The Invention of Cinema and the
Production of Fantasy
Magic Lantern Shows
To understand the origins of cinema as a
popular medium, it is important to acknowledge
it predecessors.
Magic lantern shows were very popular with
Victorian audiences. They were basically slide
shows that often consisted of an adventure
story set in exotic locations.
A slide from the serialization of Harriet Beecher Stowe's
"Uncle Tom's Cabin", America's first best-selling novel.
Alongside the Magic Lantern Shows, the Victorians were also fascinated with optical toys
based on the persistence of vision.
Zoetrope
Thaumatrope
The Persistence of Vision:
The brain retains images cast upon the retina of the eye for approximately 1/20th to 1/5th of
a second beyond their actual removal from the field of vision. It is this phenomenon which
causes us to see the individual blades of a rotating fan as a unitary circular form or the
different hues of a spinning color-wheel as a single homogeneous color. It is also what causes
us to see the separate frames of a strip of film as a continuous image.
The moving image
Three individuals that played a central part in the transition from still photography to the
invention of cinema are:
George Eastman
Edward Muybridge
Etienne Jules-Marey
"You push the button - we do the rest"
George Eastman
In 1888 Eastman introduced the first mass
produced, hand-held camera, which he named
the Kodak. The camera used rolls of sensitized
paper and in the following year Eastman brought
out celluloid rolls of film. This innovation lead to
the subsequent invention of the motion picture
camera by Thomas Edison and the rise of cinema.
In the 1860s and 70s Edward Muybridge experimented with serial photography in
an effort to capture movement on film.
Muybridge was hired by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford, to
settle a wager. The story is that Stanford, who owned a number of race horses.
had gotten into an argument with a friend concerning how horses gallop.
Stanford was of the opinion that at a particular point in a horse’s gallop all four
feet are off the ground simultaneously. His friend believed that this was
physically impossible. To prove his case Stanford hired Muybridge to come up
with a way to photograph the precise movements of the galloping horse.
Muybridge rigged together a series of cameras along a race track that were
triggered by trip-wires. After developing ways to speed up the exposure time of
the film and the camera’s shutter speed, Muybridge was able to prove
Stanford’s case.
Muybridge continued experimenting with different optical devices and in 1879
he created the zoopraxiscope, a projector that showed images in motion. With
his new invention, Muybridge went on a massive tour across America and
England.
In 1884 the University of Pennsylvania commissioned Muybridge to make a further
study of animal and human locomotion. The report, "Animal Locomotion" was
published three years later and contains more than twenty thousand images.
Marey, Etienne Jules
Like Muybridge French physiologist Marey
was also interested in the study of animal
locomotion. He too developed methods to
capture motion on film. One devices that
he created was a photographic gun that
allowed him to quickly photograph a series
of images on a photosensitive disc.
Development of Film Technology
There are three individuals who are most often credited with the “invention” of
the motion picture:
Thomas Edison
the Lumiere Brothers
In 1894 Thomas Edison opened his first Kinetoscope parlour on
Broadway.
Patrons paid 25 cents as the admission charge to view films in five
kinetoscope machines placed in a row.
Edison's film studio was used to supply films for this sensational
new form of entertainment. More Kinetoscope parlors soon opened
in other cities
He soon realized that he would make greater profits if more than
one customer could watch a film at the same time and introduced
a projection process which he name the Panoptikon.
Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited with the world's first public film screening
on December 28, 1895. They showed ten short films in the basement of the Grand
Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The show lasted 20 minutes and was
the very first public demonstration of their device they called the Cinematographe,
which effectively functioned as camera and projector all in one.
Early Film Exhibition

Early spectators in both Kinetoscope parlors and cinema houses were amazed by even the
most mundane moving images.

These early films were very short, one-reelers (a 10-15 minute reel of film - the projector's
reel capacity at the time).

Popular topics included: people at work, parades, women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats,
twisting contortionists, and short pieces of animation.
Early Film Exhibition

Films were initially shown as part of vaudeville shows and at fairgrounds. The earliest
'movie theatres' were converted churches or halls.

In 1897 the first real cinema was built in Paris, solely for the purpose of showing films.

By 1898 the Lumiere's company had produced a short film catalog with over 1,000 titles.

In 1902 Thomas L. Talley built the first US movie theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The
Electric Theater seated 200 and charged patrons a dime.

By as early as 1910 American cinemas were attracting 26 MILLION PEOPLE A WEEK.
Georges Melies is credited for being the first
person to give cinema a sense of wonderment. By
using plot or storylines, magically characters and
special effects, Melies introduced the idea of
narrative to film.
When the Lumiere brothers wouldn't sell him a
camera, he developed his own and then set up
Europe's first film studio in 1897.
Over the next 15 years he created about 500 short
films (few of which survived), and screened his own
productions in his theatre.
In 1911 he contracted with French film company
Pathe to finance and distribute his films, but within
two years he went out of business.
Melies was a stage magician and a wizard at special
effects. Film offered him the perfect medium to
create stories of fantasy and illusion. In 1902 Melies
released a 14-minute science fiction tale entitled Le
Voyage Dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).
His assortment of trick photography included
such things as hand-tinting, dissolves, wipes,
'magical' super-impositions and double
exposures, the use of mirrors, trick sets, stop
motion, slow-motion and fade-outs amd fadeins.
Although his use of the camera was innovative,
the camera remained stationary. In other
words, he recorded the all action from one
position only, duplicating the experience of
watching a play. It would take several years
before filmmakers developed the quick editing
and camera movements that we associate with
contemporary films.
Edwin S. Porter is credited for creating the first American narrative film, The Great
Train Robbery (1903), and for initiating the film genre of the Western. The film
features fast paced action, location shots (although it was film in New Jersey, it has
the look of the wild west), shootouts and horse chases. It also has an interesting
closing scene in which one of the train bandits shoots back at the shooting camera.
German Expressionism and the Land of Ghost
and Monsters
Between 1919 and 1930 a number of films were
made in Germany that came to constitute a
movement known as “German Expressionism.”
Common to these films is the use of a highly
stylized look or mise-en-scene. The films feature
such formal elements as dramatic, chiaroscuro
lighting, surreal sets and props, and remarkably
fluid editing and framing.
“The ‘gothic’ appearance of these films is often
accompanied by similar acting styles and macabre
or ‘low-life’ subject matters. The overall effect is to
create a self-contained fantasy world quite separate
from everyday reality, a world imbued with angst
and paranoia in the face of that which cannot be
rationally explained.”
Annette Kuhn, “History of the Cinema,” The Cinema
Book, edited by Pam Cook.
The first feature film that we will watch is
F. W. Murnau’s vampire classic Nosferatu
(1922). I picked this film to start us off
because we will see the influence that it
had on classical Hollywood film and it also
draws a direct connection between the
power of film and fantasy.
The influence of German Expressionism is
especially evident in Hollywood horror
movies and film noir.