The History of Motion Picture

Have you ever thought about how spoiled we are today with all these technological advancements? Thinking about how much entertainment we get today through various platforms makes me so grateful for living in the 21st century, when us, the audience, are more spoiled than ever before. Can you believe that movies came to life just a little over 100 years ago?

The cinema was the first and the greatest industrialized form of art, dominating the social and cultural life of the 20th century. The documentarist Paul Rotha named the cinema “the unresolved equation between art and industry”. But how motion picture and cinema came to life?

By the 17th century, the world was establishing the beginnings of mass communication, and the development of society, with books, newspapers, and magazines was widely spreading literacy among the middle class. The industrial revolution brought more cash and more leisure time, and people were ready to embrace entertainment at its full.

Some consider the ancient puppet shows held in Rome and Asia, as the first forms of entertainment, and, later on, a source of inspiration for movies. But when I was looking into the beginnings of film industry I wanted a more scientific answer, as cinema relies on science. I’m not a tech girl, actually I’m so away from being one, but whit this article I tried to combine what I learned in school about the movie industry with some cross reference, and, the more I was reading, the harder to understand it became. But here is a simple timeline of the most crucial inventions that led to the birth of filmmaking and cinematography.

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THE ORIGINS

Filmmaking has its origins in photography. Without pictures could have never been the motion pictures. The research gives credit to the famous photographer Edward Muybridge for establishing the origins of film and motion pictures at the end of 19th century. In 1872 he began an experiment on capturing moving images by placing 12 cameras on a Sacramento’ racecourse; as the horse sprinted by, each camera took its picture from different angles. His experiment took almost 6 years. To display these images, Muybridge invented a machine called zoopraxiscope, projecting them in sequence and creating the first motion pictures. Based on the persistence of vision, (the images we see are retained in the brain for 1/24 of a second), when people watched these projected images, changing rapidly in front of their eyes, they saw the pictures as like they were in motion. (Baron, 2010)

In 1885 the two inventors, George Eastman (the inventor of what later on became an easy-to-use Kodak camera) and Hannibal Goodwin (the inventor of celluloid roll film) put their efforts together into creating the first reel of film, (on sensitized paper, which later had been replaced by celluloid). Based on these inventions, William Dickenson, (Thomas Edison’ best scientist), developed 2 of the biggest inventions in the history of filmmaking: the kinetograph and the kinetoscope. The kinetograph was a machine similar to a camera that could capture automatically a sequence of moving images every 1/2 second. Then after, these images were placed on his kinetoscope, (a kind of peep show device to watch these images, with a motor and a shutter, that ran a loop of film).

The 19th century was the time of the most numerous scientific inventions, and Thomas Edison is the biggest inventor of them all; (well, not himself per se, but his scientific team). After inventing the phonograph in 1877, the most popular home-entertainment device of the century, he started experimenting ideas of including imagines to accompany the sound. And this is how he had Dickenson developing the motion picture. Even though so many called him “The Father of Motion Picture”, Thomas Edison can’t take all the credit for inventing it, but he is the one who put together the pieces of the puzzle, opening the first motion picture studio in 1893 in New Jersey named Black Maria, and the first kinetoscope parlor, (the first type of movie theatre) on April 14, 1894, at 1155 Broadway, New York City. The kinetoscope rapidly became popular, marking the beginnings of commercial motion picture exhibition.

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The Cinematographe - the beginnings of a new era

Lumière Cinematographe, 1895 (Credit: SSPL/Getty Images)

1895 seems to be a crucial date in the timeline of motion picture. This is when The Lumière brothers have invented the first motion picture camera, the Cinematographe, the machine that stands at the foundation of the modern motion picture history. But, if others had experimented with similar theories, and had developed similar machines prior to 1895, how the Lumière brothers’ invention was so much different? Well, because the device they created, the Cinematographe, was multifunctional: a portable motion-picture camera, a film processing unit, and a projector.

Inspired by Edison’s kinetoscope, (the device that allowed one person at a time to watch moving images), the Lumière brothers began experimenting on how to combine film recording and projection into one single device, and allow more people to watch moving images in the same time. After years of research and experiments, the French brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière developed the Cinematographe, that had lent its name later on to a new form of art and entertainment at a bigger scale: cinema. A smaller and lighter device than the kinetoscope, The Cinématographe photographed and projected film way slower than Edison’s device (16 frames per second, versus Edison’s 48 frames per second), so it was less noisy and easier to operate, and it used less film.

The now famous French brothers shot footage of their workers, and named it “La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière” (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”), which is considered to be the very first motion picture, exposed at an industrial meeting in Paris in March 1895, but on a small and private scale. The research identifies December 28, 1895 as their first official public screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris.

In early 1896, they began opening Cinématographe theaters in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York, and the movie industry boom began, which we will discuss in a next chapter.