Early Development of Movies
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Movies as we know them today were in their infancy one hundred years ago. Motion pictures were not invented by any one person, and they did not come into existence on a single day. According to Wenden, there is a plaque on the side of the Macy's 34th Street store in New York, stating that at that site on April 23 of 1896, Thomas Edison's motion pictures were projected (Wenden 10). At that time there was a music hall at that location. Two Germans, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, demonstrated an invention called the Bioscope in 189t, and during the same year, the Lumiere family presented a performance of film to an audience of thirty-three customers at the Salon Indien of the Grand CafT in Paris. The program was of ten short films, lasting a total of twenty minutes. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the early history of motion pictures in order to understand the infancy of this technological invention. The emphasis is on the mechanical aspects of the films and the machines that created them, rather than the artistic elements of the cinema, although it is not possible to completely separate the two parts of film history.Moving pictures built upon the development of photography, which appeared during the middle of the 19th century (Wenden 12). The first successful movie camera emerged from the Thomas Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, also the birthplace of the ticker tape, the telegraph, telephone, electric light bulb, typewriter, and phonograph. Ed
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a rowboat rounding the pier in Paris and a dancer. Some of Edison's early film subjects are derivative of the stage and the circus ring.
Right at the turn of the century, a great film pioneer, Edwin S. Porter, started manufacturing cameras and projectors. A Scotsman, he was a camera assistant for the first Edison show at the music house in New York in 1986 (Wenden 20). His factory burned down, perhaps giving him an idea for his first film, The Life of an American Fireman, which was created in 1902. His background came from being a mechanic and cameraman, and his film topics were realistic. Porter evolved the principle of film editing, of switching the audience's attention from the burning house to the ringing of the fire alarm and then to the fire engine. This rhythm and pattern of shooting multiple sequences and splicing them together created excitement for the viewer. Porter developed the basic elements of the film chase scene, which was used repeatedly by other movie makers for the following twenty years (Wenden 21).
Porter's most famous early film was The Great Train Robbery, attributed to Edison in one source (Kingswood College 1) and to Porter by another (Wenden 21). It was created in 1903, perhaps what could be c
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Approximate Word count = 1852
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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