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)".
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Click here for The Great Train Robbery(2 minutes) (Real Player Required) |
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.
Bibliography:
http://www.precinemahistory.net/
http://www.filmsite.org/
http://www.wildwestweb.net
The Oxford History of World Cinema
Cinema: A Year by Year History of the movies
Documentary: A History of the non-fiction film
History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope...
Thomas A. Edison and His Kinetographic...
Video:
Great Train Robbery & Other Primary
(1903)
Video:
Father of Film Set - D.W. Griffith
