Film History

1. Film History The Invention and Early Years of Cinema 1880s - 1904

2. How do we see Movement? • Persistence of Vision makes it possible for humans to see movement in a film when in reality a film is just a series of still images shown in rapid succession. • Definition: The retention of a visual image for a short period of time after the removal of the stimulus that produced it: the phenomenon that produces the illusion of movement when viewing motion pictures.

3. 1833 The zoetrope

4. How it Works

5. 1891 Edison, Dickson and the kinetoscope

6. Kinetoscope Films 1894-1896 • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmZ4VPmhAkw

7. 1894 The lumiere Brothers and the Cinematographe • In 1894 the famous Lumiere Brothers invented a small 35mm camera called the cinematographe. The cinematographe could also be used to project the films it recorded. • The first film the Lumiere Brothers made was in 1895 and called “Workers leaving the Factory” This was the first film to ever be projected to a mass audience. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BO0EkMKfgJI • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s

8. Georges Melies • One of the most important early directors was a man named Georges Meliesalso known as the Magician of Cinema. • Melies used the first form of stop motion photography to create magical scenes in his films. Actors and props would disappear and reappear by stopping the film camera changing the scenery and starting the camera again. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk

9. Editing and The Great Train Robbery • In the late 1800s most images were novel, one-scene clips. Machines such as the kinetoscope would show a series of moving images like a horse running or a woman dancing. • Moving images changed in 1903 with the debut of The Great Train Robbery. Produced by Thomas Edison, and directory by Edwin Porter. The film began to shift the focus from novelty films to plot-based cinema. • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bc7wWOmEGGY#t=90

10. The Great Train Robbery • The Great Train Robbery was one of the first crime dramas and archetype of the western genre. The film introduced moviegoers to robberies, chase scenes, and gun shoot offs. The film was also one the first to incorporates a full cast of actors and to shoot on locations • New techniques in film editing also helped to establish the movie as a pioneer. It used cross-cutting to show two events occurring simultaneously.

11. The great Train Robbery • The film also uses panning shots, where the camera follows the characters, to focus viewers’ attention. These simple techniques help to establish continuity between scenes and increase suspense for the viewer.

12. D.W. Griffith and Continuity Editing • D.W. Griffith revolutionized the art of editing. He filmed various shots from different angles and edited them together to create what is known as Continuity Editing. • Griffith freed the camera from the conventions of stage perspective by breaking the action of scene into many different shots and editing these according to the emotional and narrative rhythms of the action. For example, cutting from full-figure shots to a close-up accentuated the drama, and matching the action on a cut as a character walks from an exterior into a doorway and then enters an interior enables Griffith to join filming locations. He was creating the “Language of Film” • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jfvc3CZpLH4 The Girl and Her Trust 1912

13. SerGei Eisenstein • Russian Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein believed that editing was the foundation of the film art. For Eisenstein, meaning in cinema lay not in the individual shot but only in the relationships among shots established by the editing. Conflict was essential to the political films of Eisenstein and shows in his shot changes, which give his silent films a rough, jagged quality. His shot editing was not the smooth quality of Griffith but instead clashed and banged shots together.

14. Sergei Eisenstein • Thus, Eisenstein’s montages were eminently suited to depictions of violence as in his film “The Battleship Potemkin.” • Montage in cinema is the juxtaposition of two or more shots to create a third meaning. • Oliver Stone is an enormous fan of the use of montages in his films. Especially, in “Any Given Sunday” • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPwttAI6JCY

15. Sergei Eisenstein • Battleship Potemkin 1925 • It is a tribute to the early Russian revolutionaries and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of international cinema. • The film is based on the mutiny of Russian sailors against their tyrannical superiors aboard the battleship Potemkin during the Revolution of 1905. However, the insurgents only made it as far as the Odessa Steps before they were slaughtered by Cossack Militants

16. Battleship Potemkin • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TgWoSHUn8c • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJ_1P-Py2k • “The Untouchables” 1987 Union Station Scene • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRJ539f5Ugc

17. History • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uahjH2cspk • The history of cinema and editing • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjYjFEp9Yx0&list=PLrMEncyd64BdPt-iWyxiAdo19tYm7myf1&index=4 • The History of Frame Rate