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Introduction to Cinema Unit 1

Sikkim Manipal University Page No.: 1

Unit 1 Brief History of World Cinema

Structure:

1.1 Introduction

Objectives

1.2 The Beginnings of Cinema

1.3 Lumiere Brothers‟ Experiment

1.4 Silent Era

D. W. Griffith

Charlie Chaplin

1.5 The Advent of Sound

1.6 Color Movies1.7 Summary

1.8 Glossary

1.9 Terminal Questions

1.10 Answers

1.1 Introduction

What is World Cinema? If you sit back and recollect the number of movies

you have watched, you might roughly place them in two bags: films from

your own country, and „foreign films‟. Or you might take a step further and

classify them into tragedies, comedies, action movies, horror movies, goingby the film genres you must be familiar with by now from your reading of

unit-5 of the second semester SLM – History of Media . Possibly, you might

even group movies in terms of languages, dialects, attitudes and other

nuanced criteria.

World cinema in a general sense constitutes of Indian, Iranian, French,

American, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Danish, Italian cinema...... the trail

goes on. Surely, you can add to the list! From a broader perspective, world

cinema spans across several genres, and in a multitude of languages, the

experience of which can be studied in terms of the nature of cinematic

technique used, and even the stance of viewership which differs from

audience to audience and specifically from viewer to viewer. So to say, you,

the viewer, are also a part of the integral framework of cinema. No matter

from which part of the world you stem from, your experience of world





cinema is uniquely personal. And when the „personal factor‟ cannot be

evinced, there are certain tested ways of viewing cinema which may provebeneficial to you. Let us begin then with an understanding of „how to view

cinema‟ as a precursor to understanding the early beginnings of cinema

which are elaborated in this unit. Look up the following link to get an idea on

active viewership: [http://www.filmsite.org/filmview2.html ]

Objectives:

After studying this unit, you should be able to:

discuss the origin of cinema

describe the silent era

highlight the chief aspects of the sound era

elaborate how color movies have developed.

1.2 The Beginnings of Cinema

As you learnt in the SLM entitled History of Media in the previous semester,

optical toys, shadow shows, magic lanterns, and visual tricks have existed

for thousands of years. Many inventors, scientists, manufacturers and

scientists have observed the visual phenomenon that a series of individual

still pictures set into motion created the illusion of movement – a concept

termed persistence of vision .

Fig. 1.1: Magic Lantern (Source: wernernekes.de)

Persistence of Vision is an ability of the human brain to retain images

perceived by the eye for a brief period of time after they disappear from thefield of vision. (This made the art of cinema possible.) The illusion of motion

was first described by British physician Peter Mark Roget in 1824, and was

the first step in the development of the cinema. In the mid 19 th century

entrepreneurs started to exploit this phenomenon for its entertainment





value. Thereby, you see, cinema as we know it today had a very humble

beginning.Using multiple still cameras, which capture consecutive stages of

movement, Briton Eadweard Muybridge becomes the first man in history to

record continuous live action. In 1878, under the sponsorship of Leland

Stanford , Governor of California, Mayubridge successfully photographed a

horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24

stereoscopic cameras. It came to be called Series Photography , the

precursor of „movie – pictures‟.

True motion pictures, rather than eye-fooling 'animations', could only occur

after the development of film (flexible and transparent celluloid) that could

record split-second picture shots. Some of the first experiments in this

regard were conducted by Parisian innovator and French physiologist

Etienne – Jules Marey in the 1880s. In 1882, Marey , replaced Muybridge ‟s

multiple camera setup with the Chronophotographic gun – a single camera

capable of taking consecutive pictures of live action.

Marey's chronophotographs (multiple exposures on single glass plates and

on strips of sensitized paper – celluloid film – that passed automatically

through a camera of his own design) were revolutionary. He was soon able

to achieve a frame rate of 30 images. Further experimentation was

conducted by French-born Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince in 1888. Le Prince used long rolls of paper covered with photographic emulsion for a

camera that he devised and patented.

The work of Muybridge, Marey and Le Prince laid the groundwork for the

development of motion picture cameras, projectors and transparent celluloid

film – hence the development of cinema.

In 1887, George Eastman appropriated the invention of celluloid roll film

from Reverend Hannibal Godwin. Eastman began to mass produce it in

1889. Meanwhile, Thomas Alva Edison ‟s laboratory had been developing a

motion picture system known as the Kinetoscope. William Kennedy Laurie

Dickson , a young Edison Laboratories assistant was assigned to develop a

camera, which would be able to capture movement by allowing for more

extensive sequences than the chronophotographic gun. He designed a

motion picture camera that used „Eastman celluloid‟ stock. Kinetoscope





apparatus allowed only one person at a time to watch the short films through

a peephole.Self Assessment Questions

1. What do you mean by Persistence of Vision?

2. Who was the first man in history to record continuous live action using

the technique of multiple still cameras?

1.3 Lumiere Brothers’ Experiment

The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis , were sons of well known Lyons

based portrait painter Antoine Lumiere . Antoine, noting the financial rewards

of new photographic processes, abandoned his art and set up a business,

manufacturing and supplying photographic equipment. Joining him in thisventure was Louis who began experimenting with the photographic

equipment his father was manufacturing.

During his experimentation, Louis discovered a process, which assisted the

development of photography. He developed a new 'dry plate' process in

1881 at the age of seventeen, which became known as the Etiquette Bleue

process, and gave his father‟s business a welcome boost. A factory was

built soon after to manufacture the plates in the Monplaisir quarter of the

Lyons Suburbs.

By 1894 the Lumieres were producing around 15,000,000 plates a year.Antoine, by now a successful and well known businessman, was invited to a

demonstration of Edison‟s Peephole Kinetoscope in Paris. He was excited

by what he saw and returned to Lyons . He presented his son Louis with a

piece of Kinetoscope film, given to him by one of Edison‟s concessionaires.

The brothers worked through the winter of 1894, Auguste making the first

experiments. Their aim was to overcome the limitations and problems, as

they saw them, of Edison‟s peephole Kinetoscope. They identified two main

problems with Edison‟s device: first, its bulk – the Kinetograph – the camera,

was a colossal piece of machinery and its weight and size resigned it to the

studio. Secondly – the nature of the Kinetoscope – to the viewer, meant thatonly one person could experience the film at a time.





By early 1895, the brothers had invented their own device combining

camera with printer and projector and called it the Cinématographe.Patenting it on February 13th 1895, the Cinématographe much smaller than

Edison‟s Kinetograph, was lightweight (around five kilograms), and was

hand cranked. The Lumieres used a film speed of 16 frames per second,

much slower compared with Edison‟s 48 f rames per second – this meant

that less film was used and also the clatter and grinding associated with

Edison‟s device was reduced.

Perhaps most important was Louis’ decision to incorporate the principle of

intermittent movement using a device similar to that found in sewing

machines. This was something Edison had rejected as he struggled to

perfect projection using continuous movement. The brothers kept their newinvention a closely guarded secret with Auguste organising private

screenings to invited guests only.

The first of such screenings occurred on 22nd March 1895 at 44 Rue de

Rennes in Paris at an industrial meeting where a film especially for the

occasion, Workers leaving the Lumière factory , was shown. They caused a

sensation with their first film, although it only consisted of an everyday

outdoor image – factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home

or for a lunch break.

Unlike Edison, the Lumiere Brothers were quick to patent theCinématographe outside of their native France, applying for an English

Patent on April 18th 1895. The brothers continued to show their invention

privately, again on June 10th to photographers in Lyon. Such screenings

generated much discussion and widespread excitement surrounding this

new technology – in preparation for their first public screening.

As generally acknowledged, cinema (a word derived from Cinematographe )

was born on December 28, 1895, in Paris, France.





Fig. 1.2: Lumiere Brothers (Source: nationalmediamuseum.org.uk)

The Lumieres presented the first commercial exhibition of a projected

motion picture to a paying public in the world's first movie theatre – the

Salon Indien , at the Grand Cafe on Paris' Boulevard des Capucines . The

20-minute program included ten short films with twenty showings a day.

They used a film width of 35mm, and a speed of 16 frames per second – an

industry norm until the talkies.

Aside from technological achievements, another Frenchman who was a

member of the Lumiere's viewing audience, Georges Melies , added to the

development of cinema with his own imaginative fantasy films. When the

Lumiere brothers wouldn't sell him a Cinematographe , he developed his

own camera (a version of the Kinetograph), and then set up Europe's first

film studio in 1897. An illusionist and stage magician, and a wizard at

special effects, Melies exploited the new medium with a pioneering

14-minute science fiction work, A Trip to the Moon (1902).

Melies called his filmed scenes Tableaux. The shots were static, but the

action within each tableaux was full of movement. Melies also introduced

the idea of narrative storylines, plots, character development, illusion, and

fantasy into film, including trick photography (early special effects),dissolves, wipes, 'magical' super-impositions and double exposures, the use

of mirrors, slow-motion and fade-outs/fade-ins.

Highly impressed with the story telling ability of Melies, a former

Kinetoscope operator Edwin Stanton Porter developed parallel action- telling





stories in a simultaneous, overlapping fashion. In Porter‟s most successful

film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), parallel action becomes thefoundation of narrative film making. In an effective, scary, full-screen close

up (placed at either the beginning or at the end of the film at the discretion of

the exhibitor), a bandit shot his gun directly into the audience. The film also

included exterior scenes, chases on horseback, actors who moved toward

(and away from) the camera, a camera pan with the escaping bandits, and a

camera mounted on a moving train. Porter also developed the process of

film editing – a crucial film technique that would further the cinematic art.

In the early 1900s, motion pictures were no longer innovative experiments.

They soon became an escapist entertainment medium for the working-class

masses, and one could spend an evening at the cinema for a cheap entryfee. Kinetoscope parlours, lecture halls, and storefronts were often

converted into nickelodeons , the first real movie theatres. The normal

admission charge was a nickel (sometimes a dime – hence the name

nickelodeon .) They usually remained open from early morning to midnight.

The first nickelodeon, a small store-front theatre or dance hall converted to

view films, was opened in Pittsburgh by Harry Davis in June of 1905,

showing The Great Train Robbery . Urban, foreign-born, working-class,

immigrant audiences loved the cheap form of entertainment and were the

predominant cinema-goers. The demand for films gradually boosted the

volume of films being produced, which resulted in higher profits for their

producers.

Self Assessment Questions

3. The first public screening of the Cinématographe by the Lumiere

Brothers was at ______________.

4. The first real movie theatres were called ________.

1.4 Silent Era

The art of motion pictures grew into full maturity in the "silent era" before

silent films were replaced by talking pictures in the late 1920s. One-reel

shorts, silent films, melodramas, comedies, or novelty pieces were usually

accompanied with piano playing, sing-along songs, illustrated lectures, other

kinds of magic lantern slide shows or skits.





As silent films had no synchronized sound for dialogue, onscreen inter titles

were used to narrate story points, present key dialogue and sometimeseven comment on the action for the audience. Inter titles often became

graphic elements themselves, featuring illustrations or abstract decorations

that commented on the action.

Showings of silent films almost always featured live music, starting with the

pianist at the first public projection of movies by the Lumiere Brothers. From

the beginning, music was recognized as essential, contributing to the

atmosphere and giving the audience vital emotional cues.

Until the standardization of the projection speed of 24 frames per second for

sound films in 1926, silent films were shot at variable speeds anywhere from

16 to 23 frames per second.

1.4.1 D. W. Griffith

More than anyone in the silent era, D. W. Griffith saw the potential of a film

as an expressive medium, and exploited that prospect. Griffith‟s films

became part of history in the making – unleashing the power of movies as a

catalyst for social change.

Fig. 1.3: D. W. Griffith (Source: silent-movies.org)

As a young man he was determined to become a playwright and left home

to learn his craft as an actor. For twelve years he crisscrossed the country,

acting in minor productions, learning how to tell a story and how to sell it.





Griffith played a number of roles as an actor before agreeing to move

behind the camera as a director at the Biograph Company. During his fiveyears at Biograph, Griffith took the raw elements of moviemaking as they

had evolved up to that time – lighting, continuity, editing and acting.

Made in 1915, Birth of a Nation directed by Griffith was the first masterpiece

of cinema, bringing to film the status accorded to the visual and performing

arts. A story of the Civil War, Birth of a Nation captured the violence, the

spectacle, and the excitement of the war. Using extreme and dramatic

camera angles and complexly interweaved edits, the film brought an event

to life unlike any film had done before. The film, however beautiful, was a

sad testament to the deep prejudice of the times, and black audiences were

outraged by its racist distortion of history.

Griffith‟s next film, Intolerance (1916) was, paradoxically, a plea for

brotherhood and understanding as well as a polemic against the radical

social reformers who had demanded that The Birth of a Nation be censored.

The film marked a new standard in film spectacle and in narrative

complexity, intertwining four separate stories from four different historical

eras. Following Intolerance with Broken Blossoms (1919) and Way Down

East (1920) Griffith solidified his reputation as America‟s preeminent

director. He continued to reinvent the language of film, astounding people

with epic stories, simultaneous narratives, sophisticated set design, and

extensive travelling shows, which accompanied his films city to city.

Broken Blossoms was the story of a tender love between a Chinese man

and a young girl with a brutish and bigoted father. The beautiful and

emotionally explosive film was the first from Griffith‟s new production

company, formed that same year. The company, United Artists, brought

Griffith together with the three greatest performers of the day; Douglas

Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, and Mary Pickford. Griffith spent the next ten

years making films with United Artists and Paramount, but could never again

reach the fame of The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance .

As the 1920s roared on, Griffith‟s films seemed more and more old – fashioned, and no longer appealed to the younger audiences. A Victorian

storyteller, he had become temperamentally and artistically out of sync with

his times. Though he had almost single-handedly invented the art of modern

cinema, Griffith spent the last fifteen years of his life unable to find work. On





July 23, 1948 he died in a small Los Angeles hotel. In the wake of his death

and the coming of age of the movie industry, D.W. Griffith took his place inAmerican cultural history as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time.

1.4.2 Charlie Chaplin

Charlie Chaplin is most recognized as an icon of the silent film era, often

associated with his popular "Little Tramp" character; the man with the

toothbrush moustache, bowler hat, bamboo cane, and a funny walk. The

Little Tramp always found himself wobbling into awkward situations and

miraculously wobbling away. More than any other figure, it is this kind-

hearted character that we associate with the time before the talkies.

Born in London in 1889, Chaplin first visited America with a theatre

company in 1907. Appearing as “Billy” in the play “Sherlock Holmes”, the

young Chaplin toured the country twice. On his second tour, he met Mack

Sennett and was signed to Keystone Studios to act in films. In 1914 Chaplin

made his first one-reeler, Making a Living . That same year he made thirty-

four more short films, including Caught in a Cabaret, Caught in the Rain,

The Face on the Bar-Room Floor, and His Trysting Place. These early silent

shorts allowed very little time for anything but physical comedy, and Chaplin

was a master at it.

Chaplin‟s slapstick acrobatics made him famous, but the subtleties of his

acting made him great. For Chaplin, the best way to locate the humour orpathos of a situation was to create an environment and walk around it until

something natural happened.

Fig. 1.4: Charlie Chaplin (Source: myclassiclyrics.com)





The concern of early theatre and film was to simply keep the audience‟s

attention through overdramatic acting that exaggerated emotions, butChaplin saw in film an opportunity to control the environment enough to

allow subtlety to come through.

With the advent of the feature-length talkies, the need for more subtle acting

became apparent. To maintain the audience‟s attention throughout a six-reel

film, an actor needed to move beyond constant slapstick. Chaplin had

demanded the need for depth long before anyone else.

After the arrival of sound films, Chaplin made The Circus (1928), City Lights

(1931), as well as Modern Times (1936) before he committed to sound.

These were essentially silent films scored with his own music and sound

effects. City Lights contained arguably his most perfect balance of comedy

and sentimentality. Chaplin's dialogue films made in Hollywood were The

Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952).


5. The film The Birth of a Nation was directed by _________.

a) Edwin S Porter b) D. W. Griffith c) Charlie Chaplin

6. In 1914 Chaplin‟s first one-reeler film was __________.

1.5 The Advent of Sound

In the early years after the introduction of sound, films incorporatingsynchronized dialogue were known as "talking pictures," or "talkies." The

first commercial screening of movies with fully synchronized sound took

place in New York City in April 1923.

The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was The Jazz Singer ,

released in October 1927. The Jazz Singer directed by Alan Crosland

featuring the movie star Al Jolson was originally conceived as a silent

picture with musical interludes, but it accidentally developed several

spontaneous talking scenes. Al Jolson‟s improvised lines attracted large

audiences who had never heard informal dialogue on film before.

Supported by a rich orchestral score, Jewish music, and popular songsperformed by Jolson, The Jazz Singer became a huge international

success.





By the early 1930s, the talkies were a global phenomenon. Most of the

early talkies were successful at the box-office, but many of them were ofpoor quality – dialogue-dominated play adaptations, with stilted acting (from

inexperienced performers) and an unmoving camera or microphone.

Screenwriters were required to place more emphasis on characters in their

scripts, and title-card writers became unemployed. The first musicals were

only literal transcriptions of Broadway shows taken to the screen.

Nonetheless, a tremendous variety of films were produced with a sense of

wit, style, skill, and elegance that have never been equalled – before or

since.

Self Assessment Question

7. The first feature film originally presented as a talkie was _________ .a) The Jazz Singer b) Intolerance c) The Kid

8. What were „talking pictures‟?

1.6 Color Movies

As with sound, experimentation with color film dates back to the early years

of cinema. The first hand-tinted movies appeared as early as 1896; with

each frame elaborately painted under a magnifying glass. As an alternative

to dyeing the already developed film, the Belgian company Gevaert

introduced colored celluloid to be used as a film base. This process gave

the effect of more evenly distributed hues.

The principles of „color photography‟, developed in 1855 by James Clerk

Maxwell , the Scottish physicist, were gradually applied to cinematography.

Maxwell proved that practically all natural colors may be reproduced by

mixing red, green and blue light. By 1899, F. Marshall Lee and Edward R.

Turner patented a color camera with rotating red, green and blue filters

placed in front or behind the lens.

In 1922, the Boston based Technicolor Company invented a camera

capable of splitting the incoming light into two beams with two negatives.

After a complex chemical procedure, two film positives were developed: onedyed orange-red, the other, green. The positives were cemented together

for projection resulting in good quality color images. Some of the prominent

movies shot in this fashion were, The Ten Commandments (1923) and

Merry Widow (1925).





One of the drawbacks of early „technicolour‟ was the shifting registration of

colors. By 1932, however, a new three color camera was developed; it wasperfected by the end of the decade. The first three-colour technicolor film is

Disney‟s animation, Flowers and Trees (1932). Becky Sharp (1935) is the

first full-length live action feature film to use this technology. The Adventures

of Robinhood (1938), Gone with the Wind (1939) are some other great

movies, which benefited most from the three strips processing in color.

Cinema which was born in 1895 in Paris soon spread all over the world.

From being a mere visual entertainment in black and white, it transformed

into an audio visual colorful treat, appealing both to head and heart.


9. The first three color Technicolor film was Disney‟s ________ .

10. Who developed the principles of „colour photography‟?

1.7 Summary

In this unit, you got an overview of the early history of cinema; in particular

of the silent era, the sound era and the advent of color in movies. You may

now make a list of all the movies mentioned in this unit, watch and analyze

them in view of the link provided in the introduction, on „the art of active

viewership‟. You will no doubt be surprised to see history unfold in a new

light: of the beauty of early innovations in terms of cinematic technique, and

the thrill of being part of a yester-year audience exposed anew to the then

„modern‟ technology.

For instance, you might have watched Charlie Chaplin flicks a zillion times,

but watch them (in the historical perspective) by way of active viewership

and you will live through his movies afresh with a heightened cinematic

experience. Happy viewership!

1.8 Glossary

Magic Lantern: a 17th century apparatus designed to project images from

glass plates.Persistence of Vision: an ability of the human brain to retain images

perceived by the eye for a brief period of time after they disappear from the

field of vision.





Continuity editing: an editing principle, which maintains a smooth and

chronological flow of action.Hand tinting – Manual coloring of film strip, which produces a desired mood

for the projected image.

1.9 Terminal Questions

1. What were the various inventions which contributed to the growth of

Cinema?

2. Write a note on the contributions of D. W. Griffith to the Silent movie era.

3. Describe the change of black and white films into color movies.

1.10 Answers


1. The ability of the human brain to retain images perceived by the eye.

2. Eadweard Muybridge

3. The Grand Cafe on Paris’s Boulevard de Capuchines in Paris, France.

4. Nickelodeons

5. B

6. Making a Living

7. The Jazz Singer

8. Films incorporating synchronized dialogues were called „talking

pictures‟.

9. Flowers and Trees

10. James Clerk Maxwell

Terminal Questions

1. Hints: Chronophotographic gun – Thomas Alva Edison ‟s Kinetoscope-

Lumiere Brother‟s Cinematographe – Color film – mass production of

Color film by Eastman – process of synchronization of Sound.

2. Hints: Extreme and dramatic camera angles – complexly interweaved

edits – narrative complexity – simultaneous narratives – sophisticated

set design.

3. Hints: Hand tinted movies – coloured celluloid – rotating primary colour

filters before the lens of the camera was inventing a camera capable of

splitting the incoming light into two beams which expose two negatives –

later a new three color camera is developed.

introduction to cinema_unit 1final

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