The Invention of Cinema and the Production of Fantasy

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The Invention of Cinema and the Production of
Fantasy
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Magic Lantern Shows

• To understand the origins of cinema as a popular
  medium, it is important to acknowledge it
  predecessors.
• Magic lantern shows were very popular with
  Victorian audiences. They were basically slide
  shows that often consisted of an adventure story
  set in exotic locations.

A slide from the serialization of Harriet Beecher
Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin", America's first
best-selling novel.
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Alongside the Magic Lantern Shows, the Victorians
were also fascinated with optical toys based on
the persistence of vision.
Zoetrope
Thaumatrope

• The Persistence of Vision
• The brain retains images cast upon the retina of
  the eye for approximately 1/20th to 1/5th of a
  second beyond their actual removal from the field
  of vision. It is this phenomenon which causes us
  to see the individual blades of a rotating fan as
  a unitary circular form or the different hues of
  a spinning color-wheel as a single homogeneous
  color. It is also what causes us to see the
  separate frames of a strip of film as a
  continuous image.

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The moving image

• Three individuals that played a central part in
  the transition from still photography to the
  invention of cinema are

George Eastman
Etienne Jules-Marey
Edward Muybridge
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• "You push the button - we do the rest"
• George Eastman
• In 1888 Eastman introduced the first mass
  produced, hand-held camera, which he named the
  Kodak. The camera used rolls of sensitized paper
  and in the following year Eastman brought out
  celluloid rolls of film. This innovation lead to
  the subsequent invention of the motion picture
  camera by Thomas Edison and the rise of cinema.

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• In the 1860s and 70s Edward Muybridge
  experimented with serial photography in an effort
  to capture movement on film.

Muybridge was hired by the former governor of
California, Leland Stanford, to settle a wager.
The story is that Stanford, who owned a number of
race horses. had gotten into an argument with a
friend concerning how horses gallop. Stanford was
of the opinion that at a particular point in a
horses gallop all four feet are off the ground
simultaneously. His friend believed that this was
physically impossible. To prove his case Stanford
hired Muybridge to come up with a way to
photograph the precise movements of the galloping
horse. Muybridge rigged together a series of
cameras along a race track that were triggered by
trip-wires. After developing ways to speed up the
exposure time of the film and the cameras
shutter speed, Muybridge was able to prove
Stanfords case.
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• Muybridge continued experimenting with different
  optical devices and in 1879 he created the
  zoopraxiscope, a projector that showed images in
  motion. With his new invention, Muybridge went on
  a massive tour across America and England.

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• In 1884 the University of Pennsylvania
  commissioned Muybridge to make a further study of
  animal and human locomotion. The report, "Animal
  Locomotion" was published three years later and
  contains more than twenty thousand images.

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• Marey, Etienne Jules
• Like Muybridge French physiologist Marey was also
  interested in the study of animal locomotion. He
  too developed methods to capture motion on film.
  One devices that he created was a photographic
  gun that allowed him to quickly photograph a
  series of images on a photosensitive disc.

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Development of Film Technology

• There are three individuals who are most often
  credited with the invention of the motion
  picture

the Lumiere Brothers
Thomas Edison
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• In 1894 Thomas Edison opened his first
  Kinetoscope parlour on Broadway.
• Patrons paid 25 cents as the admission charge to
  view films in five kinetoscope machines placed in
  a row.
• Edison's film studio was used to supply films for
  this sensational new form of entertainment. More
  Kinetoscope parlors soon opened in other cities

• He soon realized that he would make greater
  profits if more than one customer could watch a
  film at the same time and introduced a projection
  process which he name the Panoptikon.

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• Auguste and Louis Lumiere are credited with the
  world's first public film screening on December
  28, 1895. They showed ten short films in the
  basement of the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des
  Capucines in Paris. The show lasted 20 minutes
  and was the very first public demonstration of
  their device they called the Cinematographe,
  which effectively functioned as camera and
  projector all in one.

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Early Film Exhibition

• Early spectators in both Kinetoscope parlors and
  cinema houses were amazed by even the most
  mundane moving images.
• These early films were very short, one-reelers (a
  10-15 minute reel of film - the projector's reel
  capacity at the time).
• Popular topics included people at work, parades,
  women dancing, dogs terrorizing rats, twisting
  contortionists, and short pieces of animation.

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Early Film Exhibition

• Films were initially shown as part of vaudeville
  shows and at fairgrounds. The earliest 'movie
  theatres' were converted churches or halls.
• In 1897 the first real cinema was built in Paris,
  solely for the purpose of showing films.
• By 1898 the Lumiere's company had produced a
  short film catalog with over 1,000 titles.
• In 1902 Thomas L. Talley built the first US movie
  theatre in downtown Los Angeles. The Electric
  Theater seated 200 and charged patrons a dime.
• By as early as 1910 American cinemas were
  attracting 26 MILLION PEOPLE A WEEK.

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• Georges Melies is credited for being the first
  person to give cinema a sense of wonderment. By
  using plot or storylines, magically characters
  and special effects, Melies introduced the idea
  of narrative to film.
• When the Lumiere brothers wouldn't sell him a
  camera, he developed his own and then set up
  Europe's first film studio in 1897.
• Over the next 15 years he created about 500 short
  films (few of which survived), and screened his
  own productions in his theatre.
• In 1911 he contracted with French film company
  Pathe to finance and distribute his films, but
  within two years he went out of business.
• Melies was a stage magician and a wizard at
  special effects. Film offered him the perfect
  medium to create stories of fantasy and illusion.
  In 1902 Melies released a 14-minute science
  fiction tale entitled Le Voyage Dans la Lune (A
  Trip to the Moon).

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• His assortment of trick photography included such
  things as hand-tinting, dissolves, wipes,
  'magical' super-impositions and double exposures,
  the use of mirrors, trick sets, stop motion,
  slow-motion and fade-outs amd fade-ins.
• Although his use of the camera was innovative,
  the camera remained stationary. In other words,
  he recorded the all action from one position
  only, duplicating the experience of watching a
  play. It would take several years before
  filmmakers developed the quick editing and camera
  movements that we associate with contemporary
  films.

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• Edwin S. Porter is credited for creating the
  first American narrative film, The Great Train
  Robbery (1903), and for initiating the film genre
  of the Western. The film features fast paced
  action, location shots (although it was film in
  New Jersey, it has the look of the wild west),
  shootouts and horse chases. It also has an
  interesting closing scene in which one of the
  train bandits shoots back at the shooting camera.
  

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• German Expressionism and the Land of Ghost and
  Monsters
• Between 1919 and 1930 a number of films were made
  in Germany that came to constitute a movement
  known as German Expressionism. Common to these
  films is the use of a highly stylized look or
  mise-en-scene. The films feature such formal
  elements as dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting,
  surreal sets and props, and remarkably fluid
  editing and framing.
• The gothic appearance of these films is often
  accompanied by similar acting styles and macabre
  or low-life subject matters. The overall effect
  is to create a self-contained fantasy world quite
  separate from everyday reality, a world imbued
  with angst and paranoia in the face of that which
  cannot be rationally explained.
• Annette Kuhn, History of the Cinema, The Cinema
  Book, edited by Pam Cook.

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• The first feature film that we will watch is
• F. W. Murnaus vampire classic Nosferatu (1922).
  I picked this film to start us off because we
  will see the influence that it had on classical
  Hollywood film and it also draws a direct
  connection between the power of film and fantasy.
  
• The influence of German Expressionism is
  especially evident in Hollywood horror movies and
  film noir.