Capturing Life Onscreen: The Invention of Motion Pictures

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Capturing Life Onscreen: The Invention of Motion Pictures

Overview

Motion pictures combined three earlier technologies. Early nineteenth-century experimenters knew how to make drawings appear to move, by passing them rapidly before the eye. Magic lanterns and shadow puppets were ways to project silhouettes onto a wall or screen. Photography allowed the capture of realistic images of people, animals, and their surroundings. Motion picture pioneers competed to find a way to make photographs seem to come alive, and project them for display to an audience.

Background

The perceptual phenomenon called persistence of vision was known to the ancient Egyptians, but was first described by Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) in 1824. You can demonstrate it yourself by looking briefly at a light, and then closing your eyes. The image of the light remains on your retinas for 1/20 to 1/5 of a second before it fades away. Early in the twentieth century, psychologists showed that the brain also has a perceptual threshold, in which images that flash by quickly will seem to be continuous. Together these phenomena make it possible to produce the illusion of motion using a series of closely spaced images that change by degrees.

The first motion picture devices were mechanical, and the images were simple drawings. The thaumatrope, from the Greek for "wonder turning," was a cardboard disk with images that seemed to merge and move when it was spun on a piece of thread. Several similar "optical toys" were developed in the early 1830s, including the Wheel of Life, the phenakisto-scope, and the stroboscope. A device with pictures on a strip surrounding a rotating drum was marketed as the zoetrope in the 1860s.

Light-projected images do not require technology; they are familiar to anyone who has ever made finger shadows into a bunny on the wall. Shadow puppet shows using ornate paper silhouettes were performed in China, India, and Java for over 1,000 years. Magic lanterns, using candles or oil lamps to illuminate and project images drawn or painted on glass slides, were popular in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In 1666 the diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of a visitor who showed him "a lantern with pictures in glass to make strange things to appear on a wall, very pretty." Gears, rotary disks, and sliding panes of glass were used to provide special effects.

The Frenchman Emile Reynaud combined the magic lantern and the mechanical motion picture device, attaching a projecting lens to the Zoetrope. The result was bright sharp projections of drawings that appeared to move. In 1892, he presented the popular pantomimes lumineuses to packed houses at his Theatre Optique. Unfortunately for Reynaud, the projection of moving photographic images, which would sweep away his invention, was only a few years away.

Cameras enabled the photographic reproduction of real-life scenes in the middle of the nineteenth century. The world's first permanent photographic image was made by Joseph Nicéphore Niepce (1765-1833) in 1826. The British scientist William H. F. Talbot (1800-1877), in the course of inventing a way to print photographs on paper, devised the first negative-positive photographic system. In 1849, the Langenheim brothers of Philadelphia introduced positive images fixed onto glass plates. These transparencies paved the way for the projection of photographs.

A story which some regard as apocryphal holds that in 1872 Edward Muybridge (1830-1904) was hired to use photography to capture the motion of a racehorse, in order to win a $25,000 bet for California millionaire Leland Stanford. Stanford wagered that when a horse galloped, at some point all four legs left the ground simultaneously. Whether or not the bet actually took place, it is known that six years later, after many failed experiments, Muybridge set up a row of 12 cameras beside the Palo Alto racetrack. As the horse galloped past, it tripped wires attached to the cameras' shutters. In fact, all four legs did leave the ground at once, and Muybridge later produced an 11-volume study of animal locomotion, using as many as 24 cameras to take his photographic sequences. But he didn't produce a realistic motion picture. When his photographs were affixed to the rim of a wheel, and the wheel was spun, the animal seemed to run in place.

What was needed was a way for one camera to take multiple pictures in succession. In that case, objects in the image would be seen to change position in relation to the camera. The cumbersome glass plates early cameras used for each exposure made rapid shooting impossible. Movies were made possible by the invention of flexible film, consisting of photographic emulsion deposited on a celluloid base. This process was discovered by Hannibal Goodwin, a minister in Newark, New Jersey, in 1887. It was patented by George Eastman (1854-1932), the local photographic manufacturer soon to be a multimillionaire.

Impact

The first movie camera using the new films, called the kinetograph, was developed in 1889. It was a product of the prolific Thomas Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, from which the electric light bulb, phonograph, and tickertape machine had also emerged. The moving picture research team was led by the Englishman William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. In 1891 the Edison Lab patented the Kinetoscope. This was a wooden box with a peephole through which an individual could view short Kinetograph film loops.

Edison's films were made in the world's first film studio, a box-like contraption in West Orange called the Black Maria. The room was mounted on a turntable so it could be rotated to let the sun in through a skylight. The short films produced there included the first motion picture kiss, between Broadway stars May Irwin and John Rice in 1896. Peepshow parlors soon sprung up around the country, where people could peer into the kinetoscope for a nickel, collected by an automated coin slot of Edison's devising. The peepshow was one of the most popular entertainment fads of the time. Believing that projecting his films for mass audiences would undercut this lucrative business, Edison lost interest in advancing the technology.

As a result, the ingenious Dickson quit and went to work with Woodville Latham and his sons Gray and Otway. The Lathams were committed to the future of motion picture projection. One of their later developments, the Latham loop, was a way to leave slack in the film as it went through the projector. This reduced the stress on the celluloid, preventing it from tearing, and allowed longer films to be made. But the Lathams and Dickson were not the only ones working on motion picture projection during the 1890s. Competing teams presented several successful demonstrations during 1895 and 1896.

On November 1, 1895, Max and Emil Skladanowsky used their movie projector, which they called the bioscope, to present a variety program at the Berlin Wintergarten. They showed several very short circular films of children dancing, kangaroos boxing, and other subjects. Their technology was never developed past these brief repetitive loops, although the term "Bioscope" was used in South Africa for decades to mean "cinema."

The first successful showing of a movie to a paying audience took place in Paris on December 28, 1895. In 20 minutes, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière (1862-1954 and 1864-1948, respectively) showed 33 customers 10 short films. One sequence, called "La Sortie des Usines," showed workers leaving the Lumières' factory in Rue Saint-Victor, Lyons. The street has since been renamed rue du Premier-Film.

Most historians credit the Lumières' demonstration as the birth of cinema. They had developed a portable hand-cranked movie camera that could shoot, print, and project motion pictures. With it they shot 15- to 20-second sequences all over the world, freeing cinema from the primitive studio and the look of the staged tableau. Their naturalistic film sequences included military parades, comic pieces, scenic landscapes, and living portraits. Their work began to hint at the scope of this new medium.

In 1896, inventors Norman Raff and Thomas Armat modified the Kinetoscope into a projector, paid Thomas Edison (1847-1931) a fee to use his name for credibility, and started advertising "Edison's latest marvel, the Vitascope." On April 23 of that year, at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, they showed a selection of the Edison kinetograph movies. The program included scene of waves crashing toward the camera on the beach, causing people sitting in the first few rows to duck. Later showings of "The Kiss" outraged audiences, who thought the larger-than-life image was lascivious. The enormous amount of publicity that these shows received left many with the impression that Edison invented the movie projector, including the officials of Macy's, who put up a plaque to that effect when they built their department store over the old 34th street site of Koster and Bial's.

The motion picture pioneers were inventors, not artists. Many were not fully aware of the potential of their devices. The first audiences, including many of the crowned heads of Europe, were amazed by the realistic motion alone. It didn't occur to them to demand high drama or glamorous film stars. Edison took out only American patent rights for his camera and projector, not believing the extra $150 to cover England and France was worth it. He was already intent on new projects. The Lumières' agent was driven out of America in 1897 by the heavy duties of the protectionist Dingley Tariff Act.

By 1900, there were dozens of small film companies throughout the United States and Europe. Inventors and technicians were giving way to theatrical artists, trick photographers, and even magicians. They began to explore cinema as an art form in its own right. In particular, the French illusionist George Méliès (1861-1938) is regarded by many as the father of the narrative film. He is credited with the first use of techniques such as fades, double exposures, time-lapse photography, and artificial lighting effects. Between 1896 and 1906, his Star Film Company produced more than 500 short films, including fantasies and documentaries. Motion pictures were no longer a novelty; by the turn of the century, they had become an industry.

SHERRI CHASIN CALVO