Cinema 1880s-1904
The Invention and Early Years of the Cinema (1880s-1904)
Hello: These are my study notes from my Cinema 20A class at CCSF.
Most notes, straight from my teacher's notes, Wikipedia or other sources
First Module Midterm Review
TERMS/PEOPLE
1)Actualities (Scenics/Topicals) vs. Fiction Films
Actualities (Scenics/Topicals) vs. Fiction Films : A nonfiction film, usually lasting no more than one to two minutes, showing unedited, unstructured footage of real events, places, people, or things. Actualities, the predecessor of documentaries, were popular forms of entertainment from the early 1890s until around 1908. actualities. These included scenics, or short travelogues, offering views of distant lands. News events might be depicted in brief topicals.
Film historian Jon Lewis describes the visual style of Sandow (1886): Edison's filmmakers - W. K. L. Dickson, James White, and William Heise - opted for an aesthetic that closely mimicked photographic portraiture. Subjects were placed in front of a flat black backdrop and lit from the front. No effort was made at simulating depth within the two-dimensional image.
Also Blacksmithing Scene 1893 by Dickson. is the earliest known example of actors performing a role in a film.
From the beginning, fiction films were also important. Typically these were brief staged scenes. The Lumières’ Arroseur arrosé AKA The Waterer Watered, presented in their first program in 1895, showed a boy tricking a gardener by stepping on his hose. Such simple jokes formed a major genre of early filmmaking. Some of these fiction films were shot outdoors, but simple painted backdrops were quickly adopted and remained common for decades.
Most films in this early period consisted of a single shot. The camera was set up in one position, and the action unfolded during a continuous take.
Unlike topicals, which were dependent on unpredictable news events, fiction films could be carefully planned in advance. While scenics involved expensive travel to distant locales, fiction films allowed their makers to stay at or near the studio.
2)Alexandre Promio
Alexandre Promio: Some of the Lumière operators’ films were technically innovative.
1) Alexandre Promio, for example, is usually credited with originating the moving camera.
2) The earliest cameras were supported by rigid tripods that did not allow the camera to swivel and make panorama, or panning, shots.
3) In 1896, Promio introduced movement into a view of Venice by placing the tripod and camera in a
gondola.
4) Promio and other filmmakers continued this practice, placing their cameras in boats and on trains.
5) Traveling shots of this type (and soon panning movements as well) were associated mainly with
scenics and topicals during this era.
Egypt: Panorama of the Bank of the Nile (Alexandre Promio, 1896)
3)Auguste and Louie Lumière
Auguste and Louie Lumière: Lumiere bros saw the kinetograph and a vendor asked them to make films for it. They did and made their own projector ¼ of the size of the kinetograph called the Cinematographe – used 35mm film. Camera and projector. 16 frames per second. 16 became standard for the next 20 years
Soon they had designed an elegant little camera, the Cinématographe, which used 35mm film and an intermittent mechanism modeled on that of the sewing machine. The camera could serve as a printer when the positive copies were made. Then, mounted in front of a magic lantern, it formed part of the projector as well.
The first film made with this system was Workers Leaving the Factory, apparently shot in March 1895. It was shown in public at a meeting of the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale in Paris on March 22.
The Lumiere brothers patent the cinematograph, a projector used for showing motion pictures to large audiences (as well as recording).Louis Lumiere (15:49) makes commercial showings possible by incorporating the principle of the claw of the sewing machine (15:56) into their projector (16:23). The first commercial public screening of films takes place in 1895 at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris. The Lumiere brothers show ten short films, including Workers Leaving the Factory (15:20) and Baby’s Breakfast (17:12)—featuring Andree Lumiere. Soon after, most cities have commercial screenings of films, allowing people to marvel at the short and simple motion pictures
They initially avoided selling their machines, instead sending operators to tour abroad, showing films in rented theaters and cafés. These operators also made one-shot scenics of local points of interest. From 1896 on, the Lumière catalogue rapidly expanded to include hundreds of views of Spain, Egypt, Italy, Japan, and other countries. Although the Lumière brothers are usually remembered for their scenics and topicals, they also produced many staged films, usually brief comic scenes.
4)American Mutoscope Company
The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey on December 30, 1895.[3] The firm manufactured the Mutoscope and made flip-card movies for it as a rival to Edison's Kinetoscope for individual "peep shows", making the company Edison's chief competitor in the nickelodeon market. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector. The company soon became a leader in the film industry, with distribution and production subsidiaries around the world, including the British Mutoscope Co. In 1899 it changed its name to the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and in 1908 to simply the Biograph Company.[4]
The Mutoscope is an early motion picture device, invented by W.K.L. Dickson and Herman Casler[1] and later patented by Herman Casler on November 21, 1894.[2] Like Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, it did not project on a screen and provided viewing to only one person at a time. Cheaper and simpler than the Kinetoscope, the system, marketed by the American Mutoscope Company (later the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), quickly dominated the coin-in-the-slot peep-show business.
a flip-card device ( a projector??) needed movies Dickson left Edison and the made the company
changed from Mutoscope – in penny arcades70MM film, larger sharper images 1897 by 1897 most popular film shows in US latermoved to 35mm in 1903 sold more film
By early 1896, Casler and Dickson had their camera, but the market for peepshow movies had declined, and they decided to concentrate on projection. Using several films made during that year, the American Mutoscope Company soon had programs playing theaters around the country and touring with vaudeville shows.
The camera and projector were unusual, employing 70mm film that yielded larger, sharper images. By 1897, American Mutoscope was the most popular film company in the country. That year the firm also began showing its films in penny arcades and other entertainment spots, using the Mutoscope. The simple card holder of the Mutoscope was less likely to break down than was the Kinetoscope, and American Mutoscope soon dominated the peepshow side of film exhibition as well. Some Mutoscopes remained in use for decades.
The American Mutoscope Company did particularly well during the late 1890s, partly because of its sharp 70mm images, displayed by the company’s own touring operators in vaudeville houses. By 1897, American Mutoscope was the most popular film company in America, and it attracted audiences abroad as well. American Mutoscope began filming in a new rooftop studio.
AM&BThe firm changed its name in 1899 to American Mutoscope and Biograph (AM&B), reflecting its double specialization in peepshow Mutoscope reels and projected films.
Over the next several years, AM&B was hampered by a lawsuit brought against it by Edison, who consistently took competitors to court for infringing patents and copyrights. In 1902, however, AM&B won the suit, because its camera used rollers rather than sprocketed gears to move the film. The company’s prosperity grew. In 1903, it began to make and sell films in 35mm rather than 70mm, a change that boosted sales.
5) Birt Acres
ENGLAND
Birt Acres : R.W.PAUL & BIRT ACRES(PARTNER– (producer of photographic equipment) asked to make a substitute Edison Kinetoscope and films. IN LONDON – KINETISCOPE FILMS EXPENSIVE.
he made one based by Marey.
R.W. Paul – went improving the camera
Birt Acres concentrated on making a projector. Rough Sea at Dover (Birt Acres, 1896)
largely because R. W. Paul was willing to sell projectors. At first, most films were grouped together to be shown as a single act on the program of a music hall (the British equivalent of American vaudeville theaters). Beginning in 1897, short, cheap film shows were also widely presented in fairgrounds, appealing to working-class audiences.
6)Black Maria
Black Maria : They built a small studio, called the Black Maria, on the grounds of Edison’s New Jersey laboratory and were ready for production by January 1893.
built a small studio, called the Black Maria - 20 seconds longest film. Kinetograph Camera and Kinetoscope Viewing Box 1891
8)Cinématographe
Auguste and Louie Lumière: Lumiere bros saw the kinetograph and a vendor asked them to make films for it. They did and made their own projector ¼ of the size of the kinetograph called the Cinematographe – used 35mm film. Camera and projector. 16 frames per second. 16 became standard for the next 20 years a projector
A cinematographe is a motion picture film camera, which—in combination with different parts—also serves as a film projector and printer. It was developed in the 1890s in Lyon by Auguste and Louis Lumière.[notes 1]
Soon they had designed an elegant little camera, the Cinématographe, which used 35mm film and an intermittent mechanism modeled on that of the sewing machine. The camera could serve as a printer when the positive copies were made. Then, mounted in front of a magic lantern, it formed part of the projector as well.
9)Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge: In 1878, ex-governor of California Leland Stanford asked photographer Eadweard Muybridge to find a way of photographing running horses to help study their gaits. Muybridge set up a row of twelve cameras, each making an exposure in one-thousandth of a second. The photos recorded one-half-second intervals of movement. Muybridge later made a lantern to project moving images of horses, but these were drawings copied from his photographs onto a revolving disc. Muybridge did not go on to invent motion pictures, but he made a major contribution to anatomical science through thousands of motion studies using his multiple-camera setup.
Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope
10)Edwin S. Porter
Porter was a film projectionist and an expert at building photographic equipment. In the late 1900s, he went to work for Edison, whom he greatly admired. He was assigned to improve the firm’s cameras and projectors. That year the Edison Company built a new glass-enclosed rooftop studio in New York, where films could be shot using the typical painted stage-style scenery of the era. In early 1901, Porter began operating a camera there. At this point in cinema history, the cameraman was also the film’s director, and soon Porter was responsible for many of the company’s most popular films
Porter has often been credited with virtually all the innovations of the pre-1908 period, including making the first story film (Life of an American Fireman) and inventing editing as we know it. In fact, he often drew on techniques already used by Méliès, Smith, and Williamson. He imaginatively developed his models, however, and he undoubtedly introduced some original techniques. His position as the foremost filmmaker of the preeminent American production company gave his works wide exposure and made them popular and influential.
There had been many, indeed hundreds, of staged fictional films made before Life of an American Fireman (1903). Porter himself had done several, including a version of Jack and the Beanstalk in 1902. He had access to all the foreign films that the Edison Company was duping, so he could study the latest innovations. He examined Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon closely and decided to copy its manner of telling a story in a series of shots. From 1902 on, many of his films contained several shots, with significant efforts to match time and space across cuts.
Porter’s Life of an American Fireman is a notable attempt at such storytelling. To a modern audience, this repetition of events seems strange, but such displays of the same event from different viewpoints were not uncommon in the early cinema. (In Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, we see the explorers’ capsule land in the Man in the Moon’s eye and then see the landing again from a camera position on the moon’s surface.)Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S. Porter, 1903) Porter’s most important film, The Great Train Robbery, also made in 1903, used eleven shots to tell the story of a gang of bandits who hold up a train.
From 1902 to 1905, Porter was one of many filmmakers who contributed to an industrywide concentration on fiction filmmaking. Both of these factors enabled companies to create films steadily and on schedule. Moreover, audiences seemed to prefer films with stories. Some of these were still one-shot views, but filmmakers increasingly used a series of shots to depict comic chases, extravagant fantasies, and melodramatic situations.
By 1904, major changes were taking place in the new medium and art form of the cinema. Fiction films were becoming the industry’s main product.
11)Étienne-Jules Marey
Étienne-Jules Marey: In 1882, inspired by Muybridge’s work, French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey studied the flight of birds and other rapid animal movements by means of a photographic gun. Shaped like a rifle, it exposed twelve images around the edge of a circular glass plate that made a single revolution in one second. In 1888, Marey built a box-type camera that used an intermittent mechanism to expose a series of photographs on a strip of paper film at speeds of up to 120 frames per second. Marey was the first to combine flexible film stock and an intermittent mechanism in photographing motion. Spot in the Darkroom (The Olympic Museum, 2017)
Chronophotograph 1894 Chronophotography 12 images per second
12)G. A. Smith
At first, most English filmmakers offered the usual novelty subjects.
The most notable were those in the small but influential group later dubbed the Brighton School because they worked in or near that resort town. Chief among them were G. A. Smith James Williamson both of whom were still photographers who branched into filmmaking in 1897. They also built small studios that opened at one side to admit sunlight. Both explored special effects and editing in ways that influenced filmmakers in other countries.
G. A. Smith’s 1903 grotesque comedy Mary Jane’s Mishap uses editing in a remarkably sophisticated way. One basic distant framing of a slovenly maid in a kitchen is interrupted by several cut-ins to medium shots that show her amusing facial expressions. Although the actor’s position is usually not matched well at the cuts, there is a general attempt to create a continuous action while using closer shots to guide our attention. Mary Jane’s Mishap (G. A. Smith, 1903)
14)Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès: Georges Méliès was a performing magician who owned his own theater. After seeing the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895, he decided to add films to his program, but the Lumière brothers were not yet selling machines. In early 1896, he obtained a projector from English inventor R. W. Paul and by studying it was able to build his own camera.
He was soon showing films at his theater. Méliès’s films, and especially his fantasies, were extremely popular in France and abroad, and they were widely imitated. They were also commonly pirated, and Méliès had to open a sales office in the United States in 1903 to protect his interests. Among the most celebrated of his films was A Trip to the Moon (1902),
Méliès often enhanced the beauty of his elaborately designed mise-en-scène by using hand-applied tinting.
15)James Williamson
The most notable were those in the small but influential group later dubbed the Brighton School because they worked in or near that resort town. Chief among them were G. A. Smith & James Williamson both of whom were still photographers who branched into filmmaking in 1897. They also built small studios that opened at one side to admit sunlight. Both explored special effects and editing in ways that influenced filmmakers in other countries.
Williamson’s 1900 film The Big Swallow is a good example of the ingenuity of the Brighton filmmakers. An imperceptible cut then substitutes a black backdrop for his mouth, and we see the cinematographer and his camera pitch forward into this void. Another concealed cut returns us to the open mouth, and the man backs away from the camera, laughing and chewing triumphantly.The Big Swallow (James Williamson, 1900)
16)Joseph Niepce
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (French: [nisefɔʁ njɛps]; 7 March 1765 – 5 July 1833),[1] commonly known or referred to simply as Nicéphore Niépce, was a French inventor, usually credited as the inventor of photography and a pioneer in that field.[2] Niépce developed heliography, a technique he used to create the world's oldest surviving product of a photographic process: a print made from a photoengraved printing plate in 1825.[3] In 1826 or 1827, he used a primitive camera to produce the oldest surviving photograph of a real-world scene. Among Niépce's other inventions was the Pyréolophore, the world's first internal combustion engine, which he conceived, created, and developed with his older brother Claude Niépce.[4] (Wikipedia)
My notes say: The first still photograph was made on a glass plate in 1826 by Claude Niepce Niépce, but it required an exposure time of eight hours.
17)Kinetograph
Amazingly, an original Kinetoscope film can be shown on a modern projector.) Initially, however, the film was exposed at about forty-six frames per second—much faster than the average speed later adopted for silent filmmaking.
The next year Eastman introduced transparent celluloid roll film, creating a breakthrough in the move toward cinema.
In 1889, Edison went to Paris and saw Marey’s camera, which used strips of flexible film. cronograph
The film was intended for still cameras, but inventors soon used the same flexible material in designing machines to take and project motion pictures.
By 1891, the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing box were ready to be patented and demonstrated. so that toothed gears could pull the film through the camera and Kinetoscope
(Wikipedia explanation:
Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.)
1891 Thomas Edison HUGE Kinetograph Horizontal Camera Replica
built a small studio, called the Black Maria - 20 seconds longest film. Kinetograph Camera and Kinetoscope Viewing Box 1891
Edison Kinetograph Horizontal Camera Replica – made only one. 1st 2 motors
19)Latham Loop:
Latham Loop Most cameras and projectors could use only a short stretch of film, lasting less than three minutes, since the tension created by a longer, heavier roll would break the film. The Lathams added a simple loop to create slack and thus relieve the tension, allowing much longer films to be made. The Latham loop has been used in most film cameras and projectors ever since. Indeed, so important was the technique that a patent involving it was to shake up the entire American film industry in 1912.
Woodville Latham and his sons Otway and Gray make one considerable contribution to film technology
20)Léon Gaumont
Léon Gaumont . Pathé Frères's main rival in France was a smaller firm formed by inventor Léon Gaumont. Gaumont initially dealt in still photographic equipment. The firm began producing films in 1897. These were mostly actualities made by Alice Guy, the first female filmmaker
Building a production studio in 1905 made Gaumont more prominent, largely through the work of director Louis Feuillade.
21)Mutoscope
By 1897, American Mutoscope was the most popular film company in the country. That year the firm also began showing its films in penny arcades and other entertainment spots, using the Mutoscope. The simple card holder of the Mutoscope was less likely to break down than was the Kinetoscope, and American Mutoscope soon dominated the peepshow side of film exhibition as well. Some Mutoscopes remained in use for decades.
The American Mutoscope Company did particularly well during the late 1890s, partly because of its sharp 70mm images, displayed by the company’s own touring operators in vaudeville houses. By 1897, American Mutoscope was the most popular film company in America, and it attracted audiences abroad as well. American Mutoscope began filming in a new rooftop studio.
wikipedia: The Mutoscope is an early motion picture device, invented by W.K.L. Dickson and Herman Casler[1] and later patented by Herman Casler on November 21, 1894.[2] Like Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope, it did not project on a screen and provided viewing to only one person at a time. Cheaper and simpler than the Kinetoscope, the system, marketed by the American Mutoscope Company (later the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company), quickly dominated the coin-in-the-slot peep-show business.
My Note: tall with the eyepiece at eyelevel - big clam shells on side.
22)Louis Le Prince
Louis Le Prince: Another Frenchman came close to inventing the cinema as early as 1888—six years before the first commercial showings of moving photographs. That year, Louis Le Prince, working in England, was able to make some brief films, shot at about sixteen frames per second, using Kodak’s recently introduced paper roll film. To be projected, however, the frames needed to be printed on a transparent strip; lacking flexible celluloid, Le Prince apparently was unable to devise a satisfactory projector. In 1890, while traveling in France, he disappeared,
Roundhay Garden Scene is an 1888 short silent actuality film recorded by Le Prince. Filmed at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds in the north of England on 14 October 1888, it is believed to be the oldest surviving film in existence.
23)Nickelodeon
A movie theater with an admission fee of one nickel.
Admission was usually a nickel (hence the term nickelodeon) or a dime for a program running fifteen to sixty minutes. Most nickelodeons had only one projector. During reel changes, a singer might perform a current song, accompanied by lantern slides.
Expenses were low. Spectators typically sat on benches or in simple wooden seats. There were seldom newspaper advertisements to alert patrons in advance concerning programs. Patrons usually either attended on a regular basis or simply dropped in. The front of the theater displayed hand-painted signs with the names of the films, and there might be a phonograph or barker attracting the attention of passersby.
There was almost always some sound accompaniment. The exhibitor might lecture along with the film, but piano or phonograph accompaniment was more common. In some cases, actors stood behind the screen and spoke dialogue in synchronization with the action on the screen. More frequently, people used noisemakers to create appropriate sound effects.
24)Pathé Frères
Pathé Frères: In 1895, he purchased some of R. W. Paul’s imitation Kinetoscopes, and the following year formed Pathé Frères, which initially made most of its money on phonographs. From 1901, however, Pathé concentrated more on film production, and profits soared. The firm expanded rapidly. In 1902, it built a glass-sided studio and began selling the Pathé camera, which became the world’s most widely used camera until the end of the 1910s.
At first Pathé’s production was somewhat derivative, borrowing ideas from Méliès and from American and English films. For example, in 1901, Ferdinand Zecca, the company’s most important director, made Scenes from My Balcony. It picked up on the vogue, recently started in England, for shots presenting things as if seen through telescopes or microscopes. Scenes from My Balcony (Ferdinand Zecca, 1901)
25)Phenakistoscope
Phenakistoscope: The phenakistoscope is a plate-like slotted disc spun to simulate moving images. Several optical toys were marketed that gave an illusion of movement by using a small number of drawings, each altered somewhat. In 1832, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau and Austrian geometry professor Simon Stampfer independently created an optical device called the Phenakistoscope. Stroboscope Looks like circle with jumping horses
26)Praxinoscope
Praxinoscope: looks like a lamp, candle, lampscade girl with chicken girl with filsh, drummer, girlwith balons. The praxinoscope is essentially a zoetrope that uses mirrors A fascinating and isolated figure in the history of the invention of the cinema was Frenchman Émile Reynaud. In 1877, he had built an optical toy, the Projecting Praxinoscope. (Chinese acrobat in red outfit)
This was a spinning drum, rather like the Zoetrope, but one in which viewers saw the moving images in a series of mirrors rather than through slots. Around 1882, he devised a way of using mirrors and a lantern to project a brief series of drawings on a screen. In 1889, Reynaud exhibited a much larger version of the Praxinoscope. From 1892 on, he regularly gave public performances using long, broad strips of hand-painted frames. These were the first public exhibitions of moving images, though the effect on the screen was jerky and slow. The labor involved in making the bands meant that Reynaud’s films could not easily be reproduced. Strips of photographs were more practical, and in 1895 Reynaud started using a camera to make his Praxinoscope films. By 1900, he was out of business, however, due to competition from other, simpler motion-picture projection systems. In despair, he destroyed his machines, though replicas have been constructed.
27)R. W. Paul
He made narrative films as early as April 1895. Those films were shown first in Edison Kinescope knockoffs. In 1896 he showed them projected. That was about the time the Lumière brothers were pioneering projected films in France.
R.W.PAUL & BIRT ACRES(PARTNER– (producer of photographic equipment) asked to make a substitute Edison Kinetoscope and films. IN LONDON – KINETISCOPE FILMS EXPENSIE. he made one based by Marey. Paul – went improving the camera
Acres concentrated on making a projector. Rough Sea at Dover (Birt Acres, 1896) largely because R. W. Paul was willing to sell projectors. At first, most films were grouped together to be shown as a single act on the program of a music hall (the British equivalent of American vaudeville theaters). Beginning in 1897, short, cheap film shows were also widely presented in fairgrounds, appealing to working-class audiences
Georges Méliès: Georges Méliès was a performing magician who owned his own theater. After seeing the Lumière Cinématographe in 1895, he decided to add films to his program, but the Lumière brothers were not yet selling machines. In early 1896, he obtained a projector from English inventor R. W. Paul and by studying it was able to build his own camera.
28)Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison: Film Invented In 1888, George Eastman devised a still camera that made photographs on rolls of sensitized paper.
This camera, which he named the Kodak,
simplified photography so that unskilled amateurs could take pictures
1) In 1888, Thomas Edison, already the successful inventor of the phonograph and the electric
light bulb, decided to design machines for making and showing moving photographs.
2)Much of the work was done by his assistant, W. K. L. Dickson.
3)Since Edison’s phonograph worked by recording sound on cylinders,
the pair tried fruitlessly to make rows of tiny photographs around similar cylinders.
4) In 1889, Edison went to Paris and saw Marey’s camera, which used strips of flexible film.
5)Dickson then obtained some Eastman Kodak film stock and began working on a new type of
machine.
6) By 1891, the Kinetograph camera and Kinetoscope viewing box were ready to be patented
and demonstrated.
7) Dickson sliced sheets of Eastman film into strips 1 inch wide (roughly 35 millimeters),
spliced them end to end, and punched four holes on either side of each frame so that
toothed gears could pull the film through the camera and Kinetoscope.
8)Dickson’s early decisions influenced the entire history of the cinema;
9)35mm film stock with four perforations per frame remained the norm for over a hundred
years.
10)(Amazingly, an original Kinetoscope film can be shown on a modern projector.)
11) Initially, however, the film was exposed at about forty-six frames per second—much faster than the average speed later adopted for silent filmmaking.The next year Eastman introduced transparent celluloid roll film,creating a breakthrough in the move toward cinema.
29)Vitascope
A second group of entrepreneurs, the partnership of C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat, first exhibited their Phantoscope projector at a commercial exposition in Atlanta in October 1895, showing Kinetoscope films. Partly because of competition from the Latham group and a Kinetoscope exhibitor, who also showed films at the exposition, and partly because of dim, unsteady projection, the Phantoscope attracted skimpy audiences. Later that year, Jenkins and Armat split up. Armat improved the projector, renamed it the Vitascope, and obtained backing from the entrepreneurial team of Norman Raff and Frank Gammon. Raff and Gammon were nervous about offending Edison, so in February they demonstrated the machine for him. Since the Kinetoscope’s initial popularity was fading, Edison agreed to manufacture Armat’s projector and supply films for it. For publicity purposes, it was marketed as “Edison’s Vitascope,” even though he had no hand in devising it.
The Vitascope’s public premiere was at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York on April 23, 1896. Six films were shown, five of them originally shot for the Kinetoscope; the sixth was Acres’s Rough Sea at Dover, which again was singled out for praise. The showing was a triumph. Although it was not the first time films had been projected commercially in the United States, it marked the beginning of projected movies as a viable industry there
The Edison Company developed its own projector known as the Projectoscope or Projecting Kinetoscope in November 1896, and abandoned marketing the Vitascope
30)William K. L. Dickson
The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey on December 30, 1895.[3] The firm manufactured the Mutoscope and made flip-card movies for it as a rival to Edison's Kinetoscope for individual "peep shows. In the summer of 1896 the Biograph projector was released, offering superior image quality to Edison's Vitascope projector.
31)Zoetrope
The zoetrope is a bowl-like apparatus with slots for viewers to peer through.The Zoetrope, invented in 1833, contained a series of drawings on a narrow strip of paper inside a revolving drum. The Zoetrope was widely sold after 1867, along with other optical toys. In these toys, the same action was repeated over and over.
FILMS
The Arrival of a Train at la Ciotat Station
Baby's Meal
The Big Swallow
Blacksmithing Scene
Egypt: Panorama of the Bank of the Nile
Explosion of a Motor Car
The Great Train Robbery
Life of an American Fireman
Mary Jane’s Mishap
Rough Sea at Dover
Roundhay Garden Scene
Sandow
Scenes from My Balcony
A Trip to the Moon
Twins’ Tea Party
View from an Engine Front—Barnstaple
The Waterer Watered
Workers Leaving the Factory
Comments
Post a Comment