EOTO 1: Motion Pictures

Introduction

    In over one century, motion pictures have transformed the world, developing into the most popular and influential media of the 20th century and beyond, with great impact on cultures, societies, politics, and arts, as motion pictures achieve widespread presence to be viewed not only at movie theatres, but also on television broadcast, streaming services, and digital technology that constantly reach millions of people day after day.

    Motion pictures, also called films or movies, became a form of art. Motion pictures emerged at the end of the 19th century and were quickly recognized as perhaps the first truly mass form of entertainment. Movies connect people with appealing stories about shared interests, dreams, or concerns, allowing people to perceive the world and understand others through a combination of art, talent, industry, and technology.

The Beginning of Motion Pictures

Muybridge & Marey

    In the 19th century, motion pictures resulted from experimenting with the fusion of several technological developments of the era such as photography, the illusion of motion by combining still images, and the study of human and animal movement.

    The predecessor of motion pictures started with mechanical devices in which a collection of still images were viewed one after another in a rapid succession that created the illusion of motion. As a way of experimenting to exhibit photographs, inventors placed a series of pictures in the inner surface of a rotating cylinder known as a zoetrope, and when those images were viewed through slits it produced the impression of motion. In 1879, Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer, created a sequential photo projector known as the zoopraxiscope. With this device, Muybridge fascinated a San Francisco audience in 1880. In Paris, the physiologist Etienne Jules Marey was doing a similar work while studying birds in flight and athletes in action. Marey invented a device that he called a chronophotographic gun, in which he used rolls of photographic paper to take bursts of twelve photographs per second. His technique of chronophotography along with Muybridge's work set the founding concepts for motion picture cameras and projectors.

Edison: The Kinetoscope and the Kinetograph Parlors

    These inventions go the interest of Thomas Edison, who in 1889 commissioned his assistant William Dickson to create a device able to record and reproduce objects in motion, but resulted in two devices: the kinetograph that was the first motion picture camera, and the kinetoscope to view the film developed from the kinetograph. Eastman Company's innovation on celluloid film allowed for film rolls of sufficient length and durability to use in a motion picture device. The kinetoscope consisted of an upright wooden cabinet with a peephole with magnifying lenses in the top. Inside, about fifty feet of film was drawn between a lens and an electric light bulb at a rate of 46 frames per second through a mechanism of sprocket gears, producing the illusion of lifelike representations of persons and objects in motion, a brief film of about 16 seconds. In order to watch the moving images, the viewer looked through a peephole at the top of the cabinet. In 1894, Edison started public motion picture screenings in newly-opened kinetograph parlors. Edison put Dickson in charge of film production and together they built the first film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey, where they created hundreds of 16-second kinetograph films from 1893 to 1895 featuring Vaudeville performers and slapstick comedy. Still, the kinetograph was too bulky, static, and required electricity to work in addition to plenty of natural light, so the movies could only be done from one perspective and only capturing bright sunlight. As there was no editing yet, the film had to be done in one single brief shot. Moreover, the viewing system only allowed one person at a time to watch a movie which limited the number of customers a kinetoscope parlor could welcome. However, the kinetoscope paved the way for the first filmmakers to experiment with motion picture technologies and storytelling.

Edison's kinetoscope

The Lumière Brothers

    Meanwhile, innovators in France were also working on motion pictures. In 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinématographe, a special device that combined the functions of a portable motion picture camera, film processing unit, and projector. The films could be projected on a wall or screen allowing audiences to watch the movie together creating not only a personal experience but also a communal experience. The Lumière brothers and Edison/Dickson films consisted of uninterrupted shots of less than one minute and were silent and in black and white; however, the difference was the material shown in them. Instead of stage performers, the Lumière brothers focused on pieces of everyday life. A year later, Edison showed his improved projector, the vitascope, which was the first commercially successful projector in the United States. Motion pictures were growing into a method of mass communication and a profitable industry.

The Lumière Brothers

Georges Méliès

    The Latham Loop made possible editing and the use of longer film strips without tearing and breaking. Technical innovations allowed filmmakers to experiment with special effects. The French illusionist and film director Georges Méliès was not only the first to film fictional narratives joining short films together to create stories, but also exploited basic camera tricks such as stop motion, slow motion, dissolve, fade-out, superimposition, and double exposure. Regarded as the inventor of special effects, Georges Méliès transformed films into the narrative medium it is today.

Georges Méliès's Trip to the Moon (1902) was one of the first films to incorporate fantasy elements and to use "trick" filming techniques, both of which heavily influenced future filmmakers.

Flickers, Nickelodeons, and the Emergence of the Motion Picture Industry

    Flickers were makeshift theaters in which business owners converted their shops or restaurants into motion picture exhibition halls where guests sat at tables to watch projected "flickers" on a screen of muslin or bed sheets while a musician played frenzied music on piano or violin. The early motion picture theaters were known as nickelodeons because the admission cost was five cents. In 1905, the first nickelodeon opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, attracting 450 people. Nickelodeons were popular among the working class who could not afford live theater, and also attracted European immigrants as nickelodeon movies were cheap, silent, and provide entertainment without language barriers. By 1908, nearly 8,000 nickelodeons had appeared in the United States. At first, movie audiences were located in poor areas of a town, but soon, motion pictures were exhibited in theaters located at wealthier neighborhoods, and then middle class and upper class audiences started going to the movies.

    The popularity of movies established motion pictures as a mass entertainment medium. As a result, the demand for motion pictures grew and production companies were formed to meet it. This growing demand was only possible to meet by producing films on a regular year-round basis at locations with weather conditions that allowed outdoor filming at any season of the year, and the place where producers found the most success was in a small industrial suburb of Los Angeles known as Hollywood. By 1913, Hollywood film crews were working non-stop to produce 200 reels a week. By 1915, Hollywood centered more than 60 percent of the film production in the United States.

A nickelodeon theater in Toronto, Ontario, in 1910. Although posters and decorated facades were used to attract people, the inside has bare walls and hard seats.

Feature Films

    Single-reel films of about 16 minutes of playing time were still the standard until 1907. Then, some companies began importing multiple-reel films from Europe. This initiated the feature films which quickly gained popularity among the middle class, as feature producers based their work on histories, literature, and stage productions that appealed a wealthier and better educated audience. These were the motion pictures of the silent era, which were simplistic in nature, they were acted in very animated movements to engage the eye, included written titles to create a mood and narrate the story, and were paired with live music played by musicians in the theater. In addition, independent feature film producers like Universal, Goldwyn, Fox, and Paramount, selected famous stage actors like Mary Pickford to play the leading roles in their productions and profit from star power.

The "Talkies"

    In 1927, Warner Bros. released its sound film "The Jazz Singer," a film that represented a major breakthrough as audiences heard an actor speaking and singing on screen for the first time. Talking films or "talkies" attracted audiences to the cinema in large numbers. By 1930, the silent film became something from the past.

Technicolor

    Although as far as 1895 eighty percent of films were colored to some extent by hand-tinting to chemical and mechanical means those methods never thrive. The hand-painting technique not only became impractical when films were mass-produced, but it created interference with the transmission of sound in films. However, in 1932 the Technicolor company designed a three-color system that improved its dye-transfer technique used to produce full-length films that during the next 25 years dominated in all color films.

    Technicolor was the most remarkable innovation during the Golden Age of cinema (the 1930s and 1940s) with a technology that could produce hyperreal and stunning images as in hit films like The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), and Singin' in the Rain (1952), leading to new ways of using color to tell stories.

The Censorship

    As film turned out into an incredibly profitable industry in the United States, important personalities of this industry like D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks not only became extremely wealthy, but also grew in influence. The public idolized celebrities, and these celebrities were also imitated in popular culture, however, because of their extravagant lifestyles and some of their screen performances, they were also criticized by others for representing a threat to national morals and social order. As a result, state and local governments sought to censor the content in films that displayed crime, violence, and sexually explicit material. However, the major Hollywood studios formed an association, the MPAA, that among other things established in 1930 a code of self-censorship for the motion picture industry that even today operates rating movies, alreting and indicating the age-appropriateness of a film while still protects the artistic freedom of the filmmakers.

Younger Audience, New Directors, and Computer Technology

    The younger audience of the late 1960s were attracted by films that put on view non-conformity toward conventional social order and that included the earliest manifestations of realistic and fierce violence in film, leading to an increase in youth-culture films and a more liberal attitude in the movie industry toward depictions of sex and violence that became present in many movies of the 1970s as in The Godfather (1972), The Exorcist (1973), and Jaws (1975).

    In the 1970s, a new type of director appeared. They were young, film-school educated, and brought sophistication and technical mastery to their work leading to a wave of blockbuster productions like Star Wars (1977), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and the available computer-generated special effects of that time played a role to the success of some large-budget productions.

    The 1990s saw the rise in technically spectacular blockbusters when movies started to be digitally manipulated using a variety of computer animation techniques and special effects as in Jurassic Park (1993), Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997), The Matrix (1999), and Toy Story, the first fully computer animated film in 1995.

    Movies began to move gradually from celluloid film to digitally filmed movies. In 2002, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones became the first major Hollywood movie filmed on high definition digital video.

    Innovations of digital technology and others have been integrated into the creation of motion pictures, giving high-resolution images, and many of these have advantages in the editing process. In just over a century, what started as a bet that motivated Muybridge to figure out a way to prove that a galloping horse is at some point suspended in the air led to a billionaire industry that transformed society, culture, politics, and beyond.

Sources of Information

• https://www.britannica.com/art/motion-picture
• https://youtu.be/vsnB4iBb78o
• https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/8-2-the-history-of-movies/
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-early-history-motion-pictures/#:~:text=In%201888%20in%20New%20York,a%20primitive%20motion%20picture%20camera
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-early-movie-audiences/
• https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/pickford-business-movies/
• https://www.loc.gov/collections/edison-company-motion-pictures-and-sound-recordings/articles-and-essays/history-of-edison-motion-pictures/origins-of-motion-pictures/
• https://youtu.be/pKSmcmueTbA
• https://youtu.be/aFkSjdaqbyE
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Georges-Melies
• https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/8-3-movies-and-culture/
• https://open.lib.umn.edu/mediaandculture/chapter/8-5-the-influence-of-new-technology/
• https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-nickelodeon-opens
• http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/how-technicolor-revolutionized-cinema-with-surreal-electric-colors-changed-how-we-see-our-world.html
• https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archibe/2015/06/beyond-black-and-white-the-forgotten-history-of-color-silent-films/396785/