1 ACTUALITY AND ILLUSION
ACTUALITY
The Earliest Filmmakers
Louis Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype photographic process, the first mechanical process that created sustainable photographs using silver plated copper and mercury vapor in 1839.
In 1874, the French Astronomer, Jules Janssen wanted to record of the transit of the planet Venus passing across the sun. He developed a tool he called the revolver photographique. It was a cylander shaped camera with a revolving photographic plate. He set it up to automatically take a series of shots of the astronomical event. This was one of the first steps in the evolution of the movie camera. Janssen wasn’t interested in making movies, he needed a way to record this historical event and he designed a tool to do it, and he became the first filmmaker.
Across the Atlantic and the American Continent, the famous English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, was hired by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford.
Stanford was breeding racehorses. He wanted to see if all four of a horse’s legs left the ground completely at a gallop. Muybridge set up cameras with trip wires on the track. When the horse tripped the wires, they snapped still images of the horse galloping around the racetrack. When they flipped through the photos, they were not only able to learn how a horse’s legs run at full gallop, they were able to create the illusion of motion. And yes, all four of the horse’s legs leave the ground when it gallops. In Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope, the story of the African American jockey riding the galloping horse in this first film is expanded into a back story for his characters.
By 1880, Muybridge was projecting his photographic sequences with a “Magic Lantern” and presenting the galloping horse on a screen. Muybridge saw film as a way for people to see animals and people in motion. He eventually used trip wire techniques to film human athletes. The painter, Thomas Eakins, was fascinated with what a still frame of motion looked like.
The French Physiologist, Étienne Jules Marey, developed the fusil photographique, the photographic rifle, to film birds in flight. Like Janssen he used a glass plate with silver emulsion to record the image, but because of the lightness and quickness of birds and because he needed to aim his film rifle upward, the glass plates were too heavy. He conducted experiments and found that with certain chemicals, paper could serve as a negative, eventually he developed the celluloid strips that we called film.
Celluloid is a tough flammable thermoplastic composed of cellulose nitrate and camphor. Cellulose is the complex polymeric carbohydrate that derives from the cell walls of plants.
Interestingly, when a need for technology was identified, to record a bird in flight, a horse running on a track, or the motion of planets, the equipment was designed. Innovation arises from curiosity, then as it is used, the technology developes to become faster, lighter, better, more portable, or able to capture longer sequences. These desires pushed technological innovation. The first few films captured action in a few seconds. Celluloid was lightweight and cheap to manufacture.
One of Marey’s assistants, George Demeny, used a motion picture camera to record the human mouth talking. He used his films to teach hearing impaired people to read lips.[1]
Originally Motion Pictures were used for science. They were not considered for entertainment.
Then there was Thomas Alva Edison.
By 1893, 15 years after Muybridge won Stanford’s bet, Edison built the first “movie studio,” a small, cramped, wood-frame hut covered in black tar paper with a hole in the roof to let in sunlight. His employees nicknamed it the Black Maria because it reminded them of the police prisoner transport wagons in use at the time. One of the first films they produced was a man sneezing. There was just one problem: the only way to view Edison’s films was through a kinetoscope, a machine that allowed a single viewer to peer into a viewfinder and crank through the images. The ability to project the images to a paying audience would take another couple of years.[2]
Auguste and Louis Lumière inherited their father’s factory in Lyon France. Their father had produced photographic plates. When he retired, the brothers began working to develop a motion picture camera.
In an interview with George Sadoul in 1948, Louis Lumière explains:
It was during the summer of 1894 that my brother Auguste and I commenced our first work. At that period, the research of Marey, Edison and Démeny had caused those inventors to arrive at certain results, but no projection of film on a screen had yet been accomplished.
The main problem to be solved was that of finding a system of driving the strip of film pictures. My brother Auguste had thought of using for the purpose an indented cylinder, similar to that proposed by Léon Boully in another apparatus. But such a system was clumsy. It couldn’t work and it never did.
I was rather indisposed and had to remain in bed. One night when I was unable to sleep, the solution came clearly to my mind. It consisted of adapting to the camera the mechanism known by the name of “presser foot” in the drive device of sewing machines.
Moisson, chief mechanic at our works, assembled the first apparatus in accordance with the sketches which I handed him as the invention took shape. As it was then impossible to obtain transparent celluloid films in France, I conducted my initial tests with strips of photographic paper manufactured in our works. I cut them and perforated them myself. The first results were excellent.
The negatives on paper could not be cast on the screen owing to their excessive opacity. I nevertheless succeeded in animating them in the laboratory by looking at them with the transparency effect produced by a strong arc lamp.
I would have used celluloid strips at once had I been able to obtain in France a flexible, transparent celluloid which gave me satisfaction. However, no French or British firm was then making any. I had to send one of our departmental managers to the United States, who purchased celluloid in non-sensitized sheets from the New York Celluloid Company and brought them back to us at Lyon. We cut them and perforated them with the aid of an apparatus whose feed device was based on that of the sewing machine, which apparatus was perfected by M. Moisson.
It was at the end of the summer of 1894 that I was able to make my first film, “Workers leaving the Lumière Factory.” The men are wearing straw hats and the women summer dresses. I needed strong sunlight to be able to make such scenes, for my lens was not very powerful, and I should not have been able to take such a view in winter or at the end of autumn.
The film was shown in public for the first time at Paris, rue de Bennes, before the “Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale.” This was on 22nd March, 1895. This showing ended a lecture which I had been asked to give by the illustrious physicist, Mascari of the Institute, then President of the Society. I also showed on the screen the formation of a photographic image in course of development.
Our first patent, taken out on 13th February, 1895, did not adopt any particular name. In that patent we merely referred to “an apparatus for obtaining and showing chronophotographic prints.” It was not until several weeks afterwards that we selected the name of Cinematograph.[3]
The Lumière camera weighed only a few pounds and was totally mobile.
The first Lumière Brothers’ film “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” was a few seconds of footage documenting the actual workers leaving the factory. Louis Lumière wanted to demonstrate how his cameras and photographic equipment recorded images, but by making this choice to film workers in a factory, he became the first documentary filmmaker. His subject was working people, the proletariat. The Lumières called their short films Actualités.
Next, Louis Lumière set up a camera close to the train tracks and filmed as a train rolled into the station. It was called L’arrivée d’un train en gare, Arrival of a Train at the station. Because of the angle of the approaching train toward the camera, the film created a sensation at the first screening. Some reports stated that viewers jumped out of their seats and ran for cover. Other reports said this was an exaggeration, but it was the action movie that launched Cinema.
Lumière set up shots to be dramatic and exciting, but he never sought out actors to enhance the drama. For Lumière, the medium was the message. He was selling cinématographe cameras and he wanted to get people excited by what they could do with his equipment. He began exhibiting the films, but didn’t really consider that there might be a market for film as entertainment.
Lumière hired and trained cinematographers and sent them all over the world to film things that people in France had only seen in paintings, drawings, and photographs: The arrival of the Toreadors, the Coronation of Tzar Nicholas II, and the Melbourne Races.
His screening room was in the basement of a Grand Café in Paris called the Salon Indien. Lumière invented the movie theatre as well as the first movie camera. Lumiére had orders for hundreds of cinematographes. Within a few months, he opened cinematographies, screening rooms, in England, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Serbia, Russia, Sweden and the USA. Later he opened cinemas in Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, India, Australia, Indochina, Japan, and Mexico.
ILLUSION
Méliès, A Trip to the Moon and Phalke, Krishna Janma
The French Magician, Georges Méliès, was at the first screening at the Salon Indien. When Méliès viewed the Actualités of the Lumières, he realized that film could also be used for the purpose of illusion. He could expand of the sleight of hand tricks he used as a magician and create cinema effects using double exposure and editing techniques.
Méliès’ Masterpiece of special effects and hand-painted color, A Trip to the Moon, was completed and released in 1902.
Film could reflect reality and present images of the historic moment, it could be paused to show a still frame of something in motion, it could be sped up and rewound to show time moving backward. Film also offered opportunities to present images from literature, religion, and ancient storytelling traditions.
The History of Motion Pictures in India started only a few months after the Lumieres debuted their first film at Salon Indien in Paris. A screening, using the cinématographe as the projector, was held at the Watson Hotel Bombay in July 1896. India was a colony under Queen Victoria. British officials in India were eager to see images of their home in England and they purchased cinematographes to make films of India to send back to England.
Harischandra Sakharam Bhatvadekar owned a photography shop in Bombay. After attending one of the Lumière screenings, he ordered a motion picture camera which arrived a year later. He filmed wrestling matches and circus monkeys. He exhibited his films in Bombay and eventually managed the Capitol Cinema.
Bombay theatres screened Indian actuality films with titles like: Train Arriving at Bombay Station and Poona Races. They also screened The Queen’s Funeral Procession and The Life of Christ.
Dadasaheb Phalke was a shastri, a learned man, from a Brahmin family. He studied photography at the Art School in Bombay. He was also a magician, like Georges Méliès. When he saw the The Life of Christ, he realized film could use illusion and special effects to illustrate stories from the Hindu religion. He was determined to make a film about the Hindu God, Krishna.
His first film, Rajah Harischandra, based on a story from the Mahabharata, was completed in 1912. Krishna Janma was released in 1918. Phalke traveled throughout India by oxcart to present his films. When Phalke showed Krishna Janma in Madras screenings were sold out from seven in the morning to midnight. This subject would dominate Indian film for the next century and would define Bollywood Cinema.
Phalke was able to present stories from Indian cultural history, but he needed to work as Shakespeare did, with male actors portraying female characters. Women would have been branded prostitutes if they appeared in a film. His films were not only exhibited in India, but also played to Indian audiences in Burma, Singapore and East Africa.[4]
Bollywood is the term used for the commercial film industry based in Mumbai. The Indian film industry makes big budget films about Indian cultural subjects for an Indian audience: Musicals, Melodramas, and Historical Epics.
- Barnouw, Eric. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film. 2nd Revised Edition. Oxford University Film, Oxford, 1974, pp. 3-11. ↵
- Sharman, Russell. Moving Pictures. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted, pp. 21-23. ↵
- Geduld, Harry M. Film Makers on Film Making. Indiana University Press, 1967. Project MUSE muse.jhu.edu/book/93942. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License ↵
- Barnouw, Eric and Krishnaswamy, S. Indian Film Second Edition. Oxford University Press, New York, Oxford, New Delhi, 1980, pp. 10-20. ↵