‘Birth of Film’

This page contains links, images and video's related to early moving image, 'pre cinema', experiments.

 Shahr-e Sūkhté Goblet

As I was revisiting this page, January 2020, the news of Donald Trump’s threats to target “52 Iranian sites … some at a very high level & important to Iran & Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” were dominating the News.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

In 2012, French researchers suggested that 'Prehistoric cave artists used cartoon-like techniques to give the impression that their images were moving across cave walls'.

The Origins of 'Persistence of Vision

'The Origins of 'Persistence of Vision' or 'Retention of Image' - the phenomena which, it is often noted can be used to explain how motion pictures work - can be traced back to experiments by Newton, but it became firmly established by Belgian scientist Joseph Plateau in 1829.' http://www.earlycinema.com/technology/zoetrope.html

The thaumatrope,  phenakistoscope (1832), zoetrope (1834) and praxinoscope (1877), as well as the common flip book, were early animation devices that produced an illusion of movement from a series of sequential drawings. The basic drum-like form of the zoetrope was created in 1833[3] or 1834 by Bristol based mathematician William George Horner.' Wiki

Why not try making your own Zoetrope?

Horse in Motion - Eadweard Muybridge 1878

Dan Colman in an Open Culture article says 'If you’re looking for the first movie ever made, you can look back to The Horse In Motion, created by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878. Muybridge was asked by Leland Stanford (railroad magnate, California senator, race-horse owner, and eventual founder of Stanford University) to answer a popularly debated question: When a horse trots, do all four hooves leave the ground simultaneously? Muybridge’s stop motion film made it clear that they do.' Link

‘The Horse in Motion and later experiments are not ‘movies’ but they are early photographic sequences, known as chronophotography and can be regarded as early motion picture recordings that could not yet be presented as moving pictures. Since 1878, Eadward Muybridge made hundreds of chronophotographic studies of the motion of animals and humans in real-time, soon followed by other chronophotographers like Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ and Ottomar Anschütz. Usually chronophotography was regarded as a serious, even scientific, method to study motion and almost exclusively involved humans or animals performing a simple movement in front of the camera. Soon after Muybridge published his first results as The Horse in Motion cabinet cards, people put the silhouette-like photographic images in zoetropes to watch them in motion. Most sequences could later be animated into very short films with fluent motion (relatively often the footage can be presented as a loop that repeats the motion seamlessly). (wiki)

THE LUMIERE EXPERIMENTAL FILMS

'One of the first commercial, public showings of a motion picture in France (and made with a celluloid film camera/projector), took place December 28 of 1895 at the Grand Café on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris. The Lumière's used the basement to open their movie theatre known as the ‘Cinematographe Lumière Freres'. A private showing of the machine (as well as experimental films) took place in March of the same year - see below. The device was the Cinematographe (below left & right), and was used in scheduled showings from that point on. It was constructed by Jules Carpentier of the Lumière factory, with Alfred Molteni adding the lamphouse, and had a claw-like mechanism in order to provide the required intermittent pull-down movement of 35mm perforated-celluloid film. The film which had two perforations per frame, was also manufactured by the Lumière business. (Image Source: Smithsonian Institute)' *
 

'The first of the Lumière private screenings took place on 22 March 1895 in preparation for the public showing in December of that year. Known as Actualités, or 'actuality' films, their repertoire of experimental films amassed to over two thousand by the year 1903.

These films of everyday life added greatly to the popular culture and by early 1896, the Lumières had opened theatres in New York, Brussels, and London, as well as in France, showing their films on the same machine which had taken them, the Cinématographe.

One such film was entitled Arrival Of A Train At La Ciotat Station or, “L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat” (right). Subtitled and catalogued as number 653, this short featured members of the Lumière family in the crowd to the right.' *

A Brief History of Film

This short video on Youtube gives a good whistle stop overview of a history of film.