Cinema, Early Development of

I

Introduction

Cinema, Early Development of, historical development of the medium known variously as cinema, motion pictures, film, or the movies.

II

The Beginning of Cinema

As a result of the work of Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge, many researchers in the late 19th century realized that films as they are known today were a practical possibility, but the first to design a fully successful apparatus was W. K. L. Dickson, working under the direction of Thomas Alva Edison. His fully developed camera, called the Kinetograph, was patented in 1891 and took a series of instantaneous photographs on standard Eastman Kodak photographic emulsion coated on to a transparent celluloid strip 35 mm wide. The results of this work were first shown in public in 1893, using the viewing apparatus also designed by Dickson, and called the Kinetoscope. This was contained within a large box, and only permitted the images to be viewed by one person at a time looking into it through a peephole, after starting the machine by inserting a coin. It was not a commercial success in this form, and left the way free for the Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste, to perfect their apparatus, the Cinématographe. This was the first successful projector, as well as being the apparatus that took and printed the film beforehand. With their Cinématographe they gave the first show of projected pictures to an audience in Paris in December 1895.

After this date, the Edison company developed its own form of projector, as did various other inventors. Some of these used different film widths and projection speeds, but after a few years the 35-mm wide Edison film, and the 16-frames-per-second projection speed of the Lumière Cinématographe became standard. The other important American competitor was the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company, which used a new camera designed by Dickson after he left the Edison company.

III

Early Cinema

The earliest films showed just one scene, which ran for about a minute, which was all that the standard lengths of film (65 or 80 ft/around 20 or 25 m) produced by Eastman Kodak or other manufacturers allowed. From the beginning, some of these films showed specially staged and acted scenes, such as the Edison Barbershop Scene and the L’Arroseur Arrosé (A Trick on the Gardener) by the Lumières. However, the majority of early films were simple records of real-life scenes or stage acts. Some of these showed different views of related places and actions, and, although sold separately, they were probably joined together in succession by the showmen who bought them and projected them. It seems that the step forward from this, to joining a number of staged scenes together to tell a longer story, was taken in 1898 by the Robert Paul company in Britain with Come Along Do! In this the action moves from a scene outside an art gallery to a scene inside by means of a cut. However, most of the early multi-shot films were made by Georges Méliès. In his films, well-known stories such as Cinderella (1899) were told in a series of disconnected scenes joined by dissolves (see Special Effects), as was done at the time with slides in a magic-lantern show. Méliès’s long story films with their trick effects were the most commercially successful of all in the first few years of cinema, and they led other film-makers towards producing longer films. However, Méliès’s films made no real contribution to the development of film construction as we know it.

The important figures in doing this were G. A. Smith and James Williamson, working independently in Brighton, East Sussex. Smith invented the basic technique of breaking a filmed scene down into a number of shots taken from different camera positions in his films Grandma’s Reading Glass (1900), As Seen Through a Telescope (1901), and The Little Doctors (1901). The first two of these introduced the view of things looked at through a magnifying glass and a telescope by one of the actors, by taking close shots inside a black circular mask. The Little Doctors used a close shot of a kitten being fed medicine that was cut into the middle of the shot showing the whole scene, and constitutes the first such use of a “close-up” cut into a scene. By 1903 Smith was making a conscious effort to get some sort of continuity matching in the actor’s position across the cut. Smith then gave up ordinary film-making in 1903 to produce a system of colour cinematography called Kinemacolor that was quite successful up to World War I.

James Williamson developed the movement of action through a series of shots taken in various locations in his films Attack on a Chinese Mission Station, Stop Thief!, and Fire!, all made in 1901. In these films the leading character was shown running out of one shot, then there would be a cut to another scene set somewhere else, and the character would then run into frame to continue the story. Méliès also used a similar technique on one occasion in the same year, but in this case the shots were joined with a dissolve rather than a cut.

Other film-makers in Britain took up these techniques in 1903, and developed longer films by having characters pursued through more and more different scenes. These were referred to as chase films. Afterwards, other less inventive film-makers in France and the United States such as Edwin S. Porter copied these techniques in various films, such as The Great Train Robbery. In France, Charles Pathé built a large company by ploughing back his profits to raise the production values of his films, and the film-makers he employed, led by Ferdinand Zecca, added extra polish to the continuity devices developed by the British. By building more studios and setting up multiple production teams, Pathé produced more films than any other firm in the world. A form of comedy unique to film began to develop, particularly at Pathé, by combining theatrical slapstick with the chase film.

IV

The Nickelodeon Boom

In the early period, prints of films were sold outright by length, at so much per foot, through specialist film sales organizations to the showmen who exhibited them as items on a variety bill, or who travelled the countryside showing them in tent theatres. There were no permanent theatres dedicated solely to showing films. This changed in 1905, because by that time there were enough films that were several minutes long to provide the programming for cinemas running full time. Beginning in the United States with the original Nickelodeon in Pittsburgh, there followed a worldwide boom in film exhibition and production. Up to this time the only countries to have a film industry were France, Britain, and the United States, but now film-makers went into regular production in Italy and Denmark, followed fairly closely by Germany, Sweden, and Russia.

In the United States, other film-making companies had been set up to compete with the Edison and Biograph companies, and the most important of these was Vitagraph. This company was modelled on Pathé, and as soon as Albert Edward Smith and James Stuart Blackton had established it with the films they directed themselves, it too moved over to a multiple-production unit structure with specialized departments for scripting, set construction, wardrobe, and so on. Smith and Blackton were responsible, along with the Pathé film-makers, for speeding up film narration and introducing the beginning of the technique of cross-cutting between scenes of parallel action.

As the number of nickelodeons in the United States increased into the thousands by 1908, the standard pattern of exhibition became the one-hour show costing 10 cents, made up of several films one reel long. A reel of film was towards 300 m (1,000 ft) long, and ran for between 10 and 15 minutes.