History of cinema
The history of cinema is the remembrance of the inventions, inventors, and events that gave birth to cinematography. It spans from its silent black-and-white beginnings to its contemporary, digital, and computerized special-effects-abundant strands.
This is a story that covers almost two centuries, from the end of the 19th century to the present, and that goes hand in hand with the invention of photography. Cinema is a technique of capturing, editing, and reproducing images and sound. It operates based on photosensitive supports, computing devices, and specialized projectors, to offer the viewing public the impression of movement.
This technique has been perfected in our days with the incorporation of digital technology and the professionalization of the cinematographic trade. It has achieved its own artistic language that today is recognized as the "ninth art" and that, as an entertainment industry, mobilizes large amounts of money throughout the world.
Origin of Cinema
The formal origin of cinema dates back to the 19th century, with the invention of photography. With it, the first steps were taken towards the generation of the impression of movement, thanks to retinal persistence (the minimum duration of the images seen on the human retina when they are projected at high speed) and the principle of the camera obscura.
The first film projection exhibited to the public took place in Paris on December 28, 1895. It consisted of a projection of the departure of some workers from a factory in Lyon. It was recorded by the famous Lumière brothers, who in one year produced more than 500 films lasting no more than one minute.
That first screening was attended by just 35 people, but word spread very quickly in Paris and soon there were crowds eager to see the new invention, billed as the Cinématographe Lumière.
There is also a famous anecdote that one of his first projections involved the frontal filming of a train arriving at the station. The audience, fearful that the train would run over them, fled the room.
Cinema background
For the invention of the Lumieres to exist, numerous discoveries had to be made previously. Some even date back to the 16th century, when the German priest Athanasius Kircher invented the magic lantern, a device with rotating images that simulated movement and was used to entertain children.
In the 18th century, Gaspard Robert popularized the public projection of images painted on glass plates, which he called Fantasmagories. In the 19th century, there were more experiments with moving images. One of the most important was Simon von Stampfer's stroboscope (1833), which made it possible to see at very slow speeds (or at rest) an object that rotated on itself.
In 1874 photography was invented. Based on this invention, the Frenchman Jules Janssen created the "photographic revolver", an ancestor of today's photographic camera. Shortly after, the American Edward Muybridge managed to reproduce the galloping of a horse from photographs taken in a series of his career.
But cinema as such was only possible when Thomas Alva Edison invented the incandescent light bulb in 1889, and then the Kinematograph, a device that synchronized sound and image capture, trying to capture the moment lived. The latter gave rise to the subsequent inclusion of audio in the cinema.
The magic of Georges Melies
One of the great precursors of cinema was Georges Méliès. Due to his enthusiasm, he decided to invest in the technology of the Lumière brothers. He proposed important innovations that changed the naturalistic, realistic, and passive character of the Lumière recordings.
On the contrary, Méliès created fictional stories endowed with special effects, cardboard sets, makeup, and editing jumps. It was about children's fables and fantastic stories, thanks to which he is still remembered today as the "magician of the cinema". Among them were "Journey to the Moon" (1902) and "The Impossible Journey" (1904), inspired by Jules Verne's books.
Pioneers: Leon Gaumont and Alice Guy Blaché
Other important forerunners of cinema at the end of the 19th century were Leon Gaumont and Alice Guy Blaché, his secretary and associate. The latter, after witnessing the projections of the Lumière brothers, convinced her boss, who owned a sale of photographic equipment, to venture into the cinema.
Together they undertook the production of films, which Guy herself scripted and filmed, among them one of the first fiction feature films: La fée aux choux, “the cabbage fairy” in 1896. In these first films, there was an important presence of techniques theatrical, and later dyeing was incorporated for the first time, allowing the images to be in color.
Pioneer: Charles Pathé
Pathé was another film entrepreneur resulting from the exhibitions of the Lumière brothers. He made his own cameras with which he started his productions. He also tried to combine the phonograph with the cinematograph, to capture audio and video at the same time, although without much success.
Later, he did thrive in the corporate world of film: he founded the first film company that combined the three branches of the film industry: production, distribution, and exhibition, called Pathé Frères (“Pathé Brothers”).
Many innovations in cinematographic language took place in this enterprise, such as close, not wide, cinematographic shots. They were especially due to Ferdinand Zecca, who played the actor, director, screenwriter, and decorator.
Silent film and sound film
Already in 1902, Edison took the first steps towards recording audio and image at the same time, although still with very poor quality. In addition, thanks to León Gaumont's chromophore in 1910, the possibility of including sound in films began to be glimpsed.
However, the cinema was silent during its first 30 years. Live music continued to be accompanied by projections until 1927 when the first sound feature film was made possible by synchronizing a record played at the same time as the film. This first sound film was Warner Bros. Pictures Inc's The Jazz Singer in the United States.
Cinematographic Language
The pioneers of cinematographic language, who put an end to the tendency of filming cinema as if it were recorded theater, were two:
David W. Griffith. American filmmaker, and author of The Birth of a Nation (1915), a silent film that recounted the founding of the United States and was the first film blockbuster in history. For the first time, he used alternating and not fixed shots, a mobile camera, shots and full or partial shots, and other changes that found part of the way of making movies that we still understand.
Sergey Eisenstein. Soviet Union filmmaker whose key work is Battleship Potemkin (1925), a silent film that narrates the mutiny inside a Tsarist battleship in the middle of the October Revolution. It is considered the best film in history and is one of the most studied in cinema, given its editing technique, which has set the standard ever since. It is the first film to use shocking images to generate an emotional reaction in the audience.
