Motion Pictures
“Film has a uniquely powerful ubiquity within human culture. In 2009, there were over 6.8 billion cinema admissions (compared against a world population of roughly the same number) creating global box office revenues of over US$30 billion.” – Vikas Shah
Characteristics:
Movies are a highly accessible social art form
Movies create a range of emotions
Movie-going is a collective experience
Movies have a “uniquely powerful ubiquity within human culture.”
Movies reflect the culture in which they are made.
The evolution of film began shortly after the invention of photography when some innovators experimented with the medium by trying to produce the illusion of motion. Recalling the properties of the visual cue depth, motion picture created apparent movement.
INNOVATIONS
In 1834, William Horner invented the Zoetrope, which was a cylinder with slits on the outside and photographs on the inside. When spun, the images appeared to moving.
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In 1872, Eadweard Muybridge experimented with making images of things in motion.
According to the National Museum of American history, “expatriate Englishman Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), a brilliant and eccentric photographer, gained worldwide fame photographing animal and human movement imperceptible to the human eye. Hired by railroad baron Leland Stanford in 1872, Muybridge used photography to prove that there was a moment in a horse’s gallop when all four hooves were off the ground at once. He spent much of his later career at the University of Pennsylvania, producing thousands of images that capture progressive movements within fractions of a second.”
Between 1883-1885, William Dickson, while working for Thomas Edison invented one of the first movie projection systems with his Kinetoscope. According to the Library of Congress, “Instrumental to the birth of American movie culture, the Kinetoscope also had a major impact in Europe; its influence abroad was magnified by Edison's decision not to seek international patents on the device, facilitating numerous imitations of and improvements on the technology.
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Silent Films
The first film was made by Louis and Auguste Lumiere in 1895 after the invention of their Cinematographe camera. Sarah Pruitt notes, "Cinématographe would go down in history as the first viable film camera. Using it, the Lumière brothers shot footage of workers at their factory leaving at the end of the day. They showed the resulting film, “La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière” (“Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”) at an industrial meeting in Paris in March 1895; it is considered to be the very first motion picture.
This was a time when people were trying to figure technologies, post-production processes, and the distribution of films. In France, the Lumiere Brothers are credited with the first film, “Workers Leaving the Station” in 1896. The brothers invented a portable motion-picture camera, film processing unit and projector called the Cinematographe, three functions covered in one invention.
Cinematography: (from Greek: kinema “movements” and, graphein “to record”) is the art or science of motion picture photography. Cinematography is an art form in the field of filmmaking.
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(1895–1929)
"A silent film is a film which consists of only the picture, that is, it has no sound. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as the motion picture itself, but before the 1920s, most films were silent." Link
Prior to the invention of synchronous sound movies were accompanied by live music. Early films were produced mostly for the middle-class and used plots that capitalized on body language and emotional cues.
This period is also associated with the growth of the studio system in filmmaking. Just five studios controlled all the movies produced during this time including production and distribution.
From Robert E. Yahnke's History of Cinema
"For the first twenty years of motion picture history most silent films were short--only a few minutes in length. At first a novelty, and then increasingly an art form and literary form, silent films reached greater complexity and length in the early 1910's. The films on the list above represent the greatest achievements of the silent era, which ended--after years of experimentation--in 1929 when a means of recording sound that would be synchronous with the recorded image was discovered. Few silent films were made in the 1930s, with the exception of Charlie Chaplin, whose character of the Tramp perfected expressive physical moves in many short films in the 1910's and 1920s. When the silent era ended, Chaplin refused to go along with sound; instead, he maintained the melodramatic Tramp as his mainstay in City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936). The trademarks of Chaplin's Tramp were his ill-fitting suit, floppy over-sized shoes and a bowler hat, and his ever-present cane. A memorable image is Chaplin's Tramp shuffling off, penguin-like, into the sunset and spinning his cane whimsically as he exits. He represented the "little guy," the underdog, someone who used wit and whimsy to defeat his adversaries."
Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffiths , 1927: Among the most popular and perhaps the most controversial of films produced during this period is "Birth of a Nation" (1915). The movie promotes White Supremacy and Klu Klux Klan.
