- Carl Jung is quoted as saying,
"The cinema, like the detective story,
makes it possible to experience without danger,
or the excitement,
passion, and desirousness which must be repressed
in a humanitarian ordering of life."
Since its inception in the late 19th century,
cinema has become one of the most popular
and inspiring forms of entertainment,
art, education, and propaganda.
The birth of cinema is one of many interconnecting events
and inventions around the world, born out of an array technology
revolving around machinery, photography, optical illusion,
and a human love to be entertained and inspired.
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- One of the marvels of cinema
is that no one country can claim its paternity,
and it is a worldwide endeavor,
encompassing many different people from around the globe.
It was in 1824, in England,
that Peter Mark Roget first came up with an explanation
for how moving images create the illusion of motion.
Although later proven to be incorrect,
this principle is known as a persistence of vision.
This, simply defined, is when a series of pictures,
or frames, are played or presented at a rate fast enough
to trick the human mind
into thinking it is viewing a moving image.
The effect of the persistence of vision,
the writer David Parkinson notes,
was defined in 1824 by Peter Mark Roget
as the ability of the retina to retain an image
of an object from 1/20th to 1/5th of a second
after its removal from the field of vision.
However, it has since been shown that film seems to move
because the brain, and not the eye, is accepting stimuli
that it is incapable of perceiving as separate.
The brain has a perception threshold
below which images exposed to it will appear as continuous.
And film's speed of 24 frames per second
is below that threshold,
thus making cinema, itself, a strange art form
for it is primarily an illusion.
It is a mystery as to when it was first noticed
that putting images next to each other
and viewing them in quick succession
created the illusion of a moving image.
Around A.D. 180, the Chinese inventor Ding Huan,
of which no known picture exists,
is credited with inventing a device
to utilize its effect for entertainment.
This invention is called the zoetrope.
A zoetrope is basically a cylinder
with various slits in it.
A sequence of pictures that link to each other
are drawn or placed inside the cylinder,
and through the slits you can view inside the illusion
of motion when the cylinder is spun.
This principle laid the ground work for later developments
in using photographic images to create motion images,
or to give it its technical term: cinematography.
Motion images are one part
of the founding principles of cinema,
but key to its development was the projection
of images and shapes.
The origins of light-projected images
date back to the puppets of China, India, and Java.
It was not until around the 17th century
that light-projected imagery would start to become popular
in Europe in North America.
And it was a magic lantern that captivated people's attention.
The magic lantern was used as a form of entertainment,
starting as early as the 15th century,
and its first incarnation may even
date back as far as the time of King Solomon.
Its precise origins are a mystery
and no original inventor is known of.
The magic lantern itself is simply a lantern,
which its light source, usually created by a wick,
a candle, is used to project a single slide or shape
on to a wall or flat surface. The magic lantern relates
directly to the modern day slide projector
and only contributed in part to the development of cinema,
albeit an important one.
Various enhancements of this technology included using
a magic lantern to project motion images
from a zoetrope that's building the ground work
for cinematic film projection.
It was developments in light-projected
entertainment technology
that were to be used in the newly developing
science of photography
to establish what we know as cinematography.
The history of photography is also one of complex inventions
and discoveries around the world.
The very first developments in photography
and optics originated thousands of years ago.
Aristotle wrote and developed ideas of how human vision works
and studied rays of light.
He used a pinhole camera, or camera obscura,
so he could study light rays.
Aristotle was one of the first people known
to study light using a camera obscura,
although its invention has not been accredited
to one single person,
and its original development remains a mystery.
The camera obscura is basically a box with a small pinhole
that allows a thin ray of light into the box.
This ray of light can be viewed as an image
if the camera obscura is adapted to pick up
the reflection using a mirror or shiny surface.
Ibn Al-Haytham, who lived 965 A.D. to 1040 A.D.,
an Arab scholar who was born in Iraq,
further developed the camera obscura,
and noted that a single ray of light
that passed through the hole also carried the image reflected
from wherever the light was coming from,
and in this sense that light carries information.
This seemingly simple discovery was a revolutionary one
in the development in the history of how vision works.
And it is a principle that paved the way for the capturing
of photographic images for use in the pinhole camera.
Initially, the camera obscura was used
as a sketching aid by artists.
And it wasn't until around the 1820s
and the development of chemical photography,
that fixing the image became a reality,
and photography took its first steps
into the recognizable form that it is today.
As far back as the 13th century,
it was known that some chemicals darkened
or changed color when exposed to light.
Albertus Magnus, in the 13th century,
was one of the first people
to note that silver nitrate darkened when exposed to light.
In the 17th century,
Robert Boyle reported silver chloride turned black
after exposure to air,
although this was, in fact, sunlight.
In 1727 Johann Heinrich Schulze discovered that certain liquids
could be prepared that would change color
when exposed to light. At the end of the 18th century
and the beginning of the 19th century,
Thomas Wedgwood conducted experiments
where he captured silhouettes
of objects using paper covered with silver nitrate.
That's making him one of the first ever
pioneers of photography.
It was not until the work of two French inventors and scientists
that fixing a still image using chemical means became a reality.
They were Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre.
Working in conjunction they developed a process
to produce fixed images.
Unfortunately, Nicephore Niepce died
before the work was completed.
But by 1839, Daguerre had perfected the process
and it was announced at the French Academy of Sciences.
This process was called daguerreotype
and produced some of the very first photographic images.
This image taken in 1838, or early 1839,
was one of the first photos taken using
the daguerreotype process.
Its exposure time was about 10 minutes,
meaning a man standing still having his shoes cleaned
was the only person captured in the photo.
Daguerreotype type images were produced directly
onto a mirror polished silver plate bearing a coating
of silver halide particles deposited by iodine vapor.
But the images that were produced were very delicate
and could be destroyed by even the slightest handling.
In the year of 1839,
an English inventor called William Fox Talbot
had been working on his own type
of chemical photographic process.
This process called the calotype process was to greatly advance
a practical application of photography.
The calotype process created the method
of negative positive photographic images,
and this is a precursor to most photography processes
of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries,
making William Talbot a very important figure
in the history of photography and cinema.
The calotype process also allowed for photos
to be developed on paper;
that's allowing photography to be open to the masses.
And the same photo could be produced again and again
using the negative image.
In 1849, in France,
Joseph Plateau was one of the first
to suggest using a device called the phenakistoscope
to project photos.
This device, developed in 1839, was similar to the zoetrope
but more advanced.
Later, in 1877, a device called the praxinoscope
was created by Charles-Emile Reynaud.
This was another technological advancement from the zoetrope,
and in 1889, he created the Theatre Optique
using the praxinoscope not only to rotate images
but also, using an adapted magic lantern,
he projected these images on to a screen.
But the static photos used at the time
in such devices proved to be little better
than pictures in a way of recording action simultaneously
as it occurred was needed.
Two great innovators were to work in this field
and develop a process of series photography allowing
the capturing of multiple images in chronological order.
They were Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.
Eadweard Muybridge is most famous
for his sequence of photos of a horse race,
proving that a horse does lift all hooves
off the ground when it gallops.
This work was commissioned for a bet
by the governor of California, Leland Stanford.
Muybridge proved the governor correct in 1879
by using film that had fast exposure time
in a lineup of 12 cameras,
all taking single shots in quick succession
following the motion of the horse.
Muybridge then went on to develop the zoopraxiscope,
which cast onto a screen
the drawings made of his photographs.
Although this was projection,
it was a big step towards it.
In 1882, Etienne-Jules Marey adapted a device
called the photographic revolver to take a series of photos.
At first, a revolving plate was used to record
a dozen instantaneous images in the course of one second.
After various experimentations and adaptations,
Marey eventually turned to celluloid film developed
by the Eastman Kodak Company
to produce continuous strips of images.
Marey went on to produce numerous photo sequences,
and, although he did try, he was not able to develop
a projection device for moving photographic images.
It was a French inventor by the name of Louis Le Prince
who is recognized to have recorded the first ever
motion captured sequences in 1888.
The first short sequences of moving images ever filmed
were the "Roundhay Garden Scene"
and the Leeds Bridge scene,
These filmed scenes are recognized
as the first ever motion capture cinematography sequences.
However, it will forever remain a mystery
as to the success Le Prince may have gone to achieve
and what happened to him in 1890.
For in 1890, after seeing his brother,
he boarded a train in Dijon that was heading for Paris
where he would meet with friends and then go on to America,
where he was planning to patent his single lens camera.
But he never made it to Paris,
and his luggage, including his camera, was never found.
After extensive searches by the French police,
Scotland Yard, and Le Prince's family,
not a solid clue
to his disappearance was ever discovered.
There remains till this day a large amount of speculation
about Le Prince's disappearance.
It is unlikely we will ever know what happened to Le Prince,
but above all else, he should be remembered for a contribution
he made towards cinema.
At about the same time, Thomas Alva Edison
was also developing motion capture cinematography.
Edison was to fund his head engineer
William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson
in the development of a photo sequence capture camera.
Dickson, developing and adapting elements
from all other motion capturing devices and knowledge,
developed a film camera called the Kinetograph in 1890.
A year later, developed he developed the Kinetoscope,
a large device to view the motion captured images.
Edison also set up the first ever movie studio
in the early 1890s,
where various but limited footage was shot
including the Rice-Irwin kiss,
and the "Fred Ott's Sneeze."
These short movies were limited to the technology at the time,
with most being unedited lengths of celluloid
no longer than the strips of celluloid themselves.
The Kinetoscope was not a projection device though.
And Edison unwisely disregarded the possibilities of projection,
and concentrated on peep shows, thinking they would be just
another whim in a novelty-hungry age.
During the same period, two French brothers
were working on their own film capturing and projection device.
This device, the cinematograph,
was to bring about the dawn of modern cinema,
and it was the Lumiere brothers who were the inventors.
It was in 1895, on the 28th of December,
that one of the most famous film screenings
in film history took place.
It was held at the Grand Cafe in Paris,
and customers paid one franc
for the screening of 10 short Lumiere films.
The screening lasted for about 25 minutes.
The films included, amongst others,
"Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory"
in Cordeliers' Square in Lyon.
What the Lumiere brothers had achieved using the combination
and development of previous technology
was a workable way of combining the Kinetoscope,
or viewing device, with a magic lantern,
thus projecting a sequence of photos to create the illusion
of a moving image, or as it is also known:
cinematography.
It must be mentioned that the Lumiere brothers
had done screenings before using their projection device,
but this is the date that has gone down in history
and is one of the first screenings
to charge an entrance fee,
one of the foundations of modern cinema.
The Lumieres also should be celebrated for they stand high
in the rank of film innovators in history,
along with the assistance of the inventor Jules Carpentier
at their photographic firm, they invented the cinematograph,
a three-in-one device that could film, print,
and project images.
It was hand-crankable, portable,
and soon after its invention,
it was being used around the world.
Interestingly, the Lumiere brothers believed
that the cinema of film projection
will be a short-lived form of entertainment,
and audiences would soon become bored of the novelty
and not to wish to pay for motion images
that they could see with their own eyes free.
Louis Lumiere is famously quoted as saying,
"The cinema is an invention without a future."
The audiences had other ideas
and loved the new form of entertainment,
constantly creating a demand for cinema.
As technology of cinema took film advanced,
so could the creative output using the new medium.
One of the forebearers to take advantage
and develop the creative aspects
of cinematography was Georges Melies.
He is considered by some to be
the father of the narrative film,
and whom D.W. Griffith
is quoted as saying, "I owe him everything."
Melies made over 500 films from 1896 to 1906.
He was one of the first people
to introduce cutting and chronological editing,
as we see in the movies today.
It was also at this time the public demand
for the movies was increasingly and unexpectedly growing.
Around the same time
that Melies was making his first short films,
Edwin S. Porter, in 1903, working for Edison,
made the "Life of an American Fireman,"
which displayed new visual story telling techniques
and incorporated stock footage with Porter's own photography.
It acted as a major precursor to Porter's most famous film,
"The Great Train Robbery," also made in 1903.
This had a running time of 12 minutes
and is considered a milestone in narrative filmmaking,
and one of the first films to tell a story,
albeit a simple one.
The first ever device developed to record sound
before the phonograph was called the phonautograph.
This was invented in 1857 by Edouard-Leon Scott in France.
This device transcribed soundwaves onto a visual medium.
The first medium of which was a lampblackened glass plate,
but this device had no means of playing the recordings back.
A fascinating insight into this period of sound recording
was that it was not realized at the time
that the waveform transcribed
by the phonautograph was a recording of the soundwave
that only needed a playback mechanism
to replicate the sound.
In 1895, Thomas Edison introduced the Kinetephone,
which marks the first time sound was added to cinematography.
The Kinetephone was not a projection device,
and sound was added using a device called
a cylinder phonograph that was added to the Kinetescope
to produce the Kinetephone.
It was in 1899 that a sound system called
Cinemacrophonographe,
or Phonorama, was exhibited in Paris.
This device required headphones to hear the sound
which was similar to the Kinetephone.
It was not until Clement Maurice and Henri Lioret,
in France, developed the Phono-Cinema-Theatre
that allowed the projection of sound in theatres.
This system was first exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900,
and is considered the first public projection
of both recorded sound and motion image.
Meanwhile, silent film production was starting
to gain pace around the world,
and what is considered the first feature length film
was made in 1906 by Charles Tait in Australia.
It was called "The Ned Kelly Gang."
At 70 minutes long it had an unprecedented running time
and only made in a budget of around $2,250,
although the complete film has since been lost,
with only around 12 minutes running time left in existence.
As film technology advanced,
so did the creative and storytelling possibilities.
It was in the first part of the 20th century
that one of the first famous film directors
came to prominence.
His name was D.W. Griffith,
and he's considered one of the fathers of modern cinema.
It was in 1908 that a young D.W. Griffith
made his first movie,
"The Adventures of Dollie."
Still in the period of silent film production,
its narrative structure and editing were to set the way
with Griffith's coming skill with filmmaking.
He was to develop filmic techniques and codes
that brought in-depth narrative storytelling to cinema.
He directed around 450 films and was one of the most
successful directors of his time.
One of his most notable films, "Birth of a Nation,"
made in 1915 and based on Thomas
Dixon's American Civil War movies,
was racist and showed a lack of integrity
in portray African-Americans.
He would respond to criticism about this film
by making "Intolerance," showed in 1916.
This movie used some of the biggest film sets and crew sizes
ever at that time.
The story portrayed 2,500 years of history and showed how truth
and justice are threatened by hypocrisy and injustice.
Although audience reaction was muted at best,
Griffith's career faulted after 1916,
and in 1931, when a film he made called
"The Struggle" was a failure,
he would endure a 17-year exile from Hollywood,
never to return to his once high status.
Griffith certainly was not the only person developing
filmic codes and narratives,
and his work was in part continuing on from others
such as Georges Melies and Edwin S. Porter.
Whatever you may think about Griffith,
his work showed cinema technology had entered a truly
advanced form of storytelling and narrative construction.
In Russia, at the beginning of the 20th century,
not long after D.W. Griffith
was setting forth his place in cinematic history,
the Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein,
was developing his own distinct form of cinema.
In the 1920s, Russian montage, as it is known,
came to be a prominent filmmaking style in Russia.
The basic concept of montage relies heavily upon editing
and creating meaning through the collaboration of shots
in a sequence and not from a storyline.
For example, the three shots that are shown here
are taken from Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin."
They are played in sequence
to signify the meaning of Soviet Russia
rising up against the oppression of the czar.
The term "montage" literally means putting together,
and for an over-simplified example:
if you place a shot of an ear,
then the shot of a door next to each other,
the meaning would be eavesdrop. This is montage in a nutshell.
In 1925, Eisenstein made one of his most famous films,
"Battleship Potemkin," a revolutionary portrait
of mutiny aboard a Russian battleship
not long before the Russian Revolution.
Although praised by critics,
Russian audiences were indifferent to it
and much preferred entertaining and emotionally engaging
Hollywood-style continuity films.
Importantly, montage offered another approach
to filmmaking other than a continuity-based style,
and it also showed how far the technology of cinema
had come in a little more than 25 years.
The progress of sound recording and playback for cinema
had been steadily advancing,
although applying synchronized,
prerecorded sound to film had encountered many problems
such as recording fidelity, synchronizing sound to film,
and projecting sound at a satisfactory level.
These problems were to be overcome by the advance
of technology and innovation.
In 1919, an American inventor called Lee de Forest
developed one of the first sound-on-film technologies
for commercial application.
In Forest's system, which he called Phonofilm,
sound was photographically recorded onto one side
of a strip of film to create what was called a composite,
where simply two elements have been composited together.
If the sound was synchronized exactly to the film,
the playback would be perfect.
Another system developed and used in the first part
of the 20th century was called the Vitaphone.
The Vitaphone was a disc-based system produced
by General Electric and purchased by Warner Brothers.
The Vitaphone did not print sound to film,
but on to 16 inch phonograph records.
These records were then played using Vitaphone systems
at theatres where the film they were produced for was playing.
There were many problems with the Vitaphone system
including synchronization with the film,
being projected, and the phonograph records
which could not be edited and limited the corrective output
for films using the Vitaphone system.
Taking into account numerous technological improvements,
it would be sound on film
that would eventually become the universal standard
for synchronized sound in cinema.
It was in 1927 that one of the first movies
ever produced contained synchronized dialogue
sequences was released to the movie going public.
This film was "The Jazz Singer" and it used a Vitaphone system.
There had been other films
that had used synchronized sound and music,
such as "Don Juan" released in 1926,
that had a musical score played by the New York Philharmonic.
"The Jazz Singer" was the first to have dialogue
which accounted for about 25 percent
of the soundtrack in the movie.
The movie heralded the coming of the so-called talkies
and signaled the start of the end for silent films
where talkies were ultimately more popular
and technologically advanced.
The movie itself is based on a stage play
by Samson Raphaelson.
It has a culturally complex storyline,
with a young Jewish man trying to make it as a jazz singer
against the wishes of his father.
It was a signifier of the times
that so-called blackface makeup was used by Al Jolson,
who plays the lead role. This was naively racist at best,
and was used to take on the appearance of an archetype
of African-Americans,
although there is the assimilation
of African-Americans and Jews
experiencing similar identities as outsiders,
and this is something that is put across in the film.
At this point, cinema had come a long way
bringing together motion image and sound
with many brilliant innovations,
inventions, passion, and commitment,
creating one of the most unique
and inspiring art forms and entertainment
that has ever been produced in the history of the world,
establishing itself as a powerful element
in modern societies.
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