Mass Comm 10
What’s Delilo saying here? We have become the movies…they’re under our cultural skin…
But
The movies – those images and fantasies that have fill and informour lives, didn’t just spring full-blown onto the screen:
development of motion pictures is a process which largely occurred over the course of the last century and a quarter, but which had been indirectly in the works for thousands of years.
SLIDE 3 Cave
Fascination with and almost religious devotionto the moving image – with representations of the external world in motion, may be as old as humankind itself.
Can imagine earliest paleolithic men…staring at the interaction of shadows and painted images…
Mystical or sacred properties ascribed to shadow and light…
The formalized use of shadows as part of storytelling and sacred rites and practices dates back at least three millennia.
The tradition of incorporating shadow play into magical or religious performance and ritual is thought to have originated either in India or China:
the oldest written reference to the tradition dates back to the Sung Dynasty—about 1000BC
One of theearliest and best known of these traditions—said to be the longest continuous tradition of theater in the world-- is the Balinese tradition of Wayang Kulit (Kulit means leather…referring to leather from which ornate puppets were carved)
The Shadow play tradition eventually spread throughout Asiaand the Middle East.
The tradition was also eventually introduced toEurope by returning travelers and tradersin the mid-17th Century.
These types of shadow performances became all the rage in the late 18th and 19th centuries in France: called Ombres Chinoise (Chinese shadows)…they were performed frequently in Parisian cabarets …sometimes obscene!!!
SLIDE 4: Shadow VIDEO
SLIDE 5: Ombre
SLIDE 6: OBSCURA
Scientific investigations and discoveries concerning the properties of light and shadow date back to the 5th Century BC.
One of the earliest such observations had to do with the fact that light passing thru a small aperture mysteriously cast an inverted image on a wall or screen.
Anyone ever look at a solar eclipse thru a pinhole box?
Mo-ti
Aristotle
Leonardo
Keppler – used the principle for astronomical observation – called it a “camera obscura”
17th and 18th century artists used the device as a drawing aid
SLIDE 7: MAGICKLANTERN
The fascination with capturing and projecting still and moving images reached its heights in the 18th and 19th century …
Rise of industrialization and evolution of science and technology… brought popular culture and science into the proximity :
not all that different from what the computer is doing today.
Athanasius Kircher: 17th Century German Jesuit – mathematician at the RomanCollege in Italy publishes a dissertation in which he describes an invention for projecting images drawn on glass slides or circular glass discs…
instead of using sun and moon as light source (as with early cameras obscura) Kircher devises a way to focus the light of a candle thru the image by using a cocave mirror and—later lenses.
Kircher’s invention is later to become known as THE MAGICK LANTERN
Huge popularity – itinerant projectionists take shows from town to town…
Overtime, inventors figure out all kinds of cute tricks fro
animating or adding other cheap thrills to magick lantern projections.
SHOW Mickey Magic Lantern
SLIDE 8 – magick lantern video
The Throughout the 18th and early 19th centuries inventors and scientists continued to play with all manners of moving gewgaws and whirligigs and toys aimed at tricking the eye.
These scientists and toymakers had noted something very peculiar things about the way in which the eye and brain record images
Even tho they were often hard-pressed to explain these phenomena)
Many of these early optical toys created their illusions thru a physiological phenomenon that came to be known as “persistence of vision”
The retina and brain retain an image flashed in front of it for around 1/30th of a second…if you flash a rapid succession of images in front of the eye, the “afterimage” of one image is superimposed on the following image.
Peter Roget – of thesaurus fame was the first to attempt to describe the phenomenon. In 1824 Roget presented his finding in 1824 before the Royal Society in a paper entitled, "Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures“)
SLIDE 9 – Thaumatrope
SLIDE 10: Phenikistoscope/Zoetrope
Show Thaumatrope, Phenikist, zoetrope
In the mid to late 19th century, inventors and enterprising tinkers
upped the ante in the attempt to capture images of the real world and make them come alive.
Time of great technological advances in general…
- the thick of the industrial revolution...
- the rise of a new middle class just clamoring for amusing ways to spend their newly found free time.
We’ve seen that the Camera obscura had demonstrated the ability to projectand image thru an aperture.
As early as 17th century, chemists had noted that certain chemicals
darkened when exposed to light.
A leaf put on a piece of paper coated with silver nitrate would leave itssilhouetted imprint when exposed to the sun.
SLIDE 11 – Photography
In the early 19th century, various scientists and inventors began playing around with these phenomenon.
In the 1820's and 30's, for example,
- Thomas Wedgewood in Britain
- Joseph Niepce and Louis Daguerre in France
pretty much simultaneously working on rudimentary photographic technology.
In 1841 William Henry Fox Talbot, a British scholar , patented his “calotype” process—a process that made photographic prints from chemically-fixed negatives rather than exposing the image directly on photosensitive paper—radically reduced the amount of time required for exposure.
Photographs began replacing drawings or paintings in lantern slides
1888/9: George Eastman develops roll film (first paper than celluloid
nitrate).
As revolutionary as these inventions were,
they still didn't push the image beyond the flat, unmoving surface of the photographic plane
But things were brewing…
SLIDE 11 – Muybridge
The real history of the movies may be said to have started with a completely whacked out Brit expatriate named Eadweard Muybridge.
- Born in 1830,
- Muybridge moved to the US in 1851as a publisher's representative.
- He rambled West in the early1860's --stage coach accident -- returned to England to convalesce...taught himself photography
- Set up shop as book seller and photographer in San Francisco in1867 and gained recognition for a prize-winning series of dramatic Yosemite views. (stage coach
During his time in San Francisco, Muy got to know Leland Stanford,
former gov of California and one of the 4 directors of the Central Pacific Railroad. Big deep pockets guy who's social climbing wife, Jane, bankrolled that other university down the penninsula
In 1872 Stanford enlisted EM to help him settle an odd bet (said to be $25,000--a staggering amount of dough). Stanford wanted to prove that at some point in a running horses stride, all four feet left the ground
After a few inconclusive attempts to prove this point photographically, Muybridge had a breakthrough in June 1878
- On June 15, 1878, a clear and sunny day in Palo Alto, amid a gathering of art and sports journalists, Muybridge set up a series of evenly spaced trip wires across the track attached the shutters of 12 cameras.
- When Stanford's prize horse, ran the track, Muybridge captured a sequence of photographs that proved Stanford's bet.
SHOW MUY FILM CLIPS
SLIDE 13: ZOOPRAX
Muybridge later perfected this technique by increasing the number of cameras.
- Even more startlingly: he found a way to print the sequential images on a circular photographic plate, which, when rotated in front of strong light source and projected on a screen, provided the primitive illusion of movement. Called this gizmo a zoopraxiscope
Muybridge's experiments had a huge influence on other inventors
SLIDE 14: Marey
In France the physician Etienne-Jules Marey had also been working on the problem of capturing animals and humans in motion (he had corresponded with Muybridge).
- In the 1880's invented a gizmo he called "une fusil photographique" -- a photographic gun for capturing photographic sequences of humans birds and other animals in motion…multiple images captured on the same photographic plate.
These experiments didn't escape the attention of another brilliant inventor…Thomas Edison.
SLIDE 14: EDISON
A year before Muybridge's experiments in Palo Alto, Edison unveiled another, perhaps more startling invention--the phonograph.
PLAY PHONOGRAPH
Edison had met with both Muybridge and Marey.in the late 1880's…the potential of "moving pictures" whetted his inventor and businessman's appetite.
- Edison put one of his trusted lieutenant's W.K.L.Dixon on the project.
- In an attempt to protect his future, he filed a patent on October 17, 1888, describing his ideas for a device that would "do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.".
- He called it a "Kinetoscope," using the Greek words "kineto" meaning "movement" and "scopos" meaning "to watch." A continuous roll of film run thru a viewer.
Edison previewed this invention at a women’s garden party hosted by his wife on May 21, 1891…
Although the project interested Edison, his main interest in the invention seems to have been to provide visual accompanyment to his phonograph.
He called the invention a “Silly Little Machine that would make pictures that would dance”
Edison's motion pictures had more than a few shortcomings
SLIDE 16
- Edison's camera was a monsterously huge contraption…the camera--which had to remain fixed due to its size and weight--was situated in a kind of rambling lean-to studio in West OrangeNew Jersey, which was nick-named THE BLACK MARIA.
- Filming was dependent on natural sunlight and the subjects of the film had to be brought in front of the camera, filmed at a fixed distance from the camera against a dark backdrop, devoid of context.
Edison's earliest films were not projected for audiences at all…: they were initially produced and marketed as a single-viewer peep show … carnivals, midways.
You’d pay your nickel and view a continuous film loop loop thru the peep hole of a viewer
First copyrighted film: Fred Ott's sneeze (1891)
SHOW EARLY EDISON: SLIDES 17,
In general, Edison showed only passing interest in the invention…at least not early on..
The real breakthroughs were happening across the Atlantic in France.
SLIDE 18: LUMIERES
On a cold and blustery night in Paris--December 28, 1895, in the backroom of a café on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris, a revolution took place.
From the back of the room, a carbon arc lightflared and a small box projected a moving image of workers leaving a factory against a screen... They appeared to be walking off the screen into the the theater itself...
Audiences were dumbfounded...
This most definitely was NOT the kind of theatrical spectacle most audiences of the day were used to…these were images that captured life and hurled them at the audience.
When a similar showing was held the following year that featured a a moving image of a train entering the railroad station in the town of Ciotat, LEGEND HAS IT that members of the audience reportedly cowered in fear, ran for the back of the café, or fled into the street in terror.
Film historian Tom Gunning and others have pretty much debunked this story: contend that audiences at the time were well acquainted with the confounding spectacles and tricks of magicians and other showmen: But just because they weren’t terrified didn’t mean they weren’t absolutely astonished and delighted by the illusion of motion and the spectacles presented up on the screen.
Maxim Gorky reporting on the exhibition:
"Last nite I was in the kingdom of shadows - it is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows. Suddenly something clicks, everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It speeds straight at you -- Watch out! It seems as though it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning you into a ripped sack of lacerated flesh and broken fragments this hall and building, so full of women, wine, music, and vice.
Discuss: Does this huge cognitive revolution have any counterpart today…?
Is anything as transformative human perception and culture?
Can anyone raised in the past century put yourself in the place of these first movie audiences? Or are we too worked over… What part of the experience would fascinate you the most?
*****This startling event and the invention that made it possible were the handiwork of two brothers from Lyon, Auguste and Louis Lumiere
Sons of a prosoperous factory owner (leading manufacturer of photographic equipment in europe), both lumieres grew up with around photography and photographic equipment…
In the early 1890's Louis began experimenting and tinkering with Edison's primitive kinetoscope. What he came up with changed the course of the movies:
- Unlike Edisons elephepant of a camera, Lumiere's camera, which he called the "Cinematographe" weighed only 16 lbs-- less than 1/100th the weight of the Edison camera.
- It was powered by a hand-crank (unlike edison's electrically-driven contraption) and could easily be carried into the streets.
- Just as significant was the fact that the camera not only shoot the filmed but also developed and projected it--unlike Edison's peep show…
If you were the inventor of the first portable camera…with no film vocabulary, no movie-going and little movie-making experience, What would you film? How would you film it?
The Lumieres and other early filmmakers inevitably turned to one of several subjects: perhaps the most common was life on the street.
Both brothers rejected the theatre as a model for motion pictures. Instead, their express interest was in capturing "Vie sur le vif" -- life being lived…
early films did just that: babies being fed; trains coming and going; workmen working, workers leaving a factory. The Lumieres their called short pieces (usually no longer than a minute) ACTUALITIES…
SHOW LUMIERE/EDISON CLIP
SHOW LUMIERE FILMS
From that first December showing onward, the cinematographe proved to be a smash popular success.
The Lumieres were first and foremost businessmen…the enormous commercial potential of their invention wasn't lost on them.
Almost immediately, they chartered and trained a small army of cameramen/projectionists to fan out over Europe and Asia--capturing new and increasingly exotic locals and happenings, showing these films to audiences in music halls and cafes, auditoriums and other urban meeting places, and later, rural villages and fairs.
Often, foreign concessionaries shared the revenues…they rented the hall and publicized the events…but the Lumiere's jealously guarded the technology.
In these early days of MP, the Lumieres easily maintained the world monopoly on film distribution …
Unlike Edison, they early realized the huge market potential of their inventions. They were shrewd businessmen with a tightly efficient and well-oiled marketing organization. The technology they had developed was tailor-made for spreading the new medium far and wide: it was portable, allowed a steady supply of new content.
Audiences were in love with--intoxicated with-- product.
Edison quickly saw that his kinetoscope peep shows were simply nocompetition to projected movies
- moved into taking over development of his own projected film (which he called the Vitoscope)
- Vitascope’s highly publicised launch was at Koster and BialsMusic Hall in New York on April 23, 1896.
SHOW KOSTER video (SLIDE 20)
SHOW Annabelle : Slide 21
Within ten years, motion picture technology (both Lumiere's invention and parallel developments in Great Britain and the US) had spread globally.
New motion picture companies sprang up like crabgrass. Most of these companies turned to the portable camera to make their fortune. Their stock in trade was still largely non-fiction (or at least quasi-fiction):
- actualities,
- travel films (what the french called documentaires),
- expedition films,
- educationals,
- newsreels.
As audience tastes for spectacle and exotic glimpses of previously unknown worlds intensified, filmmakers responded…
The simple documentmention of daily unadorned life of bourgeoise subjects, eventually was not enough to garner the audiences nickles, Filmmakers accordingly turned to increasingly exotic subjects…far away places, royalty, the presidency, dramatic world events, such as wars and disasters.
There was often a sense that actuality was, in itself, no longer a strong enough draw. What to do when the historical world doesn't give you the kind of images audiences demand? You make them up, forge them, restage them to suit dramatic tastes. And if the spectacle took liberties with reality…audiences didn't seem to care… Fact and fantasy in the popular imagination at the turn of the century wasn't all that clearly dilineated in any case…The real world (or a reasonable facsimile) was enough to hold the audiences imagination and attention.