Cinema

views updated

CINEMA

From the early nineteenth century to the beginning of World War I the cinema emerged slowly, first as a new technology and then, after 1895, as a new industry to take its place among the various older forms of popular entertainment. As a technology, the cinema ultimately combined three distinct nineteenth-century lines of development. The first of these was the invention and refinement of photography, which had begun with the work of Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) in France. Niépce probably had a camera and a working method of producing images as early as 1816, but it was Jacques-Louis-Mandé Daguerre (1789–1851) who finally refined the process and sold it, in 1839, to the French government for free public use. But this first viable system of photography was far from suitable for the cinema: the images were not reproducible and required very long exposure times. It would take most of the remainder of the century, and the work of many hands in Europe and the United States, before cameras could record reproducible images at exposures of less than a thirtieth of a second. The final ingredient necessary for cinema, flexible-roll celluloid, came only near the end of the century.

The second strand of technological development was the synthesis of motion from individual still images. Inspired by the research of the English scientists Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) and Michael Faraday (1791–1867), the Belgian Joseph Plateau (1801–1883) invented the phénakistoscope, a rotating disk with narrow radial slots and a series of drawings on one side. The viewer held the rotating disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots at the reflected drawings; the slots functioned as a primitive movie shutter. If expertly drawn, the images appeared to be in motion. Plateau's device was quickly followed by variations and improvements, most notably the Zoetrope, which replaced the flat, vertical disc with a horizontal cylinder. This line of development was to culminate in 1892 with the first public exhibition in Paris of Emile Reynaud's (1844–1918) Théâtre Optique, in which extended sequences of moving images were projected onto a screen. But this was not yet the cinema, for the images were drawn and painted, rather than photographed.

The essential addition of photography came through the third stream of technology that fed into the cinema: the analysis of animal locomotion. The English photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) first used a series of cameras to study the movement of horses in his work in California during the 1870s. In 1881 he toured Europe with his striking images, and in response the Parisian ètienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) was moved to adopt photography to his own researches. By 1888 Marey had developed the first true movie camera; however, the French scientist had little interest in synthesizing the motion he had analyzed. He showed his device to Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), who was touring Europe in 1889, and it was the American who saw commercial potential in the apparatus. He added a series of perforations at the edges of the images and changed the film base from paper to celluloid, making Marey's "chronophotographs" viewable in apparent motion. In 1891 Edison unveiled his Kinetoscope; whether this was finally "the cinema" depends on how one defines the word, for Edison's machine was a peep-show device, incapable of projecting the images onto a screen. This final step was taken by many mechanics and tinkerers at roughly the same time, but the most striking commercial success came to Louis Lumière's (1864–1948) Cinématographe, which opened commercially in Paris in 1895 and quickly became the entertainment sensation of the century's end. Lumie're had further improved on Edison's adaptation of Marey's technology, perfecting an easily portable machine that served as camera, projector, and contact printer.

The Cinématographe entered a crowded field of European popular entertainments. Most enterprises were family-run and solidly entrenched in the lower fringes of the middle class. There were circuses, theater troupes, magicians, wonders-of-science exhibitions, and other attractions. In the large cities these could be in permanent locations, but in most of Europe, which was still largely rural, they were traveling affairs that went from town to town in well-established circuits. The cinema was largely to replace this whole economic sector, but it started its commercial development as one attraction among many.

The most important film producer was the Lumière company. Its operators quickly began to crisscross Europe and the world, showing half-hour selections of the company's films (and making more). Each film, or "view," lasted a little less than one minute, and showed one action or interesting environment: boats leaving a harbor, workers tearing down a wall, a busy city street, or the famous Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895).

At first Lumière refused to sell its films and equipment to other exhibitors, but competing machines and production companies sprang up almost everywhere the company's operators took their traveling show. By far the most successful early competitor was the Frenchman Georges Mélie's (1861–1938), proprietor of a magic theater in Paris. His Trip to the Moon (1902) was probably the most widely seen work of the cinema's first decade, and he all but single-handedly created the medium's second major genre (after the "view"), the "trick film," based on humorous, magical, and often grotesque transformations (of flowers into women, or moon people into puffs of smoke, and so on). At the same time in England, other producers began to elaborate these and other genres. The English dabbled extensively in film comedy, of which they were the first true masters, but they also pioneered the action melodrama, of which Cecil Hepworth's (1874–1953) Rescued by Rover (1905) is a remarkable early example. Rover and films like it were probably the high point of the contributions of the English entrepreneurs, who

were soon eclipsed by the medium's first large-scale capitalist enterprises.

This new stage of development had begun in France in the late 1890s, when two small businesses began to evolve into modern giants: Pathé Frères (1896) and the Gaumont company (1895). They became the first examples of the "studio system" that would dominate world film production until the middle of the twentieth century. Organizationally, they had three important characteristics: (1) they were vertically integrated, combining production, distribution, and exhibition; (2) they employed large numbers of specialized contract workers—directors, scriptwriters, and so on; and (3) they had access to capital through the financial markets (stocks and bonds). Soon the French "majors" were ready to act assertively in the marketplace. Pathé Frères, for example, cut the prices of its films by one-third in England in 1906, effectively "dumping" product onto that market and impeding further development of a domestic cinema industry.

By this time some of the early genres, such as the Lumière "views" and the "trick film," were in eclipse, but others were developing to replace them. The most important of these in France was the film d'art, or "art film," essentially filmed theater with famous actors—either direct adaptations of plays or play-like original scenarios such as The Assassination of the Duc de Guise (1908). These films were made with larger budgets and longer running times, and they appealed to socially upscale audiences. This represented a qualitatively new development, making obsolete virtually the entire fairground exhibition circuit; it arose in part because of competition from an unexpected source: Italian production companies such as Cines and Itala Films.

That Italy could develop the only European industry to provide serious competition to the French had several causes: (1) labor and capital costs were much lower there; (2) the Italian market had all but skipped the "fairground" stage of exhibition, with little popular or entrepreneurial interest in cinema before roughly 1906; and (3) beginning at that time, a wave of popular interest and entrepreneurial zeal sparked the greatest film exhibition boom in all of Europe. Unlike France, which remained dominated by its two "majors," Italy had a profusion of mid- to large-sized firms (one critic estimated eighty, in 1914); these were able to attract talent, technicians, and capital from France, England, and elsewhere. For this new industry, a new genre was the flagship product in the battle for the international film market: extra-vagantly produced historical spectacles, such as The Last Days of Pompeii (1908, directed by Luigi Maggi for Ambrosio Company). Largely from this generic line—and from its competition with the French film d'art—there emerged, by the early 1910s, the modern (though still silent) "feature film," telling a coherent, character-based story in more than an hour—sometimes much more, as in the remarkable Cabiria (1914, produced and directed by Giovanni Pastrone [1883–1959] with a text by Gabriele D'Annunzio [1863–1938]). Many of the earlier genres survived as "short subject" accompaniments to the features. Programs such as these were ill suited to traveling fairground shows, which by 1914 had been decimated by competition from movie theaters in cities and towns. The world power of the new medium was France, with Italy in close second place; other European countries had weak domestic industries with minority shares of their own markets—except for Russia, which had managed to develop a relatively healthy, although not export-oriented, cinema industry. All of this would change, of course, and change dramatically, with World War I.

bibliography

Primary Sources

British Film Institute and Film Preservation Associates, eds. The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894–1913. New York, 1994 (5 videocassettes) and 2002 (5 DVDs).

Pastrone, Giovanni. Cabiria. New York, 1990 (video-cassette) and 2000 (DVD).