Online Encyclopedia
History of cinema
Development of film
The underlying principle of cinema, that an image of an object remains projected on the retina for a split-second longer than it is actually there, causing the images to blur into the illusion of motion, was introduced to the scientific world in 1824 by English physician Peter Mark Roget in his paper "Persistence of Vision with Regard to Moving Objects." The film process may first have been created by Louis Le Prince, working in New York City, who patented his process for "the successive production of objects in motion by means of a projector" in 1886. But while traveling to Paris to demonstrate his process in 1892 he vanished.
In January 1889 however, British inventor William Friese Greene developed the first moving pictures on celluloid film, exposing 20 feet of film at Hyde Park, London. Processing the film that night at his Picadilly studio, Friese Greene produced the first projected moving image. He patented the process in 1890, but was unable to finance the manufacturing process, and later sold his patent.
The first commercially developed process was by Thomas Edison's employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who first demonstrated his Kinetoscope in March 1891. The first public display of this process took place on May 20, 1891 to members of the National Federation of Women's Clubs . Dickson left the Edison Company in 1895 and Edison himself claimed all credit for the process. People were paying to view Kinetoscope films by April 1894. The Kinetoscope was a powerful viewing experience but a private one, meant for an individual or perhaps a family.
It was in America that people were first induced to pay to watch -- in May 1895 in a store on Broadway. In Europe it was not until November 1895 in Berlin that a movie was shown in public.
The quality of the movies shown in New York and Berlin were extremely poor and used processes that had no lasting impact on movie technology. The "true" debut of the motion picture is therefore usually dated to December 28, 1895 in Paris, where at the Grand Cafe in Boulevard des Capucines the Lumière brothers had their first paying audience.
Color and sound
Commercially successful color process dates from 1906 when George Albert Smith produced a two-color system using panchromatic stock in Brighton for Charles Urban Trading Company as Kinemacolor . The first public presentation was not until February 1909 in London, when a series of twenty short movies by the Natural Colour Kinematograph Company was shown at the Palace Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue. However, there were a number of problems with Kinemacolor and color stock was not regarded as a commercial reality until 1932 with the Technicolor three-color process.
Synchronized sound was first demonstrated in 1900 at the Paris Exposition with a separate sound-on-disc system. Sound-on-film was first patented in 1906 by Eugene Lauste in London, although the system was not really successful until 1910 with the words "J'entends très bien maintenant." A completed projector project was stymied by the outbreak of war and it was not until September 1922 that the process was demonstrated to an invited audience in Berlin. Yet again it was in New York in April 1923 that people first paid.
The first (reasonably) permanent cinema was the Vitascope Hall in New Orleans. It opened in June 1896. Admission was 10 cents. The first important purpose-built cinema was the Gaumont Film Company's Gaumont-Palace in Paris, which opened in 1910 and could seat 5,000 people. There are many early cinemas still in use in the UK, including the Electric Palace in Harwich.
Soon, the French concept of movies being shown in theaters became the dominant model, and entrepreneurs scurried to build impressive movie houses all across North America and Europe.
The shift that occurred in the 1980s from seeing movies in a theater to watching videos on a VCR, is a move quite close to the original idea of Thomas Edison. In the early part of that decade, the movie studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs as a violation of copyright, which proved unsuccessful. That proved most fortuitous, however, as the sale and rental of their movies on home video became a significant source of revenue for the movie companies.
In 2001, cinema began the process of making another transition, from physical film stock to digital cinema technology, driven by the availability of low cost data storage and high-resolution digital displays.
History of cinema by region
- Albania
- Australia
- Canada
- China
- France
- Germany
- India
- Italy
- Japan
- Korea
- New Zealand
- Poland
- Russia
- United Kingdom
- United States