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Brief history of cinematography

Movies developed gradually from a carnival novelty to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century. Motion picture movies have had a substantial impact on the arts, technology, and politics.

William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, chief engineer with the Edison Laboratories, is credited with the invention of a practicable form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images, the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. In 1893 at the Chicago World Fair Thomas Edison introduced to the public two pioneering inventions based on this innovation: the kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the kinetoscope – a cabinet in which a continuous loop of Dickson's celluloid movie, powered by an electric motor, was backlit by an incandescent lamp and seen through a magnifying lens. Kinetoscope parlors were supplied with fifty-foot movie snippets photographed by Dickson. These sequences recorded mundane events as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations [5].

Kinetoscope parlors soon spread successfully to Europe. Edison, however, never attempted to patent these instruments on the other side of the Atlantic, since they relied so greatly on previous experiments and innovations from Britain and Europe. This enabled the development of imitations, such as the camera devised by British electrician and scientific instrument maker Robert William Paul and his partner Birt Acres.

In 1875, in France, Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph, a portable, three-in-one device: camera, printer, and projector. Later that year, in Paris, Lumières began exhibitions of projected movies before the paying public, beginning the general conversion of the medium to projection. They quickly became Europe's main producers with their recordings of mundane events like “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” and comic vignettes like “The Sprinkler Sprinkled” (both 1895) [5].

The movies of the time were seen mostly via temporary storefront spaces and traveling exhibitors or as acts in vaudeville programs. A movie could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life, a public event, a sporting event or slapstick. There was little to no cinematic technique: no editing and usually no camera movement, and flat, stagey compositions. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry to mushroom before the end of the century, in countries around the world [4].

Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians and sometimes sound effects, and with dialogue and narration presented in intertitles.



Paris stage magician Georges Méliès began shooting and exhibiting movies in 1896. His stock-in-trade became movies of fantasy and the bizarre, including “A Trip to the Moon” (1902), possibly the first movie to portray space travel. He pioneered many of the fundamental special effects techniques used in movies for most of the twentieth century, demonstrating that movie had unprecedented power to distort visible reality rather than just faithfully recording it. He also led the way in making multi-scene narratives as long as fifteen minutes.

Edwin S. Porter, Edison's leading director in these years, pushed forward the sophistication of movie editing in works like “Life of an American Fireman” and the first Western ever, “The Great Train Robbery” (both 1903). Porter arguably discovered that the basic unit of structure in a movie is the shot, rather than the scene (the basic unit of structure in a play).

This helped establish the medium as more than a fad and encouraged the increase of nickelodeons, the first permanent movie theaters [2, p. 1061]. The oldest cinema in the world still in operation today is the Pionier Cinema which opened as the Helios on the 26 September 1909 in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland). The previously anarchic industry became major business.

The standard length of a movie remained about ten to fifteen minutes, through the first decade of the century, partly based on producers’ assumptions about the attention spans of their still largely working class audiences.

The Australian movie “The Story of the Kelly Gang” (also known as “Ned Kelly and His Gang”) is widely regarded as the world’s first “feature length” movie. Its 80 minute running time was unprecedented when it was released in 1906. It wasn’t until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature movies.

Soon Europe created multiple-reel period extravaganzas that were even longer. With international box office successes like “Queen Elizabeth” (France, 1912), “Quo Vadis?” (Italy, 1913) and “Cabiria” (Italy, 1914), the feature movie began to replace the short as the cinema's central form [24].

Along with a boom in high-toned literary adaptations, the movies gained recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century.

Until World War I, the movies of France and Italy had been the most globally popular. But as the war caused a devastating interruption in the European movie industries, the American industry gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: movie factory for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and controlling the market in many of them.

In some ways, the 1910s marked the first serious split between mainstream movies – commercial motion pictures that are made by major entertainment studios or companies and art house movies – serious, independent motion pictures aimed at a niche market rather than a mass market audience [1, p. 18].

In 1915, in France the cinematic avant-garde – experimental or innovative works, pushing of the boundaries of what is accepted as the status quo in the cultural realm. A group of moviemakers began experimenting with optical and pictorial effects as well as rhythmic editing. The trend became known as French Impressionist Cinema.

Germany’s most distinctive contribution into cinematography was the dark, hallucinatory worlds of German Expressionism, which advanced the power of anti-realistic presentation to put internal states of mind onscreen, as well as strongly influenced the emerging horror genre.

The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called dialectical or intellectual montage, which strove to make non-linear, often violently clashing, images express ideas and provoke emotional and intellectual reactions in the viewer.

Meanwhile, the first feature-length silent movie was made in India by Dadasaheb Phalke, considered to be the Father of Indian Cinema. The movie was the period piece – a movie, notable for its lavish production values, which takes place in certain time period in history, “Raja Harishchandra” (1913), and it laid the foundation for a series of period movies. By the next decade the output of Indian Cinema was an average of 27 movies per year [5].

In 1920s the possibilities of cinematography kept increasing as cameras became more mobile. Screen acting became more of a craft, without its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism.

Experimentation with sound movie technology, both for recording and playback, was virtually constant throughout the silent era, but the twin problems of accurate synchronization and sufficient amplification had been difficult to overcome. In 1926, Hollywood studio Warner Bros. introduced the Vitaphone system, producing short movies of live entertainment acts and public figures and adding recorded sound effects and orchestral scores to some of its major features. The success of movies of this type convinced the largely reluctant industrialists that “talking pictures”, or “talkies”, were the future [3].

The change was remarkably swift. By the end of 1929, Hollywood was almost all-talkie, with several competing sound systems (soon to be standardized). Total changeover was slightly slower in the rest of the world, principally for economic reasons. Cultural reasons were also a factor in countries like China and Japan, where silents co-existed successfully with sound well into the 1930s, indeed producing what would be some of the most revered classics in those countries, like Wu Yonggang's “The Goddess” (China, 1934) and Yasujiro Ozu's “I Was Born, But...” (Japan, 1932). But even in Japan, a figure such as the benshi, the live narrator who was a major part of Japanese silent cinema, found his acting career was ending.

Sound further tightened the grip of major studios in numerous countries: the vast expense of the transition overwhelmed smaller competitors, while the novelty of sound lured vastly larger audiences for those producers that remained.

Creatively, however, the rapid transition was a difficult one, and in some ways, movie briefly reverted to the conditions of its earliest days. The late 20s were full of static, stagey talkies as artists in front of and behind the camera struggled with the stringent limitations of the early sound equipment and their own uncertainty as to how to utilize the new medium. Many stage performers, directors and writers were introduced to cinema as producers sought personnel experienced in dialogue-based storytelling. Many major silent moviemakers and actors were unable to adjust and found their careers severely curtailed or even ended [4].

This awkward period was fairly short-lived. 1929 was a watershed year: William Wellman with “Chinatown Nights”, Rouben Mamoulian with “Applause”, Alfred Hitchcock with “Blackmail” (Britain's first sound feature), were among the directors to bring greater fluidity to talkies and experiment with the expressive use of sound.

Sound movies emphasized and benefited different genres more so than silents did. Most obviously, the musical movie was born; the first classic-style Hollywood musical was “The Broadway Melody” (1929). In France, avant-garde director René Clair made surreal use of song and dance in comedies like “Under the Roofs of Paris” (1930) and “Le Million” (1931). The trend thrived best in India, where the influence of the country's traditional song-and-dance drama made the musical the basic form of most sound movies; virtually unnoticed by the Western world for decades, this Indian popular cinema, known as Bollywood, would nevertheless become the world's most prolific [2].

During World War II the desire for wartime propaganda created a renaissance in the movie industry in Britain, with realistic war dramas like “Forty-Ninth Parallel” (1941), “Went the Day Well?” (1942) and “The Way Ahead” (1944).

The harsh reality of wartime also made movies a form of escapism, bringing interest in more fantastical subjects. These included Britain's Gainsborough melodramas (including The Man in Grey and The Wicked Lady), and movies like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Heaven Can Wait, I Married a Witch and Blithe Spirit. The decade probably also saw the so-called women's pictures – movies, depicting strong independent women, such as “Now”, “Voyager”, “Random Harvest” and “Mildred Pierce” at the peak of their popularity [19].

In the late 1940s, in Britain, Ealing Studios embarked on their series of celebrated comedies, including “Whisky Galore”, “Passport to Pimlico” and “The Man in the White Suit”, and Carol Reed directed his influential thrillers “Odd Man Out”, “The Fallen Idol” and “The Third Man”.

During the immediate post-war years the cinematic industry was threatened by television, and the increasing popularity of the medium meant that some movie theatres would bankrupt and close. The demise of the studio system spurred the self-commentary of movies like “Sunset Boulevard” (1950) and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) [17].

Distressed by the increasing number of closed theatres, studios and companies would find new and innovative ways to bring audiences back. These included attempts to literally widen their appeal with new screen formats. Cinemascope, which would remain a 20th Century Fox distinction until 1967, was announced with 1953's The Robe. VistaVision, Cinerama, boasted a “bigger is better” approach to marketing movies to a dwindling US audience. This resulted in the revival of epic movies to take advantage of the new big screen formats.

Gimmicks also proliferated to lure in audiences. The fad for 3D movie would last for only two years, 1952-1954, and helped sell “House of Wax” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon”.

Across the globe, the 1950s marked a very productive period for Indian Cinema, with more than 200 movies being made. Indian movies also gained greater recognition through movies like “Pather Panchali” (1955), from critically acclaimed Academy Award winning director Satyajit Ray. Television began competing seriously with movies projected in theatres, but surprisingly it promoted more moviegoing rather than curtailing it.

During the late 1950s and 1960s the French New Wave directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard produced movies such as “Les quatre cents coups” and “Jules et Jim” which broke the rules of cinema's narrative structure [24].

In Britain such movies as “Repulsion”, “Darling”, “Alfie”, “Blowup” and “Georgy Girl” (all in 1965-1966) helped to reduce prohibitions sex and nudity on screen, while the casual sex and violence of the James Bond movies, beginning with “Dr. No” in 1962 would render the series popular worldwide.

In documentary movie the sixties saw the blossoming of direct cinema, an observational style of movie making.

The post-classical cinema is the term used to describe the period following the decline of the studio system during the late 1960s. During the 1970s, moviemakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths.

This term was also used to describe the changing methods of storytelling. The new methods of drama and characterization played upon audience expectations acquired during the classical period: story chronology may be scrambled, storylines may feature unsettling plot twists– changes in the expected direction or outcome of the plot, main characters may behave in a morally ambiguous fashion, and the lines between the antagonist and protagonist may be blurred [2].

The end of the decade saw the first major international marketing of Australian cinema, as Peter Weir's movies “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “The Last Wave” and Fred Schepisi's “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” gained critical acclaim. In 1979, Australian moviemaker George Miller also garnered international attention for his violent, low-budget action movie “Mad Max”.

During the 1980s, audiences began increasingly watching movies on their home VCRs. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. Eventually, the sale and rental of movies on home video became a significant second venue for exhibition of movies, and an additional source of revenue for the movie companies [18].

British cinema was given a boost during the early 1980s by the arrival of David Puttnam's company Goldcrest Movies. The movies “Chariots of Fire”, “Gandhi”, “The Killing Fields” and “A Room with a View” appealed to a middlebrow audience which was increasingly being ignored by the major studios.

During the 1990s movies, for the most part, would premiere in a wider number of theatres, although, to this day, some movies still premiere using the route of the limited release system. Against some expectations, the rise of the multiplex cinemas– cinemas with multiple screens, typically six or ten, housed in a specially designed buildings, did not allow less mainstream movies to be shown, but simply allowed the major blockbusters– financially sucessful movies, to be given an even greater number of screenings. However, movies that had been overlooked in cinemas were increasingly being given a second chance on home video and later DVD.

During that decade major studios began to create their own semi-independent production companies to finance and produce non-mainstream fare. 1994 marked the beginning of movie and video distribution online. During the late 1990s, another cinematic transition began, from physical movie stock to digital cinema technology. Meanwhile DVDs became the new standard for consumer video, replacing VHS tapes.

Nowadays the rapid development of technology makes it much easier for regular people to write, shoot, edit and distribute their own movies without the large apparatus of the movie industry.

 






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