History of film
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Origins of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences
Any overview of the history of cinema would be remiss to fail to at least mention a long history of literature, storytelling, narrative drama, art, mythology, puppetry, shadow play, cave paintings and perhaps even dreams. For the purposes of this article the history of cinema begins with formative technological and artistic developments and achievements that led to the modern art of movies.
Protean developments
- About 2,500 years before the present - Mo-Ti a Chinese philosopher ponders the phenomenology of an upside down image of the outside world beaming through a small hole in the opposite wall in a darkened room.
- c. 350 BCE - Aristotle tells of watching an image of an eclipse beamed onto the ground through a sieve.
- c. 1000 - Alhazen experiments with the same optical principle, and writes of the results.
- 1490 - Leonardo DaVinci describes a structure that would produce this effect.
- 1544 - Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, a Dutch scientist, illustrates large rooms built for the purpose of viewing eclipses by this means.
- 1588 - Giovanni Battista Della Porta tips off artists to this trick.
- c. 1610 - Johannes Kepler refers to a construction that utilises this phenomena as a camera obscura.
- 1671 - Athanasius Kircher projected images painted on glass plates with an oil lamp and a lens, his Magic Lantern.
- 1824 - Thaumatrope
- 1831 - Faraday's Law of electromagnetic induction.
- 1820's - Joseph Plateau: Anorthoscope; Phenakistiscope. Spindle viewers.
- 1834 - The Zoetrope(US), a.k.a. , the Daedalum (England).
Victorian Cinema (1870's-1901)
- 1872 -Eadweard Muybridge designs the zoopraxiscope. French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen develops a camera with a revolving photographic plate that makes exposures at regular, automatic intervals.
- 1877 - Muybridge begins experimenting with “serial photography” (or “chronophotography”), taking multiple exposed images of a running horse (see main Muybridge article).
- 1878 - George Eastman manufactures photographic dry plates the same year Thomas Edison invents the first electric incandescent light bulb, archaicly known as a magic lantern.
- 1880 - Muybridge begins projecting his studies of figures in motion.
- 1881 - Louis Lumiere develops a "dry plate" process with gelatin emulsion.
- 1882 -Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, makes a series of photographs of birds in flight. Hannibal Goodwin sells an idea to George Eastman, who markets it as "American film" : a roll of paper coated with emulsion.
- 1886 - Louis Le Prince patented his process for "the successive production of objects in motion by means of a projector"
- 1887 - Ottomar Anschütz creates the electrotachyscope, which presents the illusion of motion with transparent chronophotography.
- 1889 - William Friese Greene developed the first "moving pictures" on celluloid film, exposing 20 feet of film at Hyde Park, London. George Eastman improves on his paper roll film, substituting the paper with plastic.
- 1890 - Friese Greene patents his process, but was unable to finance manufacturing of it, and later sold his patent. [1]
- 1891 - Edison patents the Kinetoscopic camera invented by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, which takes moving pictures on a strip of film (this was one of many inventions for which Edison claimed credit). A lighted box was used to view the pictures, the viewer was required to turned a handle to see the pictures “move”. First called "arcade peepshows", these were to soon be known as nickelodeons. Fred Ott's Sneeze is the first Kinetographic film.
- 1892 - Peter Mark Roget explains Psychovisual principles to the world in by in his paper "Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects" which demonstrates that a flashed image remains in visual memory longer than the flash itself.
- 1893 - Edison Laboratories builds a film studio, in West Orange, New Jersey, dubbed the Black Maria. It was built on a turntable so the window could rotate toward the sun throughout the day, supplying natural light for the productions.
- 1894 - Louis Lumiere invents the cinematograph a single-unit camera, developer, and movie projector. Kinetoscopes, meanwhile, were popular and profitable.
- 1895 - The Arrival of a Train premiered on a large screen December 28 at the Grand Cafe in Paris, France. Louis and his brother Auguste Lumiere also filmed Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory that year, while in the US Woodville Latham combined a Kinetoscope with a projecting device. People were avidly watching nickelodeons on Broadway in New York City.
- 1896 - Edison loses W. K. Dickson who joins with other inventors and investors to form the American Mutoscope Company. The company manufactured the mutoscope as a rival to the Kinetoscope and, like Edison, produced films for its invention. Expanding on the idea, American Mutoscope then developed the "biograph" which was a projector allowing films to be shown in theatres to a large audience rather than in single-user nickelodeons. Edison entered the competition for developmet of a large projector he called the Vitascope. This year also debuted the work of first female film director, Alice Guy-Blaché’s The Cabbage Fairy. Vitascope Hall in New Orleans opened in June of this year.
- 1897 - US President William McKinley's inauguration was filmed, the first US newsreel. In England the Prestwich Camera is patented.
- 1899 - With the success of the biograph, American Mutoscope changed it’s name to American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In England Edward R. Turner and F. Marshall Lee create chronophotographic images through red, green and blue filters and project them with together with a three-lens projector.
- 1900 - Synchronized sound was first demonstrated in at the Paris Exposition with a sound-on-disc system.
The Early Days (1901-1919)
- 1902 - The Charles Urban Trading Company was founded by Charles Urban, an American, in England. The company produced original films and distributed films made by the Lumiere brothers and Georges Méliès throughout Europe. Méliès filmed a mock coronation of Edward VII and it was presented in theaters the same night as the actual ceremony. Léon Gaumont begins experimenting with the possibilities of sound on film.
- 1903 - Edwin S. Porter produces The Great Train Robbery.
- 1906 - Eugene Lauste patents a sound-on-film process in London.
- 1909 - Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, (Le Voyage dans la Lune), premieres, the first science fiction film with extravagant special effects. George Albert Smith produced a processed two-color system using panchromatic stock in Brighton for the Charles Urban Trading Company, this was dubbed Kinemacolor. The first public presentation of Kinemacolor was in February in London, when a series of twenty short movies by the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company was shown at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.
- 1912 - Universal Pictures Company is founded by Carl Laemmle in Hollywood.
- 1914 - Charlie Chaplin charms audiences as “The Tramp.” Vaudeville begins to suffer from this redirected audience for entertainment, but early films soon became a new venue for many stage performers.
- 1919 - United Artists Corporation is collectively formed by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
1920-1929
- The 1920s represented the era of greatest output in the US movie market. An average of 800 films were produced annually. [3]
- While developments in color and sound were still in the experimental stage a strong demand for movies and, therefore, potential for profit, encouraged productions for the commercial release.
- The French model of commercial movie houses became the international model, and entrepreneurs scurried to build impressive movie houses across North America and Europe including theatres that sat up to 5,000 people.
- With many technical obstacles overcome, film as entertainment begain to blossom as an art form in the 1920's, a decade hearalded by art deco and German expressionism. Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin rose to stardom in this era, which also saw the premier of the first Walt Disney cartoon. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded in 1927 with the first "Oscar" given in 1929. The popularity of Horror movies is traced to this era with Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Abel Gance's Napoleon was one movie presented on three screens simultaneously, a hallmark of epic filmmaking and film editing that was to presage large format film such as VistaVision and Cinerama of later decades.
- Sound technology, recording and playback, were slow in development and the 1920's would be largely dominated by silent features, sometimes musically accompanied by in in-house organist or pianist. By the latter half of the decade, new innovation is audio allowed theatrical release of The Jazz Singer (1927), featuring Al Jolson. 1928 saw Disney's Steamboat Willie, the first film with entirely post-produced dialogue, sound effects and score. The first all-out Hollywood musical, The Broadway Melody, came to theatres in (1929).
- 1922 - The Motion Picture Producers and Distributers of America is created by Will H. Hays to serve as Hollywood’s public relations firm.
- 1924 - Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is founded by Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer .
The Golden Age
"The First Golden Age" of film roughly refers to the period immediately prior to The Great Depression until the middle of WWII. This was the heyday of the Hollywood studio system with tremendous output from Universal, MGM, Columbia, UA, RKO, Paramount Studios, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Brothers.
Depression Era Film
- Dracula and Frankenstein incarnated into their silver screen depictions in 1931. King Kong premiered in 1933. Howard Hughes produces The Front Page in 1931. Disney released several short animations in the beginning of the decade, including the first three-color Technicolor production in 1932. Five years later, the first full-length animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, made its debut.
- Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both in 1939) exemplify the advancements made in the industry over the previous decade. Pinocchio, Fantasia (both 1940). Fantasia, in addition to being an unusually ambitious animated feature, is also particularly notable for Fantasound, a project that incubated significant developments in film sound, branching into SMPTE and Dolby.
Film Noir
See main article, Film noir.
- Genre films became popular in the 1930s: westerns, comedies, musicals, dramas and cartoons. Gangster movies whose characters and stark lighting launched a new stylistic approach to the hardboiled genres: Film noir. Suspicion, (1941), and Saboteur, (1942) were Alfred Hitchcock's contributions to the style.Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart (who would star in 36 films between 1934 and (1942) including John Huston's The Maltese Falcon, (1941). Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, (1941) andBambi, (1942) are other examples of late-Depression filmmaking.
The War Years (c. 1941-1946)
- The industry and audiences turned away from dark gangster tales with the onset of the US involvement with WWII, lighter fare offered more escapism. also came a proliferation of movies as both patriotism and propaganda. Notable films from the war years include the anti-Nazi Watch on the Rhine (1943), scripted by Dashiell Hammett; Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Hitchcock's direction of a script by Thornton Wilder; and the George M. Cohan biopic, Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney.1945 saw Universal's hit It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra. Samuel Fuller's experiences in WWII would influence his largely autobiographical films of later decades such as The Big Red One.
The 1950's
- The cold war era zeitgeist translated into a paranoia manifested in themes such as invading armies of evil aliens, (Invasion of the Body Snatchers); and communist fifth columnists, (Manchurian Candidate). Living rooms, meanwhile, were being invaded by television. Cinemascope, VistaVision, Cinerama, boasted a “bigger is better” approach to marketing movies to a shrinking US audience. The "Studio System" slumped, spurring the self-commentary of the 1950 film, Sunset Boulevard. Brown vs. Board of Education, (1954) set the stage for The Blackboard Jungle, (1955). TV productions were notable, e.g. the Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, (1953) was produced for television before the 1955 big screen version. Some directors would refine their styles for TV. House Committee on Un-American Activities investigated Hollywood without regard to United States Constitution. Protested by the Hollywood Ten before the comittee resulted in the blacklisting of many actors, writers and directors including Chayefsky and Dalton Trumbo. Disney's Sleeping Beauty was released on January 29, 1959 by Buena Vista Distribution after nearly a decade in production.
The Post-Classical Era
- Post-classical cinema is defined by new approaches to drama and characterization that played upon audience expectations aquired in the classical/Golden Age period. Heros became mortal, storylines featured “twist endings”, lines between the antagonist and protagonist were blurred. Audiences were kept off-balance. It is impossible to pinpoint exactly when the “post-classical era” began, film noir pointed in this direction, as did 1955s Rebel Without a Cause, and many other examples. 1960 is a good approximation, notable for Hitchcock’s storyline shattering Psycho.
The Independents
- Stanley Kubrick
- John Cassavetes
- Sam Peckinpah
- Francis Ford Coppola THX-1138
- Brian DePalma
- Roman Polanski’s Rosemary's Baby
The Underground
Rated X Melvin Van Peebles Dark Star Easy Rider
The Second Golden Age
The 80's: Sequels, Blockbusters and Videotape
- The shift that occurred in the 1980s from seeing movies in a theater to watching videos on a VCR, is a move close to the original concepts of Thomas Edison. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. That proved most fortunate, however, as the sale and rental of their movies on home video became a significant source of revenue for the movie companies. Bollywood THX Ltd, a division of Lucasfilm launched 1982. [4] Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull, 1980; After Hours, 1985; King of Comedy,1983.
The 90's: Technical Advances
- Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Influence of Comics. Smoke, 1995. In the 1990's, cinema began the process of making another transition, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology. Pixar, The Matrix.
The New Millenium
- Media branching as in Peter Greenaways The Tulse Luper Suitcases takes advantage of high definition television. Interactivity of Playstation, &, Grand Theft Auto relationship w/cinema: actors, soundtrack, narrative structure. the Superhero , Tomb Raider, Spider-Man. Faster edits. home theatre. Future: Problems of digital distribution to be overcome -- higher compression, cheaper technology. Content security. Expiration of copyrights, enforcing copyright.
References
- The Oxford History of World Cinema, Oxford University Press, 1999; Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed.
- Glorious Technicolor: The Movies’ Magic Rainbow, Fred E. Basten. AS Barnes & Company, 1980
- New Hollywood Cinema: An Introduction, Geoff King . Columbia University Press, 2002.
- "Notes on Film Noir" Paul Schrader. Film Comment. '84?
Digital Video
- Glorious Technicolor (1998); Directed by Peter Jones. Based on the book (above); written by Basten & Jones. Documentary.