The Lumiere Brothers
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The innovative Lumiere brothers in France, Louis and Auguste (often called "the founding fathers of modern film"), who worked in a Lyons factory that manufactured photographic equipment and supplies, were inspired by Edison's work. They created their own combo movie camera and projector - a more portable, hand-held and lightweight device that could be cranked by hand and could project movie images to several spectators. It was dubbed the Cinematographe and patented in February, 1895. The multi-purpose device (combining camera, printer and projecting capabilities in the same housing) was more profitable because more than a single spectator could watch the film on a large screen. They used a film width of 35mm, and a speed of 16 frames per second - an industry norm until the talkies. By the advent of sound film in the late 1920s, 24 fps became the standard.
Their work consisted mainly of moving images from scenes of everyday life. Ironically as we look back in retrospect in comparison to what film has developed into today, the Lumiere Brothers believed it to be a medium without a future as they suspected that people would bore of images that they could just as easily see by walking out into the street. However, their film sequence of a train pulling into the station reportedly had audiences screaming and ducking for cover as they believed that the train itself was about to plow into the theater.
Born in the Haute-Saone District in 1862 and 1864, with Auguste being the elder, the Lumiere family eventually settled in Lyon. Their father Antoine, opened his own photographic studio and was equally intrigued by this new phenomenon of moving pictures that was slowly developing. Antoine saw to it that his sons recieved a formal education as they attended the largest technical school in Lyon, La Martiniere.
The Lumiere Brothers have been credited with over 1,425 different short films and had even filmed aerial shots years before the very first aiplane would take to the skies.
The first public test and demonstration of the Lumieres' camera-projector system (the projection of a motion picture) was made in March of 1895. They caused a sensation with the film Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory (La Sortie des Ouviers de L'Usine Lumiere a Lyon), although it only consisted of everyday outdoor images - such as factory workers leaving the Lumiere factory gate for home or for a lunch break.
As generally acknowledged, cinema (a word derived from Cinematographe) was born on December 28, 1895, in Paris, France. The Lumieres presented the first commercial exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in the world's first movie theatre - in the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on Paris' Boulevard des Capucines. The 20-minute program of ten short films (with the mundane quality of home movies), with twenty showings a day. These factual shorts (or mini-documentaries), termed actualities, included the famous first comedy of a gardener with a watering hose (aka The Sprinkler Sprinkled, Waterer and Watered, or L'Arrouseur Arrose), the factory worker short (see above), a sequence of a horse-drawn carriage galloping toward the camera, and the arrival of a train at a station (Arrivee d'un train en gare a La Ciotat).
Other Developments in Projecting Machines:
Two brothers in Berlin, Germany - inventors Emil and Max Skladanowsky - created their own film device for projecting films in November, 1895. Also in 1895, American inventor Major Woodville Latham developed an unpopular projector called an Eidoloscope (or Panoptikon projector). What was most innovative was its Latham Loop, the addition of a slack-forming loop to the film path to restrain the inertia of the take-up reel, and prevent the tearing of sprocket holes. It also allowed for the use of films longer than three minutes. (The loop is still used in virtually all film cameras and projectors to this day.) And American inventors Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins developed the Phantascope in 1895, an improved device (with intermittent-motion mechanisms) for projecting films on a screen. In September, 1895, they debuted their projection device at the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition and patented it.
In London in January of 1896, Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul also developed a machine to project films. Paul became the first manufacturer of projectors and a pioneering film producer in Britain. In 1896, Edison's Company (because it was unable to produce a workable projector on its own) purchased an improved version of Armat's movie projection machine (the Phantascope), and renamed it the Vitascope. On April 23, 1896 in New York City at Koster and Bial's Music Hall, the date of the first Vitascope projection for a paying American audience, customers watched the Edison Company's Vitascope project a ballet sequence in an amusement arcade during a vaudeville act.
The First Permanent Movie Theatres:
Films were increasingly being shown as part of vaudeville shows, variety shows, and at fairgrounds or carnivals. Audiences would soon need larger theaters to watch screens with projected images from Vitascopes after the turn of the century. The earliest 'movie theatres' were converted churches or halls, showing one-reelers (a 10-12 minute reel of film - the projector's reel capacity at the time). The primitive films were usually more actualities and comedies.
1896: Armat applies for a patent for his improved projector; licenses it to Edison as the Vitascope.
1896: World's first public movie theater opens: George Melies' Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
1896: First official public showing of a movie in the United States for a paying audience, at Koster & Bial's Music Hall, 34th St. and Broadway, NYC (present site of Macy's), April 23.
1897: The first real cinema building was built in Paris, solely for the purpose of showing films. The same did not occur until 1902 in downtown Los Angeles where Thomas L. Talley's storefront, 200-seat Electric Theater became the first permanent US theater to exclusively exhibit movies - it charged patrons a dime, up from a nickel at the nickelodeons. By 1898, the Lumiere's company had produced a short film catalog with over 1,000 titles.
1897: The Kinora was an animated peepshow device appearing this year. The device contained three lenses so that three could view at a time. It operated through a clock-work motor wound to it’s fullest prior to viewing. A mirror at the top of the Kinora allowed ample light for viewing. Primarirly made of wood, the machine is heavily weighted to avoid tipping. The Kinora shown here (left) is circa 1910 and is also known as a Flicker Reel Picture Viewer. The name came from the fact that film negatives from early films were used to produce the images. This model contains a single lens.
Georges Melies: French Cinematic Magician
Georges Méliès (1861-1938) was also the cinema's first great fantasist. Whereas fellow pioneers such as Louis Lumière saw the cinema as essentially a recording device, taking snapshots of reality, Méliès saw it as a springboard for his own imagination, which had been developed over a decade as a conjuror, illusionist and theatre owner/manager. If ever a man was in the right place at the right time, Méliès was - the Lumière Brothers' presentation of the first ever projected film screenings in late 1895 occurred at precisely the point when Méliès, having experimented with magic lantern techniques, was looking for a new medium in which to expand his repertory of stage effects.
Méliès was born in Paris in 1861, though from an early age he showed a strong interest in the arts (including stage design and puppetry), which led to a place at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He continued his studies in London in 1884 (his family intended him to learn English before entering his parents' footwear business), where he developed a keen interest in stage conjury after seeing the work of Maskelyne and Cooke. Returning to Paris, he took over his father's business after the latter's retirement, which meant that he was able to raise the money when the famous Théâtre Robert-Houdin was put up for sale in 1888.
From then on Méliès worked full time as a theatrical showman, putting on performances that revolved around the magic and illusionistic techniques that he had studied in London, augmented with his own technical tricks. From 1896 he showed films regularly at his theatre, and later that year an event occurred that has since passed into film folklore. Filming a banal street scene, Méliès' camera jammed, and he had to spend a few seconds fixing it before he could recommence filming. When he processed the film, he was struck by the way objects suddenly appeared, disappeared or were transformed into other objects (the most famous example he cited was the carriage turning into a hearse).
This happy accident caused him to discover the cinema's unprecedented capacity for manipulating and distorting time and space, and he expanded this simple principle into a series of complex special effects, pioneering the first double exposure (La Caverne maudite, 1898), the first split-screen shot with performers acting opposite themselves (Un Homme de tête, 1898) and the first dissolve (Cendrillon, 1899), and laying the foundations for countless special effects blockbusters. Indeed, until the relatively recent introduction of computer-generated imagery (CGI), many of the special effects used in such films as Star Wars and Superman are in terms of basic technique little different from what Méliès was doing nearly a century earlier.
An illusionist and stage magician, and a wizard at special effects, Melies exploited the new medium with a pioneering, 14-minute science fiction work, Le Voyage Dans la Lune - A Trip to the Moon (1902). It was his most popular and best-known work, with about 30 scenes called tableaux. He incorporated surrealistic special effects, including the memorable image of a rocketship landing and gouging out the eye of the 'man in the moon.' Melies also introduced the idea of narrative storylines, plots, character development, illusion, and fantasy into film, including trick photography (early special effects), hand-tinting, dissolves, wipes, 'magical' super-impositions and double exposures, the use of mirrors, trick sets, stop motion, slow-motion and fade-outs/fade-ins. Although his use of the camera was innovative, the camera remained stationary and recorded the staged production from one position only.
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