HISTORY OF CINEMA: FROM ITS ORIGIN TO MODERNITY - HISTORY - 2024

The history of cinema began in France on December 28, 1895, a date recognized because it was when a film was screened for the first time. The city of Paris was full of advertisements promoting the great event.

The spectators could not imagine that they were attending the birth of the seventh art. The promotional poster showed people from all social strata crowded at the entrance of a room and a gendarme trying to bring order.

The Lumiere brothers. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

It was time for the show and the screening room was the Indian room of the Grand Café in Paris. 33 people paid a franc to see the screening of the first film in history.

The brothers Louis and Auguste Lumière thus managed, after several attempts, to present their creation in public: the cinematograph. The first film screened was Exit of the workers from the Lumière factory in Lyon Monplaisir.

This first film was shot on March 22 of that same year and presented at various universities before its commercial release. The critic was overflowing with praise.

Poster of the first public screening of the Lumiere brothers, (1895). Source: commons.wikimedia.org

The filmographic titles that followed Exit from the factory were: The arrival of the train at the station, The irrigated irrigator; The regiment, Card players, The red fish, among others. Within a month of the first screening, viewers in the room increased exponentially from 33 to 3,000.

The cinematograph and other inventions

Cinematographer of the Lumiere brothers. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

The cinematograph consists of a 35-millimeter perforated film inside a wooden box that was equipped with an objective or lens. An external crank was turned by hand and put the film into circulation, which was projected onto a screen.

The film lasted no more than a minute and reached an average speed of 16 images per second.

The Lumière brothers were chemists and knew how to create images. They are the creators of photographic plates and instant photography (1881), the cinematograph (1895) and color autochrome (1903).

In fact, the word cinema is short for cinematograph, in direct allusion to the invention of the French brothers, although cinema is a Greek word that means movement.

Patent

It is true that the capture of moving images was not an exclusive idea of ​​the Lumière brothers, but it was they who managed to execute it, patent it and put it into operation.

Many consider the Kinetoscope (1891), by Thomas Alva Edison and William Dickson as the first attempt at making images. However, the fundamental difference and the greatest achievement of the French over the American inventors is that the cinematograph projected the images on a screen.

The images from the kinetoscope, on the other hand, were only visible from inside the device. This is how on February 13, 1895, the Lumiére brothers acquired the patent for the cinematograph, becoming creators and legal owners of the first moving image projection device.

The craze for moving images immediately crossed French borders and technicians trained in the Lumière family's factory began to travel, taking cinema around the world.

The cinema enchanted everyone and the films and equipment marketed by the Lumière brothers were coveted from all over the world. From the same year of its appearance, in 1895, it was already known in other nations.

Legal obstacles in the United States

However, in the United States, the advent of the cinematograph gave rise to the “patent war”. Edison, who was already a powerful tycoon, defended his invention (the kinetoscope) with his teeth and after 500 judicial processes, he managed to get the US justice to issue strict protectionist laws in his favor.

The judgment benefited the Edison Company and removed the Lumière operating license. However, this did not prevent French film productions from taking over the show in the world and their films were the most watched, even in the United States. But all that changed with the First World War.

Silent movies

"The silent era" or "silent cinema" are the terms used to refer to film productions without dialogue, although they were not completely silent. Although it is true that there was no synchronization of audio and video, other resources were also implemented such as live music, which was played while the film was projected.

The silent film period started from the very creation of the Lumière brothers' cinema with the story of the workers leaving the factory in Lyon.

However, there are those who defend the thesis that the first film is not by the Lumière brothers, but by another Frenchman, Louis le Prince, who would have filmed The Roundhay Garden Scene in Leeds, England.

This 1.6 second film made on October 14, 1888, would be the oldest, but it was lost on a train and the inventor could not demonstrate his work.

There are even sources that claim that he also called his invention a "cinematograph", and since they were unable to pay the patent rights, the Lumière brothers kept the name.

Apogee

Silent cinema lived its heyday during the 1920s. The lack of sound gave way to posters interspersed in the images that guided the viewer.

Another resource was subtitles and written dialogue, which were developed by so-called 'title writers'. These professionals came to have great relevance, since they were a kind of scriptwriters.

One of the characteristics of silent movies was the unnatural way in which the characters moved; however, it is a consequence of the recording being made with 35-millimeter film rolls. This format had few frames, 16-20 per second, so the movement looked jerky.

At the beginning of the 20th century, during the first decade, the cinema began to be seen as a serious spectacle, after its sensationalist beginnings that presented it as a fair and very popular act.

Cinema as art

The production of more elaborate and long films in Europe and the approval of intellectuals of the time, allowed to see the film industry with different eyes. Starting in 1910, it began to be considered an art form.

Names like Lon Chaney (1883-1930), Mary Pickford (1892-1979), Charles Chaplin (1889-1977), Theda Bara (1885-1955), Gloria Swanson (1899-1983) or Rodolfo Valentino (1895-1926), they are closely linked to the history of silent movies.

At first the films could not be edited and their duration was limited, until another Frenchman, Georges Méliès, appeared, who incorporated the use of three reels and extended the duration of the recording to 9 minutes.

Not only that, Méliès is considered the father of special effects, as he used his skill with drawing to create fantasy, horror and science fiction stories.

The talkies

In the late 1920s, everything changed in the nascent movie industry. The sound came, despite the fact that it had a significant number of detractors and skeptics.

The idea of ​​adding audio to recorded images, which was always present, came to fruition with the film The Jazz Singer, The Jazz Singer, released in the United States on February 4, 1927.

The Warner Brothers company opted for this change and it was right. Although it was a rudimentary system, in which the audio had to be synchronized very well with the image, because they were recorded on different equipment. The launch of the first talking movie was a worldwide success that brought the company revenues of $ 3.5 million.

Technology thus reaffirmed its indissoluble relationship with the film industry. Silent cinema lost its charm and coexisted with sound until its disappearance. A decade was enough, from the first talking movie, for the silent film to become extinct.

The most affected at that time were the musicians and storytellers, replaced by technological advance. Some actors made the transition successfully, although most could not recover.

Recording studios emerge

This era also gave rise to recording studios, since the space had to be controlled for the location of the outlandish sound recording equipment.

Speakers and speakers were strategically located to avoid external noises and were recorded on a vinyl record. The company that created this technology was Vitaphone.

Industry-related companies such as Photokinema, Movietone, and Vitaphone began to flourish and bring breakthroughs. France was a pioneer, but the First World War affected it and left it out of the competition for a long time.

Although European cinema progressed, North American investors managed to minimize the presence of foreign productions.

The era of color

1917 was another important year for the growing movie industry. Color arrived. Black and white images began to color on the screen. The company responsible for that jump was Echnicolor.

Today very few would see the difference, because only two colors had been incorporated, but by then it was a great achievement.

The evolution of color in cinema was developing little by little, but the arrival of the 1930s represented a great leap with the technology of the Technicolor company. These pioneers introduced a third color (blue, green, and red).

The equipment used to create these colorful images was three times the weight and size of conventional motion picture cameras of the time.

For this reason, black and white films prolonged their existence a little longer, reaching their final extinction in the 1930s.

Disney Studios

Disney Studios, Alameda, California. Source: creativecommons.org

Sound and color are here to stay. An icon of this new era was the creation of the Disney animated film Fantasia. The creation of the Mickey Mouse studios wasted technology, color, sound and music.

To fulfill Walt Disney's dream, a system called Fantasound was created, which was nothing less than stereo sound.

You no longer had to synchronize the sound recorded on a separate disc, nor listen to the audios through a single channel. 13 years later (1953) came CinemaScope, which allowed the recording of sound by four channels, what we know as magnetic stripes.

3D movies

The 1950s witnessed another milestone in cinema, 3D movies, that is, in three dimensions. The first film in 3D and in color was Bwana Devil. Like all new technology, it was a box office and caused a furore and many dollars at the box office.

Although the film was interrupted to change the reels and be able to see the rest of the film, it did not guarantee that the image and audio would be synchronized. The 3D glasses caused a headache for large numbers of viewers and only the seats centered in front of the screen offered the true 3D experience.

References

1. The Lumière brothers and the birth of cinema. Retrieved on October 2, 2018 from nationalgeographic.es
2. The Change Heard Around the World: The History of Sound in Cinema. Consulted of nofilmschool.com
3. Lumiere Brothers first film screening, film history. Consulted of historiaybiografias.com
4. The beginnings of cinema (1895-1927). Consulted of duiops.net
5. What was the Patent War? Consulted of muyhistoria.es
6. The Lumiere brothers are showing a film for the first time. Consulted of alef.mx
7. Kinetoscope. Consulted of euston96.com
8. What was the first talking movie? Consulted of Consulted of muyhistoria.es
9. Brief history and guide to silent movies. Consulted of enfilme.com
10. History of 3D cinema. Consulted of xataka.com
11. Cinema in the digital age. Consulted of bid.ub.edu