Film History

2014

1. THE BEGINNING OF CINEMA

1.a) Captivating the Vision

Do you think Aristotle, when he wrote about the idea of captivating (jailing) the vision, was aware that he would come to influence an art that would be the major cultural source of entertainment and education thousands of years later?

Who didn’t deal with photography after Aristotle? From the Arab Scientist Alhazan in the 900’s to Leonardo, who left so many inventions to humanity in the 16th century, so many scientists have realised the steps on the way to the development of this important invention.

Think about a dark room with a small hole in the wall. Don’t put any lens or anything on it. You will see that the view outside will be projected onto the wall. When this darkened room (camera obscura) gets smaller in this wooden made version, (camera lucida) helps painters to draw the landscape.

After learning how to project images onto surfaces with the help of lenses, one other thing is left: to develop a technique to fix this projected image. The development of solutions sensitive to light and the ability to make the image durable would emerge by the first half of the 19th Century. One of the inventors of the chemicals used in this process was Nicéphore Niépce. He succeded in fixing images from the outside world on metal and stone plates by the year 1826. The chemical solution of Niépce was so slow to act, however, that the process of transferring the image onto the litograph took some 30 minutes. Because the exposure process took so much time, Niépce’s heliograph that captured a crowded street in Paris only shows one shoeshiner clearly, since the others did not remain still for long enough to be captured. Considering that today’s exposure times are as low as 1/2500th of a second gives you some idea of what has been achieved in the field.

The working principles of a camera are so similar to those of the human eye that it could be said the former was actually developed by imitating this human organ. If the recorder of the images picked up by the eye is the brain, than the camera has a similar unit to realise this function. An intresting fact is that the diaphragm unit of the camera is named and formed after the part of the human eye that shares its name. Just like the diaphragm in the eye, it gets bigger if the light outside is weak and gets smaller to counter over illumination. The eye projects a smaller and upside down version of the image to the center of brain that processes this image, thanks to the lenses it has, and so does the camera. The eye uses the binocular to see distant objects and a camera uses a telephoto lens to do so.

Cinema is based on the trace that the light leaves on the retina of the eye. Let’s describe this illusion with an example. If we shake a burning match in a darkroom, the light appears in the form of lines to us. Although the match is not the starting point, the starting image is preserved on the retina for some time. The working principle of film depends on this. A film camera is actually a photographic camera that takes 24 pictures in a second. Since the trace of these still photographs remains on the retina layer for a while, the objects are perceived as if they are moving.

Another example will get us closer to understanding the effort to make still photographs look as if they were in motion. There is a game that the elemantary school children play. They draw the movements of an imaginary character at the corners of the pages of a note book, one by one. When they put their finger on the corner of the starting page and and roll over all the pages quickly (just like mixing the playing cards) , the drawn image would look as if it was moving. So, if we put the still photographs showing the stages of amovement and turn the pages quickly, than these stills would look as if they were in motion.

The trace that the image leaves in the retinal layer has been known of since the 10th Century and some installations to entertain the people were invented after taking advantage of this invention. One plate had a birdcage drawn on one side of it and the bird on another side. This is a good example of this process. When one turns this plate, it looked like the bird was in the cage. A Zoetrope is another example of this. It is a cylinder with images on its inner surface. As it spins, images produce an illusion, as if they were in motion.

One step in the invention of film were the works of Eadweard Muybridge. He was a scientist and he developed the Zoopraxiscope to observe animal locomotion by 1878. This tool was also used to confirm the winning horse at the races, such as the photo-finish of those days. It was a technique which takes 12 frames of photographs in a second and displays them. Muybridge’s technique has been considered the oldest tool that works similar to contemporary projectors.

1.b) A New Invention: Cinématographe

While European scientists were working to progress their techniques, inventors at the other edge of the Atlantic were searching for possiblities towards the cinema as well. Although there was a physical distance, the inventors of these two continents were aware of the works of each other. For example, the World’s Fair, held in Paris at the beginning of the 20th Century, was a good chance for scientists to compare the technologies displayed and to learn what was going on within the other continent. A lucky coincidence for the world was Thomas Edison’s interest in Cinema. A very important name in the history of invention due to his contributions towards the development of inventions such as electricity and the telephone, Edison was one of the pioneers who concentrated on the development of cinematographic tools by the 19th Century.

When Edison put out his latest invention, the Cinetoscop, onto the market in 1892, its disadvantage was only one person’s being able to watch it. The films he realised in his studio, which was called the "Black Maria," were being distributed by individuals all over the U.S. and were making money. Edison was a business man besides being a scientist, and the films he made included The Kiss, which displayed the very first kissing scene in cinema history. Despite all these efforts, Cinema historians starts the Film History with the Lumiére Brothers due to the Cinetoscope’s lack of projecting the films for an audience.

Louis and Auguste Lumière, also known as the Lumiere Brothers, were the first inventors who succeded in displaying motion pictures to a small audience, on March 21st, 1895, or to a larger audience on December 28th, 1895 at Grand Café on Capucines Boluevard in Paris. The biggest difference of the ‘Cinematograph was its being able to project the film on the wall.

The very first footage of the Lumière Brothers was nothing but the laborers getting out of the Lumière Factory or The Train’s Entrance to the La Ciotat Station. They were lasted 8-15 minutes and could be considered as documentary footage. In a short period of time, the Cinematograph became an industry in France. Events open to public viewing were being organised and the footage that the Lumiére men shot by day was being shown in public by the evening. Most of the times, the cameras did not have film in it and people who thought they were being filmed filled the theatres with a hope to see themselves on the silver screen.

In those days, the short-length films that Lumieré produced had little stories in them. Watering the Gardener was one of them. However, Georges Méliès’ 16 minute film Voyage dans la Lune/A Trip to the Moon (1902) is considered as "the first film" due to the narrative structure it has.

Méliès was the founder of the Houdini Theatre in Paris and he was fascinated by the new invention. He wanted to do films as well and demanded a Cinematograph from Lumiéres. However, Antoine Lumieré refused him by saying that there wasn’t a future for the new invention of his two sons and cinematographe should be seen as a temporary attraction. So, Méliès found a camera from another source and with the pelicule (raw film) he obtained from Kodak he started to make films. His films, which he made on the studio he founded by the year 1897, were made of short length footage, such as Dancing Woman.

Méliès, who made tens of films which lasted between five and eight minutes, realised A Trip to the Moon in the following years. When he was writing the screenplay for this short-length film, he was influenced by two novels from Science Fiction pioners: H.G.Wells’s The First Man in The Moon and Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Besides it being the first film in terms of the dramatic structure it has, it’s the first film ever made in the genre of Science-Fiction as well. One other field that A Trip to the Moon was pioneering in was special effects. Cinema used the same special effects that Méliès used in this film until the computer oriented effects took their place in the last days of the 20th Century. An inventor of many film effects (or film tricks), one day he shot two different views on the same frame accidently due to a failure of the camera. There he realised the first superimpose in film history. Méliès, who was an illusionist himself, wasn’t foreign to the illusion at all.

1.c) The First Days of Silent Film

When we take a look at the film industry of France in the first days of the 20th Century, we witness that the Pathé Companie produces narrative films besides the work of Georges Méliès. The Pathé Companie, which was founded by the year 1900, was filming the Comédie Française Plays (France State Theatre), such as Faust or Barber of Seville, while the American Film Industry was dealing with ordinary subjects in comparison. This company’s artist, Max Linder, was realising the very first samples of comedy in film. From the begining, the biggest two companies in France, Lumieré and Pathé, had taken different directions. Lumieré was on the documentary side, while Pathé was becoming an expert on narrative film. Besides, Pathé was also preparing the Pathé Journal, a news reel shown in the movie theatres before the screening of the main film.

Italy was another country where cinema was widespread and the industry developed in a positive direction. In these first years of silent film, historical films made in Italy had some hilarious costume and art work and an army of extras played in the film. The extras were cheap and the locations left from the Roman Empire was free of use. The country had the best of designers to prepare the costumes. Therefore, it was possible to realise the best of Epics in Italy. Between these Epics, which were filmed before WWI, there was The Fall of the Rome (1905) of Albeni, The Last Days of Pompeii (1908) of Luigi Maggi, Quo Vadis? (1913) which was related to Emperor Nero and directed by Enrico Guazzoni, and Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastroni about the Cartaghe War the II. The pioneers of the long length films are Quo Vadis and Cabiria. These two films made the public get used to full-length films, with their durations being over two hours. Besides, they were both considered perfect in terms of set design for being so realistic and in terms of aesthetics.

1.d) The Birth of Hollywood

Ever since Thomas Edison succeeded in projecting film onto the screen with his invention, The Vitoskop, in 1896, he helped the cinema to become an industry and he became an important figure in that industry. However, it can be said that Edison’s methods to maintain leadership in this industry sometimes reached the extreme stages. The problem was that the people who shot the films did so by taking advantage of the technology that Edison developed but didn’t pay anything to him at all. Edison then negotiated with the Mafia and ordered the lenses of the free loaders camera’s to be broken. It’s not the only example of the things Edison did to stay at the top. Between the films shown in U.S. theaters, some came from Europe too. Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon was one of them. Edison’s men had carried a copy of it outside France, secretly, and America’s showings had been realised thanks to this copy, which Méliès’ wasn’t earning a penny on, while Edison made a fortune.

In the first years, the distributors were buying the films from the companies and were presenting them in the towns and cities. As much as they traveled and showed the film, the film paid it’s cost back, leaving a profit. An intresting fact is the people who founded the most prestigious firms, like Warner Brothers or William Fox, were the distributors who were running from one town to another to show the films. After a while, Edison thought that it would be better if distribution of films would