History of Motion Pictures

I

Introduction

History of Motion Pictures, historical development of the visual medium known as motion pictures, film, cinema, or the movies. This article covers the medium’s history as a technology, as a business, as an art form, and as a means of delivering entertainment and information to audiences in theaters and at home. It discusses major filmmakers and their films, principal fiction and nonfiction genres, and film industries in the United States and throughout the world. For more information on the technical aspects involved in creating a film, see Motion Picture.

II

Origins

In the early 19th century scientists took note of a visual phenomenon: A sequence of individual still pictures, when set in motion, can give the illusion of movement. These scientists attributed this experience to what they called persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. The eye’s retention of a visual image, now known as positive afterimage, has long been considered a founding principle of motion pictures, even though its relationship to the perception of motion is still not well understood.

A

Early Experiments

The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.

Inventors began to conceive of combining the principles of these moving-image devices with the photographic recording of actual movement soon after the development of still photography in the 1830s. The most famous experiment occurred in the 1870s in California, where railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a racetrack and spread threads across the track with a contact to each camera’s shutter. Moving along the track, the horse broke the threads and caused a sequence of photographs to be taken. The photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground, and Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope.

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Muybridge’s endeavors stimulated French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to devise equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. He built what he called a chronophotographic camera that could take multiple images superimposed on one another. His work was aided in turn by developments in photographic materials. In 1885 American inventor George Eastman introduced sensitized paper roll “film” in place of the individual glass plates then in use. In 1889 Eastman replaced the paper roll with celluloid, a synthetic plastic material coated with a gelatin emulsion.

B

Thomas Alva Edison and William K. L. Dickson

Legendary American inventor Thomas Alva Edison drew upon the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman when he turned his attention to motion pictures in the late 1880s. In his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison assigned to a British employee, William K. L. Dickson, the task of constructing a machine for recording actual movement on film and another machine for viewing the resulting images. By 1891 Dickson had produced a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, dubbed the Kinetoscope.

The Kinetograph was operated by an electric motor that moved the celluloid film roll past the camera lens. Motor-driven cameras, which were bulky and stationary, were soon replaced by movable hand-cranked cameras. Dickson’s key contribution was a sprocket mechanism linked to the camera’s shutter, which momentarily stopped the film roll for each exposure. These separate still photographic images came to be called frames. Early cameras used a number of different speeds for exposing frames, but by the advent of sound film in the late 1920s the standard had become 24 frames per second.

In early 1893 Edison constructed a motion-picture studio on his laboratory grounds, dubbed the Black Maria by his staff who thought it resembled police patrol wagons known by that nickname. On May 9, 1893, he held the first public exhibition of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. But only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope. This boxlike structure contained a motor-and-shutter mechanism similar to the camera’s. It ran a loop of positive film past an electric light source, illuminating a tiny image, which the viewer observed through a small window. Kinetoscope viewing parlors containing many machines for individual viewing began to open in cities in 1894. Edison and Dickson apparently gave little thought to a single machine that could project moving images to a large audience, something Reynaud had achieved in his Théâtre Optique. Reynaud, however, had displayed drawings rather than images photographed by a motion-picture camera.