Film
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Wikipedia-Article "Film"
- This article is about motion pictures. For other uses of "film", see photographic film or film (disambiguation).
Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and most commonly movies.
Films are produced by recording actual people and objects with cameras, or by creating them using animation techniques and/or special effects. They comprise a series of individual frames, but when these images are shown rapidly in succession, the illusion of motion is given to the viewer. Flickering between frames is not seen due to an effect known as persistence of vision — whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Perhaps of more relevance is what causes the perception of motion — a psychological effect identified as beta movement.
Film is considered by many to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. The visual elements of cinema need no translation, giving the motion picture a universal power of communication. Any film can become a worldwide attraction, especially with the addition of dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue. Films are also artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them.
History of film
- Main article: History of film
Mechanisms for producing artificialy created, two-dimensional images in motion were demonstrated as early as the 1860's, including the zoetrope and the praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as magic lanterns), and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving. Naturally, the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect — and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film animation.
With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time using the new medium. Early versions of the technology sometimes required the viewer to look into a special device to see the pictures. By the 1880's, the development of the motion picture camera allowed the individual component images to be captured and stored on a single reel, and led quickly to the development of a motion picture projector to shine light through the processed and printed film and magnify these "moving picture shows" onto a screen for an entire audience. These reels, so exhibited, came to be known as "motion pictures".
Motion pictures were purely visual art up to the late 1920s, but these innovative silent films had gained a hold on the public imagination. When films began to tell stories, instead of just record brief events, exhibitors sometimes provided a commentator to narrate the action, but this became unnecessary with the development of printed intertitles containing the actors' dialogue and other written, descriptive material as part of the visual experience. Rather than leave the audience in silence, theater owners would hire a pianist or organist or a full orchestra to play music fitting the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music for this purposes, with complete film scores being composed for major productions.
In 1922, new technology allowed filmmakers to attach to each film a soundtrack of speech, music and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. These sound films were initially distinguished by calling them "talking pictures", or talkies.
The next major step in the development of cinema was the introduction of color. While the addition of sound quickly eclipsed silent film and theater musicians, color was adopted more gradually. The public was relatively indifferent to color photography as opposed to black-and-white. But as color processes improved and became as affordable as black-and-white film, more and more movies were filmed in color after the end of WWII, as the industry in America came to view color an essential to attracting audiences in its competition with television, which remained a black-and-white medium until the mid-60s. By the end of the 1960s, color had become the norm for film makers, and by the 1980s, an expectation of the younger generations by then comprising the majority of the audience for commercial films. Only in rare exceptions is black-and-white film now used; the choice is motivated by artistic reasons. Film presented today in black-and-white, like the recent release Sin City, tends to have a greater dramatic tone and can be an inspired throwback to older cinema.
Origins of motion picture arts and sciences
Film as an art form grew out of a long tradition of literature, storytelling, narrative drama, art, mythology, puppetry, shadow play, cave paintings and perhaps even dreams. In addition, the technology of film, also emerged from various developments and achievements in human history.
Protean developments
About 400 BC - Mozi a Chinese philosopher ponders the phenomenology of an upside down image of the outside world beaming through a small hole in the opposite wall in a darkened room.
c. 350 BC - Aristotle tells of watching an image of an eclipse beamed onto the ground through a sieve.
c. 1000 - Alhazen experiments with the same optical principle, and writes of the results.
1490 - Leonardo DaVinci describes a structure that would produce this effect.
1544 - Reinerus Gemma-Frisius, a Dutch scientist, illustrates large rooms built for the purpose of viewing eclipses by this means.
1588 - Giovanni Battista Della Porta tips off artists to this trick. He used the Camera Obscura or Dark Room to help painters paint pictures with depth and [Perspective].
c. 1610 - Johannes Kepler refers to a construction that utilises this phenomenon as a camera obscura.
1671 - Athanasius Kircher projected images painted on glass plates with an oil lamp and a lens, his Magic Lantern.
1820s - Joseph Plateau: Anorthoscope; Phenakistiscope. Spindle viewers. Flip books.
1824 - Thaumatrope. Peter Mark Roget presents the persistence of vision to the world in his paper Explanation of an optical deception in the appearance of the spokes of a wheel when seen through vertical apertures. The article is often incorrectly cited as Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects, or On the Persistence of Vision with Regard to Human Motion, and given an incorrect date.
1831 - Faraday's Law of electromagnetic induction.
1834 - The Zoetrope (U.S.), a.k.a., the Daedalum (England).
Victorian cinema c.1860-1901
1861 - Henri DuMont patents an apparatus for "reproducing successive phases of motion", British Patent 1,457.
1861 - The Kinematoscope is invented. This is a series of stereoscopic pictures on glass plates, linked together in a chain, and mounted in a box. The viewer turns a crank to see moving images.
1872 - Eadweard Muybridge designs the zoopraxiscope. French astronomer Pierre Jules Cesar Janssen develops a camera with a revolving photographic plate that makes exposures at regular, automatic intervals.
1877 - Muybridge begins experimenting with "serial photography" (or "chronophotography"), taking multiple exposed images of a running horse (see main Muybridge article).
1878 - George Eastman manufactures photographic dry plates the same year Thomas Edison invents the first electric incandescent light bulb, archaically known as a magic lantern.
1880 - Muybridge begins projecting his studies of figures in motion.
1881 - Louis Lumiere develops a "dry plate" process with gelatin emulsion.
1882 - Etienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, makes a series of photographs of birds in flight. Hannibal Goodwin sells an idea to George Eastman, who markets it as "American film" : a roll of paper coated with emulsion.
1886 - Louis Le Prince patented his process for "the successive production of objects in motion by means of a projector".
1887 - Ottomar Anschütz creates the electrotachyscope, which presents the illusion of motion with transparent chronophotography.
1888 - Louis Le Prince shot the first "moving pictures" on paper film, the so-called Roundhay Garden Scene and "Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge" films. Roundhay Garden Scene is considered by film historians to be the first known motion picture.
1889 - William Friese Greene developed the first "moving pictures" on celluloid film, exposing 20 ft of film at Hyde Park, London. George Eastman improves on his paper roll film, substituting the paper with plastic.
1890 - Friese Greene patents his process, but was unable to finance manufacturing of it, and later sold his patent. [1]
1891 - Edison patents the Kinetoscopic camera invented by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, which takes moving pictures on a strip of film (this was one of many inventions for which Edison claimed credit). A lighted box was used to view the pictures, the viewer was required to turned a handle to see the pictures "move". First called "arcade peepshows", these were to soon be known as nickelodeons. Fred Ott's Sneeze is the first Kinetographic film.
1893 - Edison Laboratories builds a film studio, in West Orange, New Jersey, dubbed the Black Maria. It was built on a turntable so the window could rotate toward the sun throughout the day, supplying natural light for the productions.
1894 - Louis Lumiere invents the cinematograph a single-unit camera, developer, and movie projector. Kinetoscopes, meanwhile, were popular and profitable. On January 7, W.K. Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film. In New York City in October Alexander Black debuted his "Picture Play" entitled "Miss Jerry" which featured sequential glass lantern slides projected onto a white sheet to illustrate a narrative story, predesessor to the full-length feature film.
1895 - The Arrival of a Train premiered on a large screen December 28 at the Grand Cafe in Paris, France. Louis and his brother Auguste Lumiere also filmed Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory that year, while in the U.S. Woodville Latham combined a Kinetoscope with a projecting device. People were avidly watching nickelodeons on Broadway in New York City.
1896 - Edison loses W. K. Dickson who joins with other inventors and investors to form the American Mutoscope Company. The company manufactured the mutoscope as a rival to the Kinetoscope and, like Edison, produced films for its invention. Expanding on the idea, American Mutoscope then developed the "biograph" which was a projector allowing films to be shown in theatres to a large audience rather than in single-user nickelodeons. Edison entered the competition for developmet of a large projector he called the Vitascope. This year also debuted the work of first female film director, Alice Guy-Blaché's The Cabbage Fairy. Vitascope Hall in New Orleans opened in June of this year.
1897 - U.S. President William McKinley's inauguration was filmed, the first U.S. newsreel. In England the Prestwich Camera is patented.
1898 - The Spanish-American War becomes the first war to be photographed using the motion picture camera. This war escalated the competition between the two prominant motion picture companies of the time, Thomas Edison Incorporated and the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, as both companies vied to get the best footage of the war. The increased revenue that war motion picture brought in stimulated the industry and helped jumpstart the Silent Era.
1899 - With the success of the biograph, American Mutoscope changed its name to American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. In England Edward R. Turner and F. Marshall Lee create chronophotographic images through red, green and blue filters and project them together with a three-lens projector.
1900 - Synchronized sound was first demonstrated at the Paris Exposition with a sound-on-disc system.
The silent era
1901-1919
1902 - Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, (Le Voyage dans la Lune), premieres, the first science fiction film with extravagant special effects. The Charles Urban Trading Company was founded by Charles Urban, an American, in England. The company produced original films and distributed films made by the Lumiere brothers and Georges Méliès throughout Europe. Méliès filmed a mock coronation of Edward VII and it was presented in theaters the same night as the actual ceremony. Léon Gaumont begins experimenting with the possibilities of sound on film.
1903 - Edwin S. Porter produces The Great Train Robbery.
1906 - Eugene Lauste patents a sound-on-film process in London.
1906 - The Story of the Kelly Gang, about the legendary Australian bushranger, Ned Kelly, is released on the 26th December. It is widely regarded as the world's first feature length film with an approximate runtime of 70 minutes.
1909 - George Albert Smith produced a processed two-color system using panchromatic stock in Brighton for the Charles Urban Trading Company, this was dubbed Kinemacolor. The first public presentation of Kinemacolor was in February in London, when a series of twenty short movies by the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company was shown at the Palace Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue.
1909 - the Electric Cinema on Station street, Birmingham is the oldest working Cinema in the UK and was once reputedly a haunt of George Bernard Shaw.
1910 - Wladyslaw Starewicz (Ladislas Starevich - Polish Director) - The Beautiful Lukanida - the first puppet animated film.
1912 - Universal Pictures Company is founded by Carl Laemmle in Hollywood.
1914 - Charlie Chaplin charms audiences as "The Little Tramp." Vaudeville begins to suffer from this redirected audience for entertainment, but early films soon became a new venue for many stage performers.
1917 - An estimated 3,000 cinemas in England. [2]
1919 - United Artists Corporation is collectively formed by Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford.
1920-1929
The 1920s represented the era of greatest output in the US movie market. An average of 800 films were produced annually. [3]
While developments in color and sound were still in the experimental stage a strong demand for movies and, therefore, potential for profit, encouraged productions for commercial release.
The French model of commercial movie houses became the international model, and entrepreneurs scurried to build impressive movie houses across North America and Europe including theatres to seat up to 5,000 people. Oscar Deutsch opened his first Odeon cinema in the UK in Perry Barr in 1920. By 1930 the Odeon was a household name and still thrives today across Britain with a vast array of purpose built cinemas.
1927 saw the introduction of some early zoom lenses. These were operated with a primitive hand crank. Optical lenses were not to be perfected for another 20 years.
With many technical obstacles overcome, film as entertainment began to blossom as an art form in the 1920s, a decade heralded by art deco and German expressionism. Rudolph Valentino and Charlie Chaplin rose to stardom in this era, which also saw the premier of the first Walt Disney animated cartoon. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences founded in 1927 with the first "Oscar" given in 1929. The popularity of horror movies is traced to this era with Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Abel Gance's Napoleon was one movie presented on three screens simultaneously, a hallmark of