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| "Train Pulling Into a Station", Lumière brothers, 1896 |
Movies weren’t invented in 1900—they had already been around for a short while. I have, as stated, decided to begin my project proper in the year 1900... however, considering how young the film industry was by that point, and considering that the point of my project is to do a personal overview of the history of film, I think it appropriate to begin with a few comments on the history of cinema prior to 1900. Just remember, I’m not an expert on any of this, and most of what I know is gleaned from researching Wikipedia.
Cinema in the year 1900 was still a young art. To a modern viewer, the films made at the turn of the century seem to be hopelessly primitive. Yet, the medium had already evolved a great deal since its invention a decade earlier... in a way, the 1890s saw the greatest amount of evolution and innovation of any era in film history. They were the formative years for film.
The question, “What was the first movie?” is much more difficult to answer than one might think, and depends entirely on exactly how one defines “movie”—and the definition does have to be exact, because movies did not spring fully-formed from the mind of the Inventor Of Movies, possessing all the traits of a mature technology. The early evolution of film was a piecemeal process, with every year seeing the medium in a slightly more recognizable form to us moderns. Exactly when they stopped being “moving images” and started being “movies” is subjective.
The earliest known “movie”, by the most inclusive definition, is “Roundhay Garden Scene” (1888) by the French inventor Louis Le Prince, who probably is most deserving of the title Inventor of Movies. The movie is extraordinarily rudimentary, showing nothing more but people walking in a garden, and clocking in at a mere 2 seconds in duration. There was also apparently a short sequence—only 16 frames long—shot by Le Prince the year previous, descriptively titled “Man Walking Around A Corner”, however it was never made into film.
Le Prince later shot a
couple other movies, of similar brevity and mundanity to “Roundhay Garden Scene”,
however he never lived to see his invention mature. In 1890, while on a train travelling from
Bourges to Dijon, Louis Le Prince mysteriously vanished, never to be seen
again. My money’s on aliens. For the next four years, the dominant figure
in film was William K.L. Dickson, an inventor working for Thomas Edison.
William K.L. Dickson can be
considered the first real “filmmaker”.
The few short clips of footage shot by Le Prince had been little more
than proof of concent for his invention... Dickson, meanwhile, realized the
potential for profit in moving pictures, and made the first films intended to
be seen by an audience. These were shown
on what was called a kinetoscope.
Customers would go to a kinetoscope parlor, pay a nickel to use the
machine, and look through a peephole at a roll of backlit film on a continuous
loop. Movies on kinetoscope were thus
not projected onto a viewing surface, and only one person could view a movie at
a time.
During this time moving
pictures were still a novelty, and customers paid more to see the wonder and
spectacle of a moving image, and less out of interest in the scenes
depicted. The idea of filming actors
portraying a fictional story was not yet even considered. Movies made by William Dickson were thus
quite mundane: one early example from
1891, “Fred Ott’s Sneeze”, was just a 5-second clip of the aforementioned Mr.
Ott, sneezing.
William Dickson later would
go on to modify the design of the kinetoscope and invent the mutoscope in 1894,
which mostly were used to show early pornographic films, such as clips of women
undressing themselves. Meanwhile, the
center of the film industry moved back to France, and to the famous Lumière
brothers.
Auguste and Louis Lumière
developed a new way of filming and showing movies, called the cinematograph. This allowed a film to be projected onto a
screen before a viewing audience; they were thus the inventors of the movie
theater. They made most of their more
famous films in 1895, and while some of them, like “The Messers. Lumière at
Cards” or “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” were just as boring as the
films of William Dickson, others showed a more quickly-developing
sensibility. “The Sprinkler Sprinked”
(1895, later remade in 1896) is the first example of a film portraying a
sequence of events telling a story: a
gardener is watering a garden with a hose when a miscreant sneaks behind him
and steps on the hose; when the gardener predictably looks down the barrel of
the malfunctioning nozzle, the miscreant picks his foot up and the gardener is
sprayed in the face. He then realizes he
has been duped, and chases the miscreant down, giving him a thorough spanking.
Probably the most famous
movie by the Lumière brothers is “Train Pulling into a Station” (1896). The movie, approximately one minute long,
shows a train pulling into the La Ciotat Station, and is filmed at such an
angle that it almost looks like the train is headed directly toward the
camera. The story goes that, when this
film was first shown to a live audience, they leapt out of their seats in
terror and ran for the back of the theater.
Then, a quantum leap
occurred. Less than one year after the
release of “Train Pulling into a Station”, a director by the name of Georges
Méliès made a movie called “The Haunted Castle” (1896). This 3-minute long movie, about a vampire who
torments two hapless adventurers, introduced not only the idea of actors
dressing up as fantastical characters, but also introduced special effects. The film opens with a flying bat, which via a
stationary jump-cut transforms into a vampire.
The movie continues with the vampire conjuring a fireplace from thin
air, with a teleporting dwarf, transforming witches, and a skeleton which
appears from out of nowhere... one of the adventurers decides he’s had enough
and jumps from the balcony, while the other is able to subdue the vampire with
a cross.
“The Haunted Castle” was
revolutionary, and it alone serves to justify George Méliès’ reputation as a
wizard of early cinema. That this man
saw a tool being used to film gentlemen playing cards and trains crawling into
a depot, and envisioned that it could be used to tell a haunted castle story,
with filming tricks creating the illusion of apparition and teleportation, is
simply incredible. Two years before,
people were still paying money to see a man sneeze for five seconds; afterward, Méliès had already laid the
groundwork for cinema as we know it.
Méliès showed people how the
motion picture camera could be used to film period pieces—in 1899, he made the
first of many movies based on the story of Cleopatra. That same year, the first movie based on a
Shakespearean play was made: “King John”
(1899) was a one-minute long scene of the king dying.
During the 1890s, the
majority of films made were extremely short—one to three minutes, if not
shorter. An interesting exception was “The
Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight” (1897) by Enoch J. Rector. The film depicted the entirity of the titular
fight, amounting to over 100 minutes of footage. Narrative films wouldn’t reach this length yet
for more than a decade.
Thus concludes my overview
of films prior to 1900. There were
several more movies I wanted to discuss, but in the interest of reasonable post
length I skipped over them. All of the
extant movies I mention above, as well as many others by Dickson, the Lumières,
and Méliès, can be found on Youtube.
