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The Beginning of Movies
What are movies
&
Where do they come from
Joseph Antoine
Ferdinand Plateau
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• Blind Belgium scientist
• 1829--publishes “Certain Properties of the
Impression Produced by Light Upon the
Organ of Sight
• Persistence of Vision
– the ability of the human brain to retain images
perceived by the eye for a brief period of time
after they have disappeared from the field of
vision
Persistence of
Vision
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• Know as far back as the ancient Egyptians and
ancient Chinese
• Thaumatrope
• Flip Book
• Therefore-– If you see something, and then it is taken away and a
new image quickly replaces it (less than 1/10 of a
second later), the two images merge together and
appear to “move”
What are movies
• So what are you seeing when you walk into
the movie theater or turn on your TV?
Movies
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• A movie is nothing more than a progression
of still images flashed on a screen in
succession for brief periods of time
• 24 filmed frames alternated with 24 empty
frames every second
• For TV, its 30 frames per second
Thomas Alva Edison
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The Wizard of West Orange
1847-1931
Edison
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• Where do many people believe
movies were “invented?
• New Jersey!!
• Edison had already invented the
phonograph and wanted a device that
would, “do for the eye what the phonograph
does for the ear”.
Edison: The Inventor of Movies
• Met with Eadweard Muybridge in 1888 to
discuss idea
• Edison gave the task of creating with
motion picture machine to his assistant,
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson
• Dickson invented the Kinetoscope. A
device that could showed some of the first
movies.
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Edison and New jersey
• 1892--the first film studio in the world is
created in West Orange, NJ.
– Called “The Black Maria”
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The Black Maria
• Edison brought in popular vaudeville
performers and filmed their acts
• The Black Maria had an open roof to allow
in sunlight
• Also, the building rotated to follow the sun
all day
Edison and the Public
• Edison sold Kinetoscopes to entrepreneurs
who opened their own movie parlors and
began showing films
• Some of the more famous early movies:
– Fred Otto’s Sneeze(1894)
– Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show(1894)
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Problems with the Kinetoscope
• Only one person could view it at a time
– So what’s wrong with that?
The Vitascope
• Invented by Thomas Armat in 1896 and
then sold to Thomas Edison
• Could project the image so that many
people could view it at the same time
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The Nickelodeon
• You pay a nickel and you get to see a
movie!!
• Showed mainly “actuality” films. Films of
live events recorded
However-• Edison was not the only inventor of movies
• In Europe, others were experimenting with
the same principals
• Most notably--Auguste and Louis Lumiere
developed the Cinematographe(1895)
– They held a public screening of their movies in
1895 considered by many to be the first movie
theater in history
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Film as More
Growth and Development from Early
recordings to full narratives
Actuality Films
• From roughly 1895-1900 actuality films
were the most prominent type of films
• These showed famous speeches, boxing
matches, theater performers and other
motion pictures from everyday life
Geroge Melies (1861-1938)
• French director
• Created about 500 movies in his life
• Most notably--Cinderella(1899) and A Trip to the Moon
(Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902)
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More Melies
• One day when filming passing traffic in the
streets of Paris, his camera jammed.
• Melies cleared the aperture and resumed
filming.
• When he watched the projected image he
made an amazing discovery-– A bus changed magically into a hearse!!
Melies Magic
• Melies continued to experiment with the
ability of the new film medium
• Began using motion picture tricks
–
–
–
–
–
Multiple exposaure
Slow motion
Time-lapes
Dissolves
Hand tinting of the film
Edwin Stanton Porter(1869-1941)
• Former Kinetoscope engineer for Edison
• Began directing his own films in 1903 with Life of
an American Fireman
• Most famous story--The Great Train
Robbery(1903)
– Lengthy 12 minute film that scared the crap out of
audiences
• Porter’s Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest(1907) stars
a young unsuccessful writer and encyclopedia
salesman named David Wark Griffith
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D.W. Griffith(1875-1948)
• Created the first full-length motion picture
– The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Extremely racist film about the beginning of
the KKK in the post-war south.
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Innovations of Griffith
• Panning--moving camera left and right while filming
• Close-ups--while not the first filmmaker to use close ups,
he was the first to se them effectively
• Different camera angles
• Long-shots--used to introduce action
• Fade in/out--used as a transition
• Costumes--period piece costumes
• Authenticity--shot on location with authentic images
• Original score--featured its own musical score
• Length--12 reels, or almost 3 hours
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
• Introduces the idea of film
montage
• Montage--literally, "putting together";
refers to a filming technique, editing
style, or form of movie collage
consisting of a series of successive
short shots or images that are
rapidly juxtaposed into a coherent
sequence to suggest meaning;
Kuleshov Experiment
• Leo Kuleshov--shows audience an image of
a man with a smile and then three other
images--a bowl of soup, a child and a knife
• Audience interprets the man’s smile in
relation to what is also shown
• Result--film through editing becomes
contextual--everything is understood in its
context with other images
German Expressionism
Style of painting and theater that was unrealistic and
stylized
Typically expressionism showed distorted figures,
slanting buildings and uneasy grounds
Expressionism tried to convey inner emotions of
characters through visual images
Famous Expressionist Directors:
Robert Wiene--The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1919)
F.W. Murnau--The Last Laugh(1926)
Fritz Lang--Metropolis(1926)
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Der Letzte Mann
Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari