Early Cinema Achievements

          

                      In a world full of computer generated and special effects, trick cinematography, fast editing and complicated story lines, it is hard to imagine how revolutionary the early cinema achievements truly were. We might look at the earliest two-minute silent films of people dancing in the yard and think, “What’s so amazing about that?”  But the majority of the audience had never seen moving images before.  In order to understand how amazing these silent films really were, we must place ourselves in the time period of the audience. We must erase our minds of the technology used in today’s filmmaking in order to better understand some of the ingenious breakthroughs that were made throughout the 1800s.

            Before the first silent films came out, there were only still images.  It was Peter Mark Roget who first noted the “Persistence of Vision” phenomenon in 1820.  Roget discovered that there is a certain length of time that the retina will obtain an image. Because of this “Persistence of Vision,” when there are several photographs taken in sequence and shown in rapid succession, the eye and brain fill in the gaps in between each image and creates motion.  Soon after, there were several inventions that would demonstrate the effects of Persistence of Vision.  The first breakthrough that paved the way for motion pictures was the zoopraxiscope.  Other inventions included the thaumatrope, zoetrope and kinetiscope.  All these inventions brought to life the still images by creating movement in between them.  Another person who proved persistence of vision was Eadweard Muybridge.  In 1872, a man by the name of Leland Standtford, hired Eadweard Muybridge to figure out a way to get a sequence of photographs showing his horse running.  Eadweards set up several cameras in a row attached to wires that would snap pictures as the horse ran by. The end result was a horse running and picking up all four feet in full stride.

            Now that you have a better understanding of the technology available during these silent films, pretend that you have never seen movement between two images before and are seeing a motion picture for the first time. You pay money to see the motion picture, with no idea what it is you are going to see.  When the film starts, images on the screen have motion as if they have come to life right before your eyes.  It is like going to a magic show and being completely dumb founded by the illusion the magician has created in front of you.  A train on the screen is coming towards you, and you wonder if it is going to come through the screen and crash into the audience.

Because audiences were thrilled with the idea of seeing motion pictures and their popularity increased, the quantity and length of motion pictures increased too.  The first films, called “actualities,” were non-fiction.  As people grew tired of these actualities, the idea of writing fictitious stories and capturing them on film exploded.  Over the years there were several major advancements in motion picture films: they developed new editing styles, added cinematography elements, included special effects, added sound and color.

People in the early stages of motion pictures claimed it was a dead end hobby. Well over a hundred years later and thanks to those early cinema pioneers, that dead end hobby is still a major form of entertainment throughout the world--and will probably be for generations to come.    


Images courtesy of  inventors.about.com, www2.brooklyn.liu.edu, courses.ncssm.edu