany, the brothers Emil and Max Skladanowsky devised an apparatus and projected films in Berlin in November 1895. In Britain, a machine developed by Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul was used to project films in London in January 1896. In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope was constructed around the same time by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat then entered into a commercial alliance with Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, and the device exhibited projected motion pictures in New York City in April 1896.
The Lumière brothers held a unique place among all these simultaneous efforts, since they were innovative filmmakers as well as inventors and manufacturers. The many films they made during 1895 and 1896, though very short, are considered pivotal in the history of motion pictures. Arroseur et arrosé (Waterer and Watered, 1896), a brief comedy drawn from a newspaper cartoon, shows a gardener getting drenched with a hose as the result of a boyâs prank. La sortie de lâusine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, 1895) and Arrivée dâun train en gare (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896), which shows a train coming to a station and passengers getting off, were among the so-called actuality filmsâfilms that depicted actual events rather than a story told by actorsâfor which the Lumières became noted.
III ONE-REELERS
During the decade following the advent of projected motion pictures, films were shown as part of vaudeville or variety programs, at carnivals and fairgrounds, in lecture halls and churches, and gradually in spaces converted for the exclusive exhibition of movies. Most films ran no longer than 10 to 12 minutes, which reflected the amount of film that could be wound on a standard reel for projection (hence the term one-reelers). Many were comedies or actualities, following the Lumière brothersâ example. Their purpose was spectacleâto show something astounding, unusual, titillating, or perhaps newsworthy. But filmmakers also struck out in new directions, especially toward fantasy and narrative.
French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès was the outstanding creator of fantasy films in early cinema. Méliès exploited the new medium to enhance his magic acts through techniques such as stop-motion photographyâinterrupting the cameraâs action and moving or substituting people and objectsâso that, for example, a woman appeared to turn into a skeleton. He created elaborate backdrops with multiple scenes and costume changes for these so-called trick films that were widely emulated by other filmmakers. Of the hundreds of works he made between 1896 and 1912, perhaps the best-known is Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), which in one scene features the animated human face of the moon being struck in the eye by a rocket.
In the United States, a former projectionist and traveling exhibitor, Edwin S. Porter, took charge of motion-picture production at Edisonâs company in 1901 and began making longer films that told a story. As with Mélièsâs films, these required multiple shots that could be edited into a narrative sequence. Porterâs most notable filmâand the most famous work of early cinemaâwas The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is credited with establishing movies as a commercial entertainment medium. With its rapid shifts of location, including action on a moving train, this film offered spectators a breadth and immediacy of vision that became hallmarks of the cinema experience.
Spurred by The Great Train Robbery and subsequent story films, film exhibition greatly expanded in the United States around 1905. One phenomenon was the proliferation of nickelodeon theaters, converted storefronts in industrial cities that charged 5 cents for admission and attracted working-class audiences. Demand from these theaters increased the volume of film production and the profits for producers, but it also brought forth criticism from reformers concerning unsanitary or unsafe conditions in theaters and immoral subject matter in films. In 1908 Edison took the lead in establishing the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a consortium of producers with common goals: controlling production and distribution so as to eliminate cheap theaters, raising admission prices, cooperating with censorship bodies, and preventing film stock from getting into the hands of nonmember producers. However, the independent producers excluded from the MPPC continued to obtain materials and make the most popular films. They also led the way toward multireel, feature-length films. By 1915 the MPPC was under attack by the U.S. government as an illegal monopoly (although an ineffectual one), and the independents were combining into the companies that would dominate American filmmaking for decades to come.
IV SILENT MOVIES
With a few experimental exceptions, motion pictures from their earliest days until the late 1920s lacked synchronous sound (sound that matches the action). But silent movies were rarely silent. Early films almost always were projected with piano or organ accompaniment, and sometimes also with a narrator or live actors behind the screen. As feature-length films (four reels, with a running time of 40 to 50 minutes or more) became the norm in the 1910s, live orchestras began to play in larger theaters, frequently using music written specifically for the film.
Until World War I (1914-1918) European filmmakers dominated the world film market. France was considered the leading film-producing country, though Italy, Denmark, and other countries also played a significant role. However, the war, fought on European soil, disrupted commercial filmmaking there. With a sudden drop in European film exports, some regions, such as Latin America, experienced a brief surge in film production. But U.S. companies soon took over markets overseas, using the same tactics of high-volume production and lower prices that the Europeans had. By the 1920s some three-quarters of films screened around the world came from the United States.
A American Silent Movies
Even before the war, the United States had made its mark on the world filmmaking scene with epics and comedies. Moreover, U.S. moviemakers had begun to congregate in southern California in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood (see The Move to Hollywood, below), creating a film community apart from older urban centers of politics and the arts, and a magical new symbol for popular entertainment and glamour.
A1 D. W. Griffith
The work of D. W. Griffith exemplifies the transformation of motion pictures from the early days of one-reelers to an era of Hollywoodâs worldwide dominance. Starting out as an actor in films directed by Edwin S. Porter, Griffith in 1908 became a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. He was initially responsible for turning out two one-reel films a week, and between 1908 and 1913 he directed nearly 500 films. Amidst this breakneck schedule, he and his co-workers developed many of the cinemaâs basic storytelling conventions: moving the camera close to the action, using many separate shots, and editing the shots to cut back and forth among different actions. All these techniques served to shape a narrative, rather than present a spectacle as earlier films had tended to do. Griffith also nurtured performers such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish and emphasized an intimate, restrained style of acting suitable for camera close-ups.
Leaving Biograph in 1913 to make full-length features, Griffith planned a historical epic of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Birth of a Nation (1915), three hours in length, stunned audiences with its dazzling spectacle of a still-recent event and established motion pictures as an art form for cultured spectators. Yet the filmâs racist presumptionsâspecifically, its defense of white supremacy to protect racial purityâwas controversial in its own time and remains repugnant decades later. Griffith made another epic, Intolerance (1916), which intertwined four stories about victims of prejudice, and continued to work as an independent filmmaker into the 1920s. Eventually, financial pressures forced him to become a director at a Hollywood studio, and he made his last film in 1931.
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I INTRODUCTION
History of Motion Pictures, historical development of the visual medium known as motion pictures, film, cinema, or the movies. This article covers the mediumâs history as a technology, as a business, as an art form, and as a means of delivering entertainment and information to audiences in theaters and at home. It discusses major filmmakers and their films, principal fiction and nonfiction genres, and film industries in the United States and throughout the world. For more information on the technical aspects involved in creating a film, see Motion Picture.
II ORIGINS
In the early 19th century scientists took note of a visual phenomenon: A sequence of individual still pictures, when set in motion, can give the illusion of movement. These scientists attributed this experience to what they called persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. The eyeâs retention of a visual image, now known as positive afterimage, has long been considered a founding principle of motion pictures, even though its relationship to the perception of motion is still not well understood.
A Early Experiments
The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.
Inventors began to conceive of combining the principles of these moving-image devices with the photographic recording of actual movement soon after the development of still photography in the 1830s. The most famous experiment occurred in the 1870s in California, where railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a racetrack and spread threads across the track with a contact to each cameraâs shutter. Moving along the track, the horse broke the threads and caused a sequence of photographs to be taken. The photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground, and Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope.
Muybridgeâs endeavors stimulated French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to devise equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. He built what he called a chronophotographic camera that could take multiple images superimposed on one another. His work was aided in turn by developments in photographic materials. In 1885 American inventor George Eastman introduced sensitized paper roll âfilmâ in place of the individual glass plates then in use. In 1889 Eastman replaced the paper roll with celluloid, a synthetic plastic material coated with a gelatin emulsion.
B Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson
Legendary American inventor Thomas Alva Edison drew upon the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman when he turned his attention to motion pictures in the late 1880s. In his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison assigned to a British employee, William K. L. Dickson, the task of constructing a machine for recording actual movement on film and another machine for viewing the resulting images. By 1891 Dickson had produced a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, dubbed the Kinetoscope.
The Kinetograph was operated by an electric motor that moved the celluloid film roll past the camera lens. Motor-driven cameras, which were bulky and stationary, were soon replaced by movable hand-cranked cameras. Dicksonâs key contribution was a sprocket mechanism linked to the cameraâs shutter, which momentarily stopped the film roll for each exposure. These separate still photographic images came to be called frames. Early cameras used a number of different speeds for exposing frames, but by the advent of sound film in the late 1920s the standard had become 24 frames per second.
In early 1893 Edison constructed a motion-picture studio on his laboratory grounds, dubbed the Black Maria by his staff who thought it resembled police patrol wagons known by that nickname. On May 9, 1893, he held the first public exhibition of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. But only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope. This boxlike structure contained a motor-and-shutter mechanism similar to the cameraâs. It ran a loop of positive film past an electric light source, illuminating a tiny image, which the viewer observed through a small window. Kinetoscope viewing parlors containing many machines for individual viewing began to open in cities in 1894. Edison and Dickson apparently gave little thought to a single machine that could project moving images to a large audience, something Reynaud had achieved in his Théâtre Optique. Reynaud, however, had displayed drawings rather than images photographed by a motion-picture camera.
C The Lumière Brothers
In France, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who ran a factory in Lyons that manufactured photographic equipment, sought to improve on Edisonâs accomplishment. By 1895 they developed a lightweight, hand-held camera that used a claw mechanism to advance the film roll. They named it the Cinématographe, and they soon discovered that it could also be used to show large images on a screen, when linked with projecting equipment. Throughout 1895 they shot films and projected them for select groups. Their first screening for the general public was held in Paris in December 1895.
Elsewhere other inventors were also busy. In Germany, the brothers Emil and Max Skladanowsky devised an apparatus and projected films in Berlin in November 1895. In Britain, a machine developed by Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul was used to project films in London in January 1896. In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope was constructed around the same time by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat then entered into a commercial alliance with Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, and the device exhibited projected motion pictures in New York City in April 1896.
The Lumière brothers held a unique place among all these simultaneous efforts, since they were innovative filmmakers as well as inventors and manufacturers. The many films they made during 1895 and 1896, though very short, are considered pivotal in the history of motion pictures. Arroseur et arrosé (Waterer and Watered, 1896), a brief comedy drawn from a newspaper cartoon, shows a gardener getting drenched with a hose as the result of a boyâs prank. La sortie de lâusine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, 1895) and Arrivée dâun train en gare (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896), which shows a train coming to a station and passengers getting off, were among the so-called actuality filmsâfilms that depicted actual events rather than a story told by actorsâfor which the Lumières became noted.
III ONE-REELERS
During the decade following the advent of projected motion pictures, films were shown as part of vaudeville or variety programs, at carnivals and fairgrounds, in lecture halls and churches, and gradually in spaces converted for the exclusive exhibition of movies. Most films ran no longer than 10 to 12 minutes, which reflected the amount of film that could be wound on a standard reel for projection (hence the term one-reelers). Many were comedies or actualities, following the Lumière brothersâ example. Their purpose was spectacleâto show something astounding, unusual, titillating, or perhaps newsworthy. But filmmakers also struck out in new directions, especially toward fantasy and narrative.
French magician and filmmaker Georges Méliès was the outstanding creator of fantasy films in early cinema. Méliès exploited the new medium to enhance his magic acts through techniques such as stop-motion photographyâinterrupting the cameraâs action and moving or substituting people and objectsâso that, for example, a woman appeared to turn into a skeleton. He created elaborate backdrops with multiple scenes and costume changes for these so-called trick films that were widely emulated by other filmmakers. Of the hundreds of works he made between 1896 and 1912, perhaps the best-known is Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902), which in one scene features the animated human face of the moon being struck in the eye by a rocket.
In the United States, a former projectionist and traveling exhibitor, Edwin S. Porter, took charge of motion-picture production at Edisonâs company in 1901 and began making longer films that told a story. As with Mélièsâs films, these required multiple shots that could be edited into a narrative sequence. Porterâs most notable filmâand the most famous work of early cinemaâwas The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is credited with establishing movies as a commercial entertainment medium. With its rapid shifts of location, including action on a moving train, this film offered spectators a breadth and immediacy of vision that became hallmarks of the cinema experience.
Spurred by The Great Train Robbery and subsequent story films, film exhibition greatly expanded in the United States around 1905. One phenomenon was the proliferation of nickelodeon theaters, converted storefronts in industrial cities that charged 5 cents for admission and attracted working-class audiences. Demand from these theaters increased the volume of film production and the profits for producers, but it also brought forth criticism from reformers concerning unsanitary or unsafe conditions in theaters and immoral subject matter in films. In 1908 Edison took the lead in establishing the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC), a consortium of producers with common goals: controlling production and distribution so as to eliminate cheap theaters, raising admission prices, cooperating with censorship bodies, and preventing film stock from getting into the hands of nonmember producers. However, the independent producers excluded from the MPPC continued to obtain materials and make the most popular films. They also led the way toward multireel, feature-length films. By 1915 the MPPC was under attack by the U.S. government as an illegal monopoly (although an ineffectual one), and the independents were combining into the companies that would dominate American filmmaking for decades to come.
IV SILENT MOVIES
With a few experimental exceptions, motion pictures from their earliest days until the late 1920s lacked synchronous sound (sound that matches the action). But silent movies were rarely silent. Early films almost always were projected with piano or organ accompaniment, and sometimes also with a narrator or live actors behind the screen. As feature-length films (four reels, with a running time of 40 to 50 minutes or more) became the norm in the 1910s, live orchestras began to play in larger theaters, frequently using music written specifically for the film.
Until World War I (1914-1918) European filmmakers dominated the world film market. France was considered the leading film-producing country, though Italy, Denmark, and other countries also played a significant role. However, the war, fought on European soil, disrupted commercial filmmaking there. With a sudden drop in European film exports, some regions, such as Latin America, experienced a brief surge in film production. But U.S. companies soon took over markets overseas, using the same tactics of high-volume production and lower prices that the Europeans had. By the 1920s some three-quarters of films screened around the world came from the United States.
A American Silent Movies
Even before the war, the United States had made its mark on the world filmmaking scene with epics and comedies. Moreover, U.S. moviemakers had begun to congregate in southern California in the Los Angeles suburb of Hollywood (see The Move to Hollywood, below), creating a film community apart from older urban centers of politics and the arts, and a magical new symbol for popular entertainment and glamour.
A1 D. W. Griffith
The work of D. W. Griffith exemplifies the transformation of motion pictures from the early days of one-reelers to an era of Hollywoodâs worldwide dominance. Starting out as an actor in films directed by Edwin S. Porter, Griffith in 1908 became a director at the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company in New York City. He was initially responsible for turning out two one-reel films a week, and between 1908 and 1913 he directed nearly 500 films. Amidst this breakneck schedule, he and his co-workers developed many of the cinemaâs basic storytelling conventions: moving the camera close to the action, using many separate shots, and editing the shots to cut back and forth among different actions. All these techniques served to shape a narrative, rather than present a spectacle as earlier films had tended to do. Griffith also nurtured performers such as Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish and emphasized an intimate, restrained style of acting suitable for camera close-ups.
Leaving Biograph in 1913 to make full-length features, Griffith planned a historical epic of the American Civil War (1861-1865). The Birth of a Nation (1915), three hours in length, stunned audiences with its dazzling spectacle of a still-recent event and established motion pictures as an art form for cultured spectators. Yet the filmâs racist presumptionsâspecifically, its defense of white supremacy to protect racial purityâwas controversial in its own time and remains repugnant decades later. Griffith made another epic, Intolerance (1916), which intertwined four stories about victims of prejudice, and continued to work as an independent filmmaker into the 1920s. Eventually, financial pressures forced him to become a director at a Hollywood studio, and he made his last film in 1931.
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