History of film
The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century.
The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. There were earlier cinematographic screenings by others like the first showing of life sized pictures in motion 1894 in Berlin by Ottomar Anschütz; however, the commercial, public screening of ten Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895, can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. The earliest films were in black and white, under a minute long, without recorded sound, and consisted of a single shot from a steady camera. The first decade saw film move from a novelty, to an established mass entertainment industry, with film production companies and studios established throughout the world. Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed, with film editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films.
Popular new media, including television, home video, and the internet, influenced the distribution and consumption of films. Film production usually responded with content to fit the new media, and technical innovations and more spectacular films to keep theatrical screenings attractive. Systems that were cheaper and more easily handled allowed for an increasing number of people to create films of varying qualities, for any purpose including home movies and video art. The technical quality was usually lower than professional movies, but improved with digital video and affordable, high-quality digital cameras. Improving over time, digital production methods became more popular during the 1990s, resulting in increasingly realistic visual effects and popular feature-length computer animations.
Various film genres have emerged during the history of film, and enjoyed variable degrees of success.
Precursors
The use of film as an art form traces its origins to several earlier traditions in the arts such as storytelling, literature, theatre, opera, and visual arts. Cantastoria and similar ancient traditions combined storytelling with series of images that were shown or indicated one after the other. Predecessors to film that had already used light and shadows to create art before the advent of modern film technology include shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, camera obscura, and the magic lantern.Shadowgraphy and shadow puppetry represent early examples of the intent to use moving imagery for entertainment and storytelling. Thought to have originated in the Far East, the art form used shadows cast by hands or objects to assist in the creation of narratives. Shadow puppetry enjoyed popularity for centuries around Asia, notably in Java, and eventually spread to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment.
By the 16th century, entertainers often conjured images of ghostly apparitions, using techniques such as camera obscura and other forms of projection to enhance their performances. Magic lantern shows developed in the latter half of the 17th century seem to have continued this tradition with images of death, monsters and other scary figures. Around 1790, this practice was developed into a type of multimedia ghost show known as phantasmagoria. These popular shows entertained audiences using mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolves, live actors, smoke, odors, sounds and even electric shocks. While many first magic lantern shows were intended to frighten viewers, advances by projectionists allowed for creative and even educational storytelling that could appeal to wider family audiences. Newly pioneered techniques such as the use of dissolving views and the chromatrope allowed for smoother transitions between two projected images and aided in providing stronger narratives.
In 1833, scientific study of a stroboscopic illusion in spoked wheels by Joseph Plateau, Michael Faraday and Simon Stampfer led to the invention of the Fantascope, also known as the stroboscopic disk or the phenakistiscope, which was popular in several European countries for a while. Plateau thought it could be further developed for use in phantasmagoria and Stampfer imagined a system for longer scenes with strips on rollers, as well as a transparent version. Plateau, Charles Wheatstone, Antoine Claudet and others tried to combine the technique with the stereoscope and photography for a more complete illusion of reality, but for decades such experiments were mostly hindered by the need for long exposure times, with motion blur around objects that moved while the reflected light fell on the photo-sensitive chemicals. A few people managed to get decent results from stop motion techniques, but these were only very rarely marketed and no form of animated photography had much cultural impact before the advent of chronophotography.
Most early photographic sequences, known as chronophotography, were not initially intended to be viewed in motion and were typically presented as a serious, even scientific, method of studying locomotion. The sequences almost exclusively involved humans or animals performing a simple movement in front of the camera. Starting in 1878 with the publication of The Horse in Motion cabinet cards, photographer Eadweard Muybridge began making hundreds of chronophotographic studies of the motion of animals and humans in real-time. He was soon followed by other chronophotographers like Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, Albert Londe and Ottomar Anschütz. In 1879, Muybridge started lecturing on animal locomotion and used his Zoopraxiscope to project animations of the contours of his recordings, traced onto glass discs.
In 1887, the German inventor and photographer Ottomar Anschütz started presenting his chronophotographic recordings in motion, using a device he called the Elektrischen Schnellseher, which displayed short loops on a small milk glass screen. By 1891, he had started mass production of a more economical, coin-operated peep-box viewing device of the same name that was exhibited at international exhibitions and fairs. Some machines were installed for longer periods, including some at The Crystal Palace in London, and in several U.S. stores. Shifting the focus of the medium from technical and scientific interest in motion to entertainment for the masses, he recorded wrestlers, dancers, acrobats, and scenes of everyday life. Nearly 34,000 people paid to see his shows at the Berlin Exhibition Park in summer 1892. Others saw it in London or at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Though little evidence remains for most of these recordings, some scenes probably depicted staged comical sequences. Extant records suggest some of his output directly influenced later works by the Edison Company, such as the 1894 film Fred Ott's Sneeze.
Advances towards motion picture projection technologies were based on the popularity of magic lanterns, chronophotographic demonstrations, and other closely related forms of projected entertainment such as illustrated songs. From October 1892 to March 1900, inventor Émile Reynaud exhibited his Théâtre Optique film system at the Musée Grévin in Paris. Reynaud's device, which projected a series of animated stories such as Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une cabine, was displayed to over 500,000 visitors over the course of 12,800 shows. On 25, 29 and 30 November 1894, Ottomar Anschütz projected moving images from Electrotachyscope discs on a large screen in the darkened Grand Auditorium of a Post Office Building in Berlin, the first showing of life sized pictures in motion. From 22 February to 30 March 1895, a commercial 1.5-hour program of 40 different scenes was screened for audiences of 300 people at the old Reichstag and received circa 4,000 visitors.
Novelty era (1890s – early 1900s)
Advances towards projection
Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Louis Le Prince, William Friese-Greene, and the Skladanowsky brothers made pioneering contributions to the development of devices that could capture and display moving images, laying the groundwork for the emergence of cinema as an artistic medium. The scenes in these experiments primarily served to demonstrate the technology itself and were usually filmed with family, friends or passing traffic as the moving subjects. The earliest surviving film, known today as the Roundhay Garden Scene, was captured by Louis Le Prince and briefly depicted members of his family in motion.In June 1889, American inventor Thomas Edison assigned a lab assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, to help develop a device that could produce visuals to accompany the sounds produced from the phonograph. Building upon previous machines by Muybridge, Marey, Anschütz and others, Dickson and his team created the Kinetoscope peep-box viewer, with celluloid loops containing about half a minute of motion picture entertainment. After an early preview on 20 May 1891, Edison introduced the machine in 1893. Many of the movies presented on the Kinetoscope showcased well-known vaudeville acts performing in Edison's Black Maria studio. The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895. As the initial novelty of the images wore off, the Edison Company was slow to diversify their repertoire of films and waning public interest caused business to slow by Spring 1895. To remedy declining profits, experiments, such as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, were conducted in an attempt to achieve the device's original goal of providing visual accompaniment for sound recordings. Limitations in syncing the sound to the visuals, however, prevented widespread application. During that same period, inventors began advancing technologies towards film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format.
The Skladanowsky brothers, used their self-made Bioscop to display the first moving picture show to a paying audience on 1 November 1895, in Berlin. But they did not have the quality or financial resources to acquire momentum. Most of these films never passed the experimental stage and their efforts garnered little public attention until after cinema had become successful.
In the latter half of 1895, brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière filmed a number of short scenes with their invention, the Cinématographe. On 28 December 1895, the brothers gave their first commercial screening in Paris. The screening consisted of ten films and lasted roughly 20 minutes. The program consisted mainly of actuality films such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory as truthful documents of the world, but the show also included the staged comedy L'Arroseur Arrosé. The most advanced demonstration of film projection thus far, the Cinématographe was an instant success, bringing in an average of 2,500 to 3,000 francs daily by the end of January 1896. Following the first screening, the order and selection of films were changed often.
The Lumière brothers' primary business interests were in selling cameras and film equipment to exhibitors, not the actual production of films. Despite this, filmmakers across the world were inspired by the potential of film as exhibitors brought their shows to new countries. This era of filmmaking, dubbed by film historian Tom Gunning as "the cinema of attractions", offered a relatively cheap and simple way of providing entertainment to the masses. Rather than focusing on stories, Gunning argues, filmmakers mainly relied on the ability to delight audiences through the "illusory power" of viewing sequences in motion, much as they did in the Kinetoscope era that preceded it. Despite this, early experimentation with fiction filmmaking did occur. Films were mostly screened inside temporary storefront spaces, in tents of traveling exhibitors at fairs, or as "dumb" acts in vaudeville programs. During this period, before the process of post-production was clearly defined, exhibitors were allowed to exercise their creative freedom in their presentations. To enhance the viewers' experience, some showings were accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a theatre organ, live sound effects and commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist.
File:La Fée aux Choux.webm|thumb|A 1900 restaging of the 1897 film La Fée aux Choux, directed by Alice Guy
Experiments in film editing, special effects, narrative construction, and camera movement during this period by filmmakers in France, England, and the United States became influential in establishing an identity for film going forward. At both the Edison and Lumière studios, loose narratives such as the 1895 Edison film, Washday Troubles, established short relationship dynamics and simple storylines. In 1896, La Fée aux Choux was first released. Directed and edited by Alice Guy, the story is arguably the earliest narrative film in history, as well as the first film to be directed by a woman. That same year, the Edison Manufacturing Company released The May Irwin Kiss in May to widespread financial success. The film, which featured the first kiss in cinematic history, led to the earliest known calls for film censorship.
Another early film producer was Australia's Limelight Department. Commencing in 1898, it was operated by The Salvation Army in Melbourne, Australia. The Limelight Department produced evangelistic material for use by the Salvation Army, including lantern slides as early as 1891, as well as private and government contracts. In its nineteen years of operation, the Limelight Department produced about 300 films of various lengths, making it one of largest film producers of its time. The Limelight Department made a 1904 film by Joseph Perry called Bushranging in North Queensland, which is believed to be the first ever film about bushrangers.