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History of the film industry
History of cinema Essay
Cinema then and now
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In the beginning, all films were short. Audiences were not aware of this as they gazed at the marvelous new form of entertainment. As the 20th century began to approach, films started to get even longer. The very first film was introduced to audiences in 1894 through an invention created by Thomas Edison called the Kinetoscope. This device was made for viewing slideshows individually. Most films of the time depicted celebrities, current world affairs and other scenes in one shot scenes. The best known film from this era was the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat which was filmed in 1895. This film depicted a locomotive hurtling towards the audience.
There first invention produced was the Technicolor System 1 Additive Color, which I’m sorry to say flopped massively due to the unfortunate screening of The Gulf Between in 1917 which only a few frames remain of this film today. This was the first public premier of the technology and was disastrous. The film was captured through two separate filters red and green and the light through those two filters was captured on a single reel of film, when processed this negative had red and green information captured on a black and white reel, when this was processed the reel was placed into a projector and then threw red and green filters. To project the image an adjustable prism that had to manually lined up by the projectionist as two separate images formed on the projection screen this did not work as planned as the projectionist failed to line up the images correctly.
When The Birth of a Nation was released in theatres in 1915, the art of film making was still in its early stages. Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope was invented less than 25 years prior to the movie’s release, in 1891. In a time where the majority of movies were just starting to grow away from its single-reel predecessors, The Birth of a Nation was the longest feature film of its time. [1]
The first films made after Shakespearean plays used photographs or fixed cameras with the whole body of the actor in order to reproduce performances. The moving camera effect that has been used later in the film industry created problems for
On December 28, 1895 Georges was an audience member of the first seen movie or “moving picture” made in the world. This was a very short single reel, one shot film documenting a train pulling into the station. When the image of the train started approaching the audience, the audience screamed thinking they would actually get run over by the train. This revolutionary new type of “magic” was discovered by the Lumiere Brothers, who used their invention, the Cinematographe, to capture the first movie ever made. Melies soon after asked to purchase a camera from the Lumiere Brothers, but they refused. In desperate attempt to utilize this new entertainment tool, he set out to build his own camera.
Before it was made, many films were only one reel in length and involved no
The Underground Railroad despite occurring centuries ago continues to be an “enduring and popular thread in the fabric of America’s national historical memory” as Bright puts it. Throughout history, thousands of slaves managed to escape the clutches of slavery by using a system meant to liberate. In Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, he manages to blend slave narrative and history creating a book that goes beyond literary or historical fiction. Whitehead based his book off a question, “what if the Underground Railroad was a real railroad?” The story follows two runaway slaves, Cora and Caesar, who are pursued by the relentless slave catcher Ridgeway. Their journey on the railroad takes them to new and unfamiliar locations,
Eadweard Muybridge was a director who made the first movie in 1878, The Horse in Motion. He used multiple cameras and put the individual pictures into a movie. Muybridge’s movie was just pictures of a galloping horse. Muybridge also invented the Zoopraxiscope,the first ever movie projector that made short films and movies. It was able to quickly project images, creating what is known as motion photography and the first movie to ever exist. To use the Zoopraxiscope a disc is put on the device and is turned. As the disc turns, the images are projected onto the screen and the movie starts ...
Lev Kuleshov and his ‘effect’ « Early & Silent Film. 2014. Lev Kuleshov and his ‘effect’ « Early & Silent Film. [ONLINE] Available at: http://cinetext.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/lev-kuleshov-and-his/. [Accessed 15 February 2014].
The first Western film ever made was called ‘The Great Train Robbery‘. It was made by ‘The Lumiere Brothers’ in 1903.This film was a high quality film, because they used some panning with the camera. This was unusual in its time because the cameras that they had, had to be put on a fixed point because they were too heavy to lift. This meant that they couldn’t move in for close-ups. Consequently it made it harder for the audience to understand the characters feelings and to understand the storyline. If the camera can move in on the villain when he is plotting something or pulling a gun out ready for a fight it is much easier for the audience to follow. ’The Great Train Robbery’ was a simple one-reeler action picture, about 10 minutes long, with...
The Lumiere Brothers made a massive impact in the world of film that greatly shaped the world today. From their initial improvement to Edison’s Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, they greatly improved the world of film. The movies they made are extremely significant today because everything from the people they filmed to the manner in which they shot it was a pioneering step. The brothers were responsible for the first comedy, home movie, remake, film, and commercial. By making their camera portable they were also able to branch out from the confines of a studio and film on a moving train and all around the world. Each one of their films is also like mini documentaries about that time. The various films in The Lumiere Brothers' First Films show the
During the 1800’s Phenakistoscope, praxinoscope and the flip book were early animation devices that were invented, these devices made use of technological means which is the purpose of producing movement from sequential drawings The flip book was a simple image drawn on a piece of paper, then the next image would be slightly different. A whole series of pictures were bound together then flipped rapidly by hand which made it seem like the pictures were moving. Then there was a machine called the kinetoscope in 1889, it was the first example of using film to make a moving image. The boost of animation came in the 1860’s when the introduction of motion pictures films were introduced. In 1908 Emile Cohl’s Fantasmagorie was the first ever animated film that was made using traditional; animation, which is hand drawing, Georges Melies was the creator of special effects-films was the first person to use a...
Soon after, businessmen such as Inabata Katsutaro showed off the Vitascope and Cinematograph in early 1897. It wasn’t until Gabriel Veyre, who worked for the Lumiere Brothers, recorded kendo practices in 1897 that the process of filmmaking was introduced to the Japanese. Like the early films around the world, film in Japan showed the spectacle of movement. Instead of a kiss or a strongman, the first Japanese films had sword practice as its subject. Unlike their Western counterparts, the Japanese weren’t as surprised by film as Westerners because of their fondness of utishi-e (aka: magic lanterns). By the 1910s, Japan was a part of the world market in cinema consumption. In 1904, under the employment of Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter made two films specifically for Japanese audiences called Battle of Chemulpo Bay (1904) and Battle of Yalu (1904). Both of these films were shot at Thomas Edison’s New Jersey studio and made use of authentic uniforms to show the stories of two battles of the Russo-Japanese
The first form of movies began in the late 1800’s. Pictures were flashed in quick succession to trick the eye into thinking they were moving. These were called thaumatropes and zoetropes. Created shortly after was the cinematographe or the first film camera. The 1900s led to many leaps and strides in the film industry leading to the current movies seen today.
The modern film industry was born around the beginning of the twentieth century. On April 23rd 1896 Thomas Edition showed the first publicly-projected motion picture at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City. From there the film industry had an explosive growth rate. In fact, not only was Thomas Edison the inventor of film but he is also responsible for the birth of media censorship. "The Kiss " was the first film ever made of a couple kissing in cinematic history. May Irwin and John Rice re-enacted a lingering kiss from their 1895 Broadway stage play The Widow Jones was also notorious as the first film to be criticized as scandalous and bringing demands for censorship."1 By 1900 films had already started taking their modern form as story telling narratives became the most popular production instead of documentaries. Between 1910 and 1914 Hollywood was born, annexed by Los Angeles and replaced the East Coast as the center for the new burgeoning film industry. The beginning of the First World War brought European filmmaking to a complete halt and made room for America as the world center for film production2. During this time some of the most influential names in film history made their names.
The Indian cinema came into existence in 1913 but motion picture was first introduced in India way before that in July 1896 when Lumierre films which were made in Britain were screened in India in Bombay. This was the first time Indian audience was exposed to motion picture and they got to know that something like this exists.