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A Brief History of Film

History of film has been dominated by the discovery and testing of the paradoxes inherent in the medium itself. Film uses machines to record images of life; it combines still photographs to give the illusion of continuous motion; it seems to present life itself, but it also offers impossible unrealities approached only in dreams.

The motion picture was developed in the 1890s from the union of still PHOTOGRAPHY, which records physical reality, with the persistence-of-vision toy, which made drawn figures appear to move. Four major film traditions have developed since then: fictional narrative film, which tells stories about people with whom an audience can identify because their world looks familiar; nonfictional documentary film, which focuses on the real world either to instruct or to reveal some sort of truth about it; animated film, which makes drawn or sculpted figures look as if they are moving and speaking; and experimental film, which exploits film's ability to create a purely abstract, nonrealistic world unlike any previously seen.

Film is considered the youngest art form and has inherited much from the older and more traditional arts. Like the novel, it can tell stories; like the drama, it can portray conflict between live characters; like painting, it composes in space with light, color, shade, shape, and texture; like music, it moves in time according to principles of rhythm and tone; like dance, it presents the movement of figures in space and is often underscored by music; and like photography, it presents a two-dimensional rendering of what appears to be three-dimensional reality, using perspective, depth, and shading.

Film, however, is one of the few arts that is both spatial and temporal, intentionally manipulating both space and time. This synthesis has given rise to two conflicting theories about film and its historical development. Some theorists, such as S. M. EISENSTEIN and Rudolf Arnheim, have argued that film must take the path of the other modern arts and concentrate not on telling stories or representing reality but on investigating time and space in a pure and consciously abstract way. Others, such as Andre Bazin and Siegfried KRACAUER, maintain that film must fully and carefully develop its connection with nature so that it can portray human events as excitingly and revealingly as possible.

Because of his fame, his success at publicizing his activities, and his habit of patenting machines before actually inventing them, Thomas EDISON received most of the credit for having invented the motion picture; as early as 1887, he patented a motion picture camera, but this could not produce images. In reality, many inventors contributed to the development of moving pictures.

Perhaps the first important contribution was the series of motion photographs made by Eadweard MUYBRIDGE between 1872 and 1877. Hired by the governor of California, Leland Stanford, to capture on film the movement of a racehorse, Muybridge tied a series of wires across the track and connected each one to the shutter of a still camera. The running horse tripped the wires and exposed a series of still photographs, which Muybridge then mounted on a stroboscopic disk and projected with a magic lantern to reproduce an image of the horse in motion. Muybridge shot hundreds of such studies and went on to lecture in Europe, where his work intrigued the French scientist E. J. MAREY. Marey devised a means of shooting motion photographs with what he called a photographic gun.

Edison became interested in the possibilities of motion photography after hearing Muybridge lecture in West Orange, N.J. Edison's motion picture experiments, under the direction of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began in 1888 with an attempt to record the photographs on wax cylinders similar to those used to make the original phonograph recordings. Dickson made a major breakthrough when he decided to use George EASTMAN's celluloid film instead. Celluloid was tough but supple and could be manufactured in long rolls, making it an excellent medium for motion photography, which required great lengths of film. Between 1891 and 1895, Dickson shot many 15-second films using the Edison camera, or Kinetograph, but Edison decided against projecting the films for audiences--in part because the visual results were inadequate and in part because he felt that motion pictures would have little public appeal. Instead, Edison marketed an electrically driven peep-hole viewing machine (the Kinetoscope) that displayed the marvels recorded to one viewer at a time.

Edison thought so little of the Kinetoscope that he failed to extend his patent rights to England and Europe, an oversight that allowed two Frenchmen, Louis and Auguste LUMIERE, to manufacture a more portable camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on Edison's machine. The movie era might be said to have begun officially on Dec. 28, 1895, when the Lumieres presented a program of brief motion pictures to a paying audience in the basement of a Paris cafe. English and German inventors also copied and improved upon the Edison machines, as did many other experimenters in the United States. By the end of the 19th century vast numbers of people in both Europe and America had been exposed to some form of motion pictures.

The earliest films presented 15- to 60-second glimpses of real scenes recorded outdoors (workmen, trains, fire engines, boats, parades, soldiers) or of staged theatrical performances shot indoors. These two early tendencies--to record life as it is and to dramatize life for artistic effect--can be viewed as the two dominant paths of film history.

Georges MELIES was the most important of the early theatrical filmmakers. A magician by trade, Melies, in such films as A Trip to the Moon (1902), showed how the cinema could perform the most amazing magic tricks of all: simply by stopping the camera, adding something to the scene or removing something from it, and then starting the camera again, he made things seem to appear and disappear. Early English and French filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson, and Ferdinand Zecca also discovered how rhythmic movement (the chase) and rhythmic editing could make cinema's treatment of time and space more exciting.

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