History of cinema

The history of Cinema has been dominated by the discovery and testing of paradoxes
inherent to the medium itself. Cinema uses machines to record images of life; combines
still photographs to give the illusion of continuous movement; It seems to present life
itself, but it also offers impossible realities that only dreams come close to.

A few words about cinema

Cinema developed around 1890 from the union of photography, which records physical
reality, with the game of retinal persistence. which made the drawings look like they
were moving. Four main film traditions have developed since then

 The narrative fiction film, which tells stories about people with whom the
audience can identify because their world seems familiar;
 Documentary films, not fiction, that focus on the real world rather than
instructing or revealing any kind of truth about it;
 Cartoons, which make drawn or sculpted figures appear to move and speak; and
 Experimental cinema, which exploits cinema's ability to create purely abstract,
unreal worlds like never before seen.

Cinema is considered the youngest of artistic forms and has inherited much from the
oldest and most traditional arts. Like the novel, it can tell stories; like drama, it can
reflect conflict between living characters; Like painting, it composes space with light,
color, shadow, shape and texture; like music, it moves in time according to principles of
rhythm and tone; Like dance, it represents the movement of figures in space and is
frequently supported by music; and like photography, it presents a two-dimensional
version of what appears to be a three-dimensional reality, using perspective, depth and
shadow.

Cinema, however, is one of the few arts that is both spatial and temporal, that
intentionally manipulates both time and space. This synthesis has generated two
conflicting theories about cinema and its historical development. Some theorists, such
as Sergei M. Eisenstein and Rudolf Arnheim argue that cinema should take the path of
the other modern arts and concentrate not on telling stories and representing reality, but
on investigating time and space in a pure and consciously abstract way. Others, such as
André Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, argue that cinema must fully and carefully
develop its connections with nature so that it can portray human events as revealingly
and excitingly as possible.

The invention

Due to his fame, his success in spreading his activities, and his habit of patenting
machines before actually inventing them, Thomas Alva Edison received much of the
credit for having invented cinema; As early as 1887, he patented a moving-picture
camera, but it could not produce images. In truth, many inventors contributed to the
development of the animated image. Perhaps the first important contribution was a
series of moving photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge between 1872 and 1877.
Hired by California Governor Leland Stanford to capture on film the movement of a
racing horse, Muybridge strung a series of cables along a track and connected each to
the trigger of a fixed camera. The horse, while running, pulled on the cables and
achieved a series of photos, which Muybridge then mounted on a strobe disk and
projected with a magic flashlight to reproduce the image of the horse in motion.
Muybridge took hundreds of these studies and gave a lecture in Europe, where his work
interested the French scientist E. J. Marey. Marey devised a means of shooting moving
photos with what he called a photo gun.

Edison became interested in the possibilities of motion photography after hearing

Muybridge's lecture in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison's experiments with moving
photographs, under the direction of William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, began in 1888
with an attempt to record photographs on wax cylinders similar to those used to make
the first phonographic recordings. Dickson made a much bigger breakthrough when he
decided to use George Eastman's celluloid film instead. Celluloid was tough but flexible
and could be manufactured in long rolls, making it an excellent medium for motion
photography that required long lengths of film. Between 1891 and 1895, Dickson took
many 15-second films using Edison's camera, or Kinetograph, but Edison decided
against projecting the films to the public--partly because the visual results were
inadequate and partly because he thought the images on the move would have little
public appreciation. Instead, Edison launched an electrically powered machine that
pulled holes (the Kinetoscope) and showed the recorded wonders to one viewer at a
time.

Edison thought so little of the Kinetoscope that he declined to extend his patent rights to
England and Europe, a shortsightedness that allowed two Frenchmen, Louis and
Auguste Lumiere, to make a more portable camera and a functional projector, the
Cinematograph, based on Edison's machine. . The era of cinema can be said to have
officially begun on December 28, 1895, when the Lumieres presented a program of
short films to a paying audience in the basement of a Paris café. English and German
inventors also copied and improved based on Edison's machines, as did many
experimenters in the United States. At the end of the 19th century, a large number of
people in both Europe and the United States had seen some type of moving images.

Older films feature 15 to 60 glimpses of actual scenes filmed outdoors (workers, trains,
fire trucks, boats, military parades, soldiers) or staged performances filmed indoors.
These two initial tendencies -- recording life as it is and dramatizing life for artistic
purposes -- can be seen as the two dominant paths in the history of cinema.

Georges Melies was the most important of the early dramatic filmmakers. A magician
by trade, Melies showed in films such as "The Trip to the Moon" (1902), how cinema
could perform the most wonderful magic trick of all: simply by stopping the camera,
adding something to the scene or removing something from it, and then starting the
camera again, he made things pretend to appear and disappear. Early English and
French filmmakers such as Cecil Hepworth, James Williamson, and Ferdinand Zecca
also discovered how rhythmic movement (the chase) and rhythmic editing could make
cinema's treatment of space and time more exciting.
NORTH AMERICAN CINEMA IN THE SILENT PERIOD (1903-1928)

The most interesting early film was "The Great Train Robbery" ( 1903), directed by
Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Company. This primal western used much freer editing
and camera work than usual to tell its story, which included bandits, a stand, a chase for
loot, and a final shootout. When other companies (Vitagraph, the American Mutoscope
and Biograph Company, Lubin, and Kalem among them) began producing films that
competed with those of the Edison Company, Edison sued them for infringing his patent
rights. The much talked about "patent war" lasted 10 years (1898-1908), ending only
when nine leading companies emerged to form the "Motion Picture Patents Company."

One reason for the formalization was the enormous profits that arose from what had
begun only as a cheap curiosity. Before 1905 films were frequently shown in a
vaudeville house as one of the acts on the programme. After 1905 a growing number of
small warehouse-front theaters called "nickelodeons" , seating fewer than 200 patrons,
began showing films exclusively. By 1908 an estimated ten million Americans paid
their nickels (5 cents) or dimes (ten cents) to see these films. Young speculators like
William Fox and Marcus Loew saw their theaters grow from $1,600 each to businesses
worth $150,000 each in five years. Called "the people's theater", the first films attracted
primarily working-class and immigrant audiences who found pleasant family
entertainment in Nickelodeons . They may not have been able to read the words in
novels and newspapers, but they understood the silent language of the movies.

The popularity of moving images led to the first attacks against them, from crusading
moralists, police and politicians. To eliminate objectionable material from films, local
censorship committees were established. In 1909 the fledgling US film industry
mounted a counterattack by creating the first of many self-censorship committees, the
National Board of Censorship , renamed after 1916 the National Board of Review.
Review ), whose purpose was to establish moral standards for films and thus save them
from costly mutilation.

A Nickelodeon program consisted of about six 10-minute movies, usually including an

adventure, a comedy, a documentary film, a chase, and a melodrama. The most
dedicated maker of these films was D. W. GRIFFITH, who almost single-handedly
transformed both the art and the business of film. Griffith made nearly 400 short films
between 1908 and 1913, developing or discovering in this period almost every major
film technique for manipulating time and space: the alternating use of close-ups,
medium shots, and distant pans; the subtle control of editing pace, the effective use of
traveling shots, atmospheric lighting, narrative commentary, poetic detail and visual
symbolism; and the advantages of understated acting, at which his company was
excellent. The culmination of Griffith's work was The Birth of a Nation (1915), a
mammoth, three-hour epic about the Civil War and Reconstruction. Its historical detail,
suspense and passionate conviction made the 10-minute short go out of style.

The decade between 1908 and 1918 was one of the most important in the history of
American Cinema. The feature-length film replaced the series of short films; World
War I destroyed or restricted the European film industry, promoting greater technical
innovation, growth, and commercial stability in the United States; the film industry was
consolidated with the founding of the first major studios in Hollywood, California (Fox,
Paramount, and Universal); and the great American silent comedies appeared. Mack
SENNETT became the driving force behind the Keystone Company shortly after
joining it in 1912; Hal Roach founded his comedy company in 1914; and Charlie
CHAPLIN was probably the best-known face in the world in 1916.

During this period the first movie stars rose to fame, replacing the anonymous
performers of the shorts. In 1918, America's two favorite stars, Charlie Chaplin and
Mary PICKFORD, signed contracts worth more than a million dollars. Other familiar
stars of the era included comedians Fatty ARBUCKLE and John Bunny, cowboys
William S. HART and Bronco Billy Anderson, matinee idols Rudolph VALENTINO
and John Gilbert, and the fascinating ladies Theda BARA and Clara BOW. Along with
the stars came the first magazines for film fans; Photoplay published its inaugural issue
in 1912. That same year also saw the first of the FILM SERIALS, The Perils of Pauline
, The Perils of Pauline , starring Pearl White.

The next decade in the history of American cinema, from 1918 to 1928, was a period of
stabilization rather than expansion. Movies were made in studio complexes, which
were, in essence, factories designed to produce movies in the same way that Henry
Ford's factories produced automobiles. Film companies became monopolies since they
not only made films but distributed them to theaters and also owned the theaters in
which they were exhibited. This vertical integration was the commercial foundation of
the film industry for the next 30 years. Two new production companies were founded
during that decade, Warner Brothers (1923), which would become powerful with its
early conversion to synchronous sound, and Metro-Goldwyn (later in 1924 Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer), the production arm of Loew Under the direction of Louis B. MAYER
and Irving THALBERG.

Attacks on immorality in films intensified during this decade, spurred by the sensual
implications of movie stars' sexual practices both on and off screen. In 1921, after
several nationally publicized sex and drug scandals, the industry preempted the threat of
federal censorship by creating the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of
America (now Motion Picture Association of America ), under the direction of Will
HAYS. Hays, who had been US press chief and campaign manager for Warren G.
Harding began a series of public relations campaigns to highlight the importance of
cinema in American life. He also circulated several lists of practices that were from then
on prohibited on and off screens.

Hollywood films of the 1920s were more polished, subtle, talented, and especially
imaginative in handling the absence of sound. It was the great comedy moment. Chaplin
retained his followers around the world with his feature films such as El Pibe The Kid
(1920) and The Gold Rush (1925); Harold LLOYD climbed his way to fame -- and got
the girl -- no matter how great the obstacles in Grandma's Boy , Grandma's Boy (1922)
or The Freshman (1925); Buster KEATON remained unchanged through a succession
of bizarre events in Sherlock Jr. and The Navigator (both 1924); Harry Langdon was
always the elf-type cast lost in a harsh world; and director Ernst LUBITSCH, fresh from
Germany, brought his “touch” to understand sitcoms, sex and marriage. The decade saw
the first great American war film ( The Big Parade , 1925), its first great Western (The
Covered Wagon, 1923; The Iron Horse, 1924), and its first great biblical epic (The Ten
Commandments, 1923, and King of Kings King of Kings , 1927, both made by Cecil B.
DE MILLE). Other films of this era include the sexual studies of Erich Von
STROHEIM, the grotesque costume melodramas of Lon CHANEY, and the first major
documentary film Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert J. FLAHERTY.

EUROPEAN CINEMA IN THE 1920S

In the same decade European cinema recovered from the war to produce one of the
richest artistic periods in the history of cinema. German cinema, stimulated by
EXPRESSIONISM in painting and theater and by the design theories of the
BAUHAUS, created strange expressionist sets for fantasies such as Robert Wiene's The
Cabinet of Doctor Caligari and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1919), Nosferatu by F.
W. MURNAU's (1922), and Fritz LANG's Metropolis (1927). The Germans also
brought their sense of scenery, atmospheric lighting , and penchant for a frequently
moving camera to realistically political and psychological studies such as Murnau's The
Last Laugh (1924), G. W. PABST's (1925), and Viariedad Variety by E. TO. Dupont
(1925).

The innovation also came from a totally different approach given by filmmakers of the
USSR, where films were not only made to entertain but also to instruct the masses in the
political and social scope of their new government. Soviet cinema used montage or
complicated editing techniques that relied on visual metaphor to create emotion and
richness of texture, and ultimately to affect ideological attitudes. The most influential
Soviet theorist and filmmaker was Sergei M. Eisenstein, whose Potemkin (1925) had an
impact on the entire world; Other innovative Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s include V.
YO. PUDOVKIN, Lev Kuleshov, Abram Room, and Alexander DOVZHENKO.

Swedish cinema of the 1920s relied heavily on the remarkable visual qualities of the
Norian landscape. Mauritz Stiller and Victor Sjostrom mixed their natural imagery of
mountains, sea and ice with psychological drama and tales of supernatural quest. French
cinema, in contrast, brought the methods and theories of modern painting to the film.
Under the influence of SURREALISM and Dadaism, filmmakers working in France
began to experiment with the possibility of realizing abstract perceptions or dreams in a
visual medium. Marcel DUCHAMP, Rene CLAIR, Fernand LEGER, Jean RENOIR
and Luis BUÑUEL and Salvador DALI in An Andalusian Dog Un Chien andalou
(1928)--all made anti-realistic, anti-rational, non-commercial films that helped establish
the avant-garde tradition in cinematography. Many of these filmmakers would later
make significant contributions to the narrative tradition in the area of sound.

THE ARRIVAL OF SOUND

The talking film era began in late 1927 with the enormous success of Warner Brothers'
The Jazz Singer. The first all-talkie film, Lights of New York Lights of New York ,
followed in 1928. Although experimentation with the synchronization of sound and
image was as old as cinema itself (Dickson, for example, did a crude synchronization of
the two for Edison in 1894), the viability of sound cinema was widely publicized only
after Warner Brothers purchased the Vitaphone from Western Electric in 1926. The
original Vitaphone system synchronized the picture to a separate phonograph record,
rather than using the safer method of recording a sound track onto the film itself (based
on the OSCILLOSCOPE principle). Warners originally used the Vitaphone to make
musical shorts featuring both classical and popular performers and to record musical
tracks for otherwise silent films (Don Juan, 1926). For The Jazz Singer , Warners added
four synchronized musical sequences to the silent film. When Al JOLSON sang and
then delivered several lines of dialogue, the audience was electrified. Silent cinema
would die within a year.

The conversion to synchronous sound caused serious problems for the film industry.
Sound recording was difficult, cameras had to record from inside glass booths; studios
had to build special soundproof stages; the rooms required expensive new equipment;
writers had to be hired who had a good ear for dialogue; and actors whose voices could
reproduce them had to be found. Much of the early dialogue was ugly and static, the
visual images serving merely as accompaniment to endless dialogue, sound effects, and
musical numbers. Serious film critics mourned the death of the moving image, which no
longer seemed to have either image or movement.

The most effective early sound films were those that played most adventurously with
the union of image and soundtrack. Walt DISNEY in his cartoons combined striking
images with inventive sounds, carefully orchestrating animated movement and musical
rhythm. Ernst Lubitsch also played very wisely with sound, contrasting the visually
represented action with the information on the soundtrack in surprising or amusing
ways. By 1930 the North American film industry had conquered both the artistic and
technical problems related to using sight and sound harmoniously, the European
industry was quick to follow.

Film Bibliography
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Publishing House.

Bettetini, Gianfranco. 1975. Cinema: Language and writing. Mexico, Economic Culture
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Chiarini, Luigi. 1968. Art and technique of the film. Barcelona, Peninsula Editions.

Duca, Lo. 1960. History of cinema. Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires University Publishing
House.

May, Renato. 1962. The language of the film. Madrid, Ediciones Rialp, SA

Sandoul, G. 1960. The wonders of cinema. Mexico, Breviaries. Fund of Economic

Culture.
St. John Marner, Terence. 1984. How to direct cinema. Madrid, Editorial Fundamentos.

Allen, Robert C., and Gomery, Douglas, Film History: Theory and Practice (1985)

Arnheim, Rudolf, Film as Art (1957; repr. 1971)

Bazin, Andre, What is Cinema? , 2 vols., trans. by Hugh Gray (1967, 1971)

Brownlow, Kevis, The Parade's Gone By (1968)

Cook, David A., A History of Narrative Film , 1889-1979 (1981)

Cowie, Peter, ed., Concise History of the Cinema, 2 vols . (1970)

Downing, John D., Third World Cinema (1988)

Eisenstein, Sergei M., Film Form (1949; repr. 1969)

Ellis, J.C., A History of Film , 3d ed. (1990)

Halliwell, Leslie, Filmgoer's Companion , 6th ed. (1977)

Jowett, Garth, Film: The Democratic Art (1976)

Kael, Pauline, Reeling (1976), 5,000 Nights at the Movies: A Guide from A to Z (1982)

Movie Love: Complete Reviews , 1988-1991 (1991)

Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)

Leff, Leonard J., and Simmons, Jerold L., The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood,
Censorship, and the Production Code, from the 1920s to the 1960s (1990)

Mast, Gerald, A Short History of the Movies , 4th ed. (1986)

Mast, Gerald, and Cohen, Marshall, Film Theory and Criticism , 3d ed. (1985)

Medved, Michael, Hollywood vs. America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional
Values (1992)

Monaco, James, How to Read a Film (1977)

Peary, Danny, Cult Movies (1981);

Robinson, David, The History of World Cinema (1973).

Reviewed: .

NATIONAL FILM STORIES

LATIN AMERICAN, CANADIAN, AND AMERICAN: Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons,
Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films
(1973); Bordwell, David, Thompson, Kristin, and Staiger, Janet, The Classical
Hollywood Cinema (1984); Burton, Julianne, The New Latin Cinema (1976); Gabler,
Neal, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988); Hamilton,
Ian, Writers in Hollywood, 1915-51 (1990); Harpole, Charles, general editor, History of
the American Cinema, 3 vols. (1991); Haskell, Molly, From Reverence to Rape (1974);
Jowett, Garth, Film: the Democratic Art (1976); Medved, Michael, Hollywood vs.
America (1992); Monaco, James, American Film Now: The People, the Power, the
Movies (1979); Morris, Peter, Embattled Shadows: A History of the Canadian Film
(1979); Nevares, B. R., The Mexican Cinema (1976); Quart, Leonard, and Auster,
Albert, American Film and Society Since 1945 (1985); Russo, Vito, The Celluloid
Closet (1981); Sarris, Andrew, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-
1968 (1968); Sklar, Robert, Movie-Made America (1975); Veroneau, Pierre, ed., The
Canadian Cinema (1979).

AUSTRALIAN: Bertrand, Ina, ed., Cinema in Australia (1990); Murray, Scott, ed., The
New Australian Cinema (1981); Rhode, Eric, History and Heartburn: The Saga of
Australian Film (1981); Stratton, David, The Last New Wave: The Australian Film
Revival (1981).

BRITISH: Armes, Roy, A Critical History of British Cinema (1978); Durgnat,

Raymond, A Mirror for England (1971); Low, Rachael, The History of British Film, 4
vols. (1973); Manvell, Roger, New Cinema in Britain (1969).

CHINESE: Clark, Paul, Chinese Cinema (1988); Eberhard, Wolfram, The Chinese
Silver Screen (1972).

FRENCH: Abel, R., French Cinema: The First Wave, 1915-29 (1987); Armes, Roy, The
French Cinema Since 1946, 2 vols., rev. ed. (1970); Harvey, Sylvia, May '68 and Film
Culture (rev. ed., 1980); Monaco, James, The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol,
Rohmer, Rivette (1976); Sadoul, Georges, French Film (1953; repr. 1972).

GERMAN: Barlow, John D., German Expressionist Film (1982); Elsaessar, T., New
German Cinema (1989); Hull, David S., Film of the Third Reich: A Study of the
German Cinema, 1933-1945 (1969); Kracauer, Siegfried, From Caligari to Hitler
(1959); Manvell, Roger, and Fraenkel, Heinrich, The German Cinema (1971); Phillips,
Klaus, ed., New German Filmmakers (1984); Sandford, John, The New German
Cinema (1980); Riefenstahl, Leni, Leni Riefenstahl: A Memoir (1993); Wollenberg, H.
H., Fifty Years of German Film (1948; repr. 1972).

INDIAN: Barnouw, Erik, and Krishnaswamy, S., Indian Film, 2d ed. (1980).

ITALIAN: Jarratt, Vernon, Italian Cinema (1951; repr. 1972); Leprohon, Pierre, The
Italian Cinema (1972); Rondi, Gian, Italian Cinema Today (1965); Witcombe, Roger,
The New Italian Cinema (1982).
JAPANESE: Bock, Audie, Japanese Film Directors (1978); Burch, Noel, To the Distant
Observer: Form and Meaning in Japanese Cinema (1979); Mellen, Joan, The Waves at
Genji's Door: Japan Through Its Cinema (1976); Richie, Donald, The Films of Akira
Kurosawa (1965), The Japanese Movie: An Illustrated History (1966), and The
Japanese Cinema (1971); Sato, Tadao, Currents in Japanese Cinema (1982).

SOVIET AND EASTERN EUROPE: Cohen, Louis H., The Cultural-Political

Traditions and Development of the Soviet Cinema, 1917-1972 (1974); Dickenson,
Thorold, and De La Roche, Catherine, Soviet Cinema (1948; repr. 1972); Kurzewski,
Stanislas, Contemporary Polish Cinema (1980); Leyda, Jay, Kino: A History of the
Russian and Soviet Film (1960; repr. 1973); Liehm, Antonin J. and Mira, The Most
Important Art: East European Film after 1945 (1977); Taylor, Richard, Film
Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany (1979).

SWEDISH: Cowie, Peter, Swedish Cinema (1969); Donner, Jorn, The Personal Vision
of Ingmar Bergman (1964); Hardy, Forsyth, The Scandinavian Film (1952; repr. 1972).