Motion pictures don’t really move. There a bunch of images shown at 24 images per second at a 1/60th of a second each. this coupled with the principal of persistence of vision made the images come to life. People have figured this was possible since the ancient egyptians, but it wasn’t ever explained until Peter Mark Roget did in 1824. He thought it came from people’s ability to remember an image for a short time after, but it was later found to be the opposite - peoples minds having trouble distinguish all the images, so they get moshed together into one moving picture.
Magic lantern displays and shadow puppet plays in china, france and other parts of the globe were pretty popular from 1780s to 1870s. the closest thing to a moving picture was the Phenakistoscope - later renamed Zoetrope. it was a a moving wheel with images and slits above circling the inside of a wheel that would create the illusion of a moving image when spun - fairly popular though novelty display in the 1860s. Later, Ottomar Anschutz invented the Electrical Tachyscope, which worked similarly as the Zoetrope but used flickering lights instead of slits. he then made the Projecting Electrotachyscope, which displayed the image on a screen.
It was famously Eadweard Muybridge who made the first motion picture in the modern sense in 1872. He would capture the movement of birds, and humans by having the subject set off tripwire attached to a series of cameras. It started as a bet between Muybridge and Leland Stanford, the governor of California at the time, on whether or not a horse ever has all its feet in the air while sprinting. What resulted is the now iconic clip of a horse galloping around the Palo Alto racetrack in California in 1878.
Étienne-Jules Marey was the inventer of the first “video camera” in 1882. It originally photographed 12 photos onto 12 glass plates until 1888, where the design was changed to paper film and could now capture 40 images. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was the first to put it into a single lens in april of 1887. He also made a projection device that utilized Maltese cross movement to make a smoother illusion of movement - this technique is still used in projectors today. Unfortunately, Le Prince disappeared in 1890 with his inventions, but fortunately, he was far from the only one working on a motion camera.
The Lumiere Brothers combined projection and photography with the Cinematographe in February 1895. Like other projectionist before them, they would display they’re movies to the public, - usually one minute documentaries - most famously L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat which is considered to be the first commercially successfully instance of the medium.
The Lumiere Brothers saw no future in the medium and pursed it purely out of curiosity. Thomas Edison, however, saw money in the field and would stage his films rather then being caught. He originally intended for them to be peep-shows - filing erotic dancers and bodybuilders - but changed his mind to commercial product. Edison’s films focused on the human body, often with “exaggerated masculinity (the boxing films) and stylized sensuality (the Ella Lola and Carmencita films).” He also liked to play into novelty. He parodied boxing films of the time with The Boxing Cats, displayed violence in Rat Killing and his film The Kiss lead to one of the first forms of film censorship. He also filmed the first advertisement, Dewar’s Scotch Whiskey.
Movie Theaters - called nickelodeons at the time - were quickly becoming america’s favorite past time. “By 1907, roughly two million viewers attended the nickelodeons daily, and by 1908, there were more than 8,000 nickelodeons in existence in the United States.”
While the invention of the motion picture was being developed, the art of the motion picture was as well. Georges Méliès was a magician who brought his sense of wizardry to the screen in special effects. His most acclaimed film, Le Voyage dans la lune was a worldwide sensation, and created a vocabulary of movie magic tricky that stayed until the digital era (cuts, double exposure, dissolves, etc).
A pioneer in the narrative film was Alice Guy. Her films were relatively unknown for her time until her work was rediscovered by feminist historians the late 1970s. She was the Sectary for Léon Gaumont, a french inventer who made a moving image camera of his own. her first attempts at directing were through advertisements, newsreels and and instructional films, but is wasn’t until 1896 where she made one of the first narrative films, La Fée aux Choux. She then worked with stage performs and made films in a variety of genres and epics like La Vie du Christ in 1906. She hired more directors to keep up with the output of her and gaumont studio, Gaumont Studios, and her successes today is often attributed to them rather than her.
While Guy was getting married and moving to america, Edison and Edwin S. Porter were revolutionizing cinema, particularly with their film The Life of an American Fireman (1903) which employed new techniques such as: close-up, medium and wide shots, dissolves to display passage of time and cutting staged shots with footage. Their next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), continued to the language of film. the film featured Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson who later became synonymous with the “Broncho Billy” Character he would play for the sever years, making him the first film star.
Note: Cartoonist Winsor McCay made some of the the first animated films. Each short film took thousands of drawings individually photographed for a few minutes of motion. He returned to cartooning in the 1920s.
People were making innovations in film around the world. Cecil M. Hepworth’s film Rescued by Rover (1905) in England is consider to be the first film with paid actors, and was a precursor to Rin Tin Tin and lassie by having a dog be the hero - it also started the cliche of ending on a freeze frame.
In America, Edison was in legal battles in attempts to monopolize the cinema trade with the Motion Picture Patents Company and assert he was the inventor of the motion picture camera (he wasn’t).
D. W. GRIFFITH started his career as in actor in Rescued from the Eagle’s Nest (1908) when he was low on funds, but he liked working in the medium and quickly started directing. He made roughly 450 films in five years and developed a style that hearkens back to Victorian literature while also being popular with the public. He marketed himself as the inventor of all his techniques - he wasn’t; he just took them the farthest of anyone. “He used a then-unprecedented number of camera setups to enhance the speed of the narrative.” He also was hard on rehearsing and having more “natural movements”; moving away from conventions, but stayed making short films.
In Italy, Enrico Guazzoni made the first blockbuster, Quo Vadis? (1913). A 2 hour epic made with nine reels of film and international success. This coupled with Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) motivated Griffith to make his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915). The film was a massive success, through nowadays its better known for how it reflects his abhorrent racism and sexism. African American’s protested the film even before it was out, which baffled Griffith who insisted the film was the truth and fair.
Griffith’s career would spiral from the creation of his next film Intolerance (1916). Intolerance was three and a half hour epic with four different narratives spanning different time periods (ranging from the Babylons to the crucifixion of Christ) to “prove his point that revolutionary ideas have always been persecuted.” It costed an unprecedented $1.9 million out of his own pocket, and was a commercial flop. He attempt cutting two of the films narratives into their own films but the damage was already done. He never finical recovered and beside the odd, small melodrama film, he stayed out of the public eye.
Lois Weber was a pennsylvania native who worked in Alice Guy’s Gaumont Studio as a screenwriter. She eventually started acting in films with her husband and directed a few shot films before quickly becoming one of the most famous and sot after directors of her time. She was also the first women to make her own production company, Weber Productions in 1917. Her films typically dealt with social issues she felt strongly about like birth control and the education system, and Her attention to nuances bleed into more purposeful set designs and complex characters then her peers.
Thomas Ince played a big role in cementing motion pictures as a business. Although his films were influential for their time, his legacy is best felt as a producer where he introduced assembly line like systems and attitudes to the studio. He had a lot of control of his directors and would oversee the production of multiple films at one, although this lead to less creative output overall.
Back to Edison, his idea to monopolize the medium anchored around The Motion Picture Patents Company (also known as The Trust), which was a joining of seven production companies including his own. He later got deals with Eastman Kodak to get exclusive access to a celluloid film manufacturer and three other french productions (including Gaumont Studio) to make ten companies that controlled most motion picture production in America and Europe. Part of what made The Trust successful is that they claimed between the ten companies, they had all the patents needed to produce a film (all these technologies were based off the patents of The Lumiere Brothers, La Prince and others discussed preciously, which were all part of The Trust).
The first person to fight against The Trust was Carl Laemmle. Using his company, The Laemmle Film Service, (later known as the Independent Moving Pictures Company or IMP) and aided by William Fox - owner of Fox Film Corporation - they put up statical advertisements and cartoons as well as talking to nickelodeon owners directly to “come out of it” and offered to screen there films for far less. Edison responded with everything and the book: lawsuits, coercive action and even hiring local thugs to smash rival studios. “In 1915, the courts ruled that the Trust was, in fact, a monopoly, and Edison’s scheme collapsed.”
Note: Florence Lawrence, a star at the time famous for working with biography (in The Trust) was signed to work with Laemmle. They generated publicly for it by creating rumours that lawrence had died in a street car accident.
Note: Most of Film Production had moved into the west, specially Los Angeles. This was because of its good weather, variety of filming locations and distance from The Trust in New York City
Mack Sennett’s Keystone Film Company, produced fast-pace slapstick comedies, but they would’t get much notice until the meteoric rise of Charlie Chaplin. He was originally hired for $150 a week by was signed to a million for eight films a year at First National studio once he became an international sensation. Chaplin later founded his own studio, United Artists Studios, in collaboration with Griffith, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr.
Many large studios of today got there start during this time. Laemmle turned IMP into many smaller companies to make Universal Pictures. Metro Gold Mayer started putting their iconic lion and the beginning of their movies. “Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players merged with Jesse Lasky’s Feature Play Company to form Paramount Pictures.” Paramount’s “vertical integration” tactic (owning the theaters) made them effectively have a monopoly for some time. Jack, Sam, Albert, and Harry Warner formed Warner Bros. Columbia Pictures was founded by Jack and Harry Cohn - that latter of which was nicknamed “the white fang” for his brutal business strategies.
Although Chaplin was the most popular, he had stiff competition. typecasting was very popular at the time; audiences loved recognizing their favorite heros, damsels, and villains in multiple films. Early film serials screening weekly also got the public to fall in love with particular faces
Note: examples of serials of the time include: Charles Brabin’s What Happened to Mary? (1912), Louis J. Gasnier and Donald MacKenzie’s The Perils of Pauline (1914), and Howard Hansel’s The Million Dollar Mystery (1914).
Now we start seeing place like New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’s The Roxy. Paramount starts using predatory tactics like block booking (theater buying a whole slate of films) and blind bidding (forced to bid on a film before seeing it); these would later be outlawed. but a bigger threat was coming in that would last until the early sound era in 1934, censorship. This started with a suite of scandals. First the murder of director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, who was later found to have love letters to two of his female stars. Fatty Arbuckle was wrapped in the murder of Virginia Rappe; he was allegedly to have raped her at a party. Him, along with minter and normand left the screen shortly after (Arbuckle tried to make a comeback years later under the name - im not joking - “Will B. Good.” it was ultimately unsuccessful). Wallace Reid, one of the biggest stars at the time, died in 1923 of a drug overdose.
In later 1922, Motion Picture Studios created Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (or MPPDA). They patrolled the private lives of actors and directors and insured contracts had morality clauses that must be abided by.
An interesting figure in this era was Cecil B. DeMille. who made moralistic movies that portrayed people committing sin and soon getting punishment for it. It was up to code because it should bad people doing bad things, while also allowing DeMille to show sex and violence in a film to pack a theater.
At the same time, Robert Flaherty was making the first documentary. His film Nanook of the North (1922) was both a commercial success and informed in public on Eskimo life near the Hudson’s Bay, filmed on location in the Hudson’s Bay. He subsequent films never captured the success of his debut, and scholars later found that many shoots were staged for dramatic effect.
A peculiar case in silent film of the time is Erich von Stroheim. He was obsessed with what he called “extreme naturalism”. Each film he made was incredibly long, went over budget and was cut down by the studio who typically didn’t like him. His film Greed(1924) was originally 42 reels long, but MGM cut it down to 10 reels and took two years to film.
The first known black director was William Foster, who used his experience as stage manager to write, get actors and direct a few films in 1910. In the underground of America in the 1910s, “Race” films were made. These featured an all black case and production team that were screened in segregated theaters. This practice continued until the 1950s were mainstream cinema started to recognize black culture.
Race films started with Noble Johnson’s Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which he founded on 24 May 1916. the company produced morally uplifting films for black audiences before. “They were all directed by Harry A. Gant, a white director who continued making all-black films into the sound era.” Oscar Micheaux was the most prolific black director of his time. his films were set in a world where white and black people were treated completely evenly, which was criticized as delusional and unhelpful at the time.
In the late 1920s, Lee de Forest was on the brink of revolutionizing the medium of the motion picture. He had made the technology to capture sounds and sync them to moving images, but he needed a studio to make a film using this technology. Warner brothers were about to go bankrupt and were willing to take a hail mary on sound - seen as a by other studios. They used segments of it in their film The Jazz Singer (1927), and silent films were out the day it premiered. Actors moved to Hollywood by the train full and intertitles were dropped immediately. “Quality, for the moment, didn’t matter. The actors spoke, the dialogue was clearly recorded, and audiences were thrilled.”
The course is mostly based on comprehension and analysis - no actual production
The axis of the course is History, Aesthetic, and Theory (Also artists, artwork and audience)
intertextuality: the practice of a film reference or paying tribute to another film
Early technological development:
… and urbanism was a huge thing at the time
1905: continuity editing audiences found it difficult to follow jumps in location improvements in lighting and camera positioning and the use of new intertitles, help with narrative coherence. People still found it difficult to track what was happening between shots (not the cinematic language they new)
“If we wish to retain the attention of the public, we have to maintain unbroken connection with the previous shot.” (Alfred Capus, scriptwriter) - this was the biggest challenge for films
new technologies borrow from previous technologies - with film, it was theater.
180 degree keeping the on one side of an imaginary axis. be very careful when you break it - audiences find it confusing!
Establishing Shot, big shot showing the totality of the setting.
Russian Filmmakers and films theorist studied D.W. Griffith
Hollywood films promote continuity Soviet filmmakers: montage promotes confilicts.
the success is often measured bt how well th iflm promotes active participation by asking viewing audiences to be aware and reflct on the the shots
Constructivism.
Watched
The Life of an American Fireman, 1903
Man with a Movie Camera - Dziga Vertov (music from 2002, micheal nyman) (not well received at the time but it now considered one of the greatest films of all time) (full of cinematic effects: tracking, close-ups, reversed footage, freeze frames, jumps cuts, split screens, fast motion, multiple exposure, stop machine, slow motion; almost continuous self-reflexivity; makes connection between transportation and communication.)
Movies that innovated continuity editing
The Great Train Robbery (big sequences)
The Birth of a nation (reduced sequences into shots)
Her Girl Friday dir. howard Hawks (eye line match, continuity editing)
Breathless dir Jean-Luc Godard (jump cuts - Cinematic apparatus, reminding you its a film.) \