An Introduction to Cinema
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MOVING PICTURES SUBTITLE - AN INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA Russell Sharman University of Arkansas University of Arkansas Moving Pictures - An Introduction to Cinema Russell Sharman This text is disseminated via the Open Education Resource (OER) LibreTexts Project (https://LibreTexts.org) and like the hundreds of other texts available within this powerful platform, it freely available for reading, printing and "consuming." Most, but not all, pages in the library have licenses that may allow individuals to make changes, save, and print this book. Carefully consult the applicable license(s) before pursuing such effects. Instructors can adopt existing LibreTexts texts or Remix them to quickly build course-specific resources to meet the needs of their students. Unlike traditional textbooks, LibreTexts’ web based origins allow powerful integration of advanced features and new technologies to support learning. 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This text was compiled on 09/21/2021 TABLE OF CONTENTS A free and open-source introduction to the art and science of moving pictures, offering in-depth exploration of how cinema communicates, and what, exactly, it is trying to say. 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA 1.1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CINEMA 1.2: HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE 1.3: MISE-EN-SCÈNE 1.4: NARRATIVE 1.5: CINEMATOGRAPHY 1.6: EDITING 1.7: SOUND 1.8: ACTING 2: REPRESENTATION IN CINEMA 2.1: WOMEN IN CINEMA 2.2: AFRICAN AMERICANS IN CINEMA BACK MATTER INDEX GLOSSARY 1 9/21/2021 CHAPTER OVERVIEW 1: AN INTRODUCTION TO CINEMA 1.1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF CINEMA 1.2: HOW TO WATCH A MOVIE 1.3: MISE-EN-SCÈNE 1.4: NARRATIVE 1.5: CINEMATOGRAPHY 1.6: EDITING 1.7: SOUND 1.8: ACTING 1 9/21/2021 1.1: A Brief History of Cinema Leland Stanford was bored. In 1872, Stanford was a wealthy robber baron, former Governor of California, and horse racing enthusiast with way too much time on his hands. Spending much of that time at the track, he became convinced that a horse at full gallop lifted all four hooves off the ground. His friends scoffed at the idea. Unfortunately, a horse’s legs moved so fast that it was impossible to tell with the human eye. So he did what really wealthy people do when they want to settle a bet, he turned to a nature photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, and offered him $25,000 to photograph a horse mid gallop. Six years later, after narrowly avoiding a murder conviction (but that’s another story), Muybridge perfected a technique of photographing a horse in motion with a series of 12 cameras triggered in sequence. One of the photos clearly showed that all four of the horse’s hooves left the ground at full gallop. Stanford won the bet and went on to found Stanford University. Muybridge pocketed the $25,000 and became famous for the invention of series photography, a critical first step toward motion pictures. The Horse in Motion. Eadweard Muybridge, 1878. Of course, the mechanical reproduction of an image had already been around for some time. The Camera Obscura, a technique for reproducing images by projecting a scene through a tiny hole that is inverted and reversed on the opposite wall or surface (think pinhole camera), had been around since at least the 5th century BCE, if not thousands of years earlier. But it wasn’t until a couple of French inventors, Nicephore Niepce and Louis Daguerre, managed to capture an image through a chemical process known as photoetching in the 1820s that photography was born. By 1837, Niepce was dead (best not to ask too many questions about that) and Daguerre had perfected the technique of fixing an image on a photographic plate through a chemical reaction of silver, iodine and mercury. He called it a daguerreotype. After himself. Naturally. But to create the illusion of movement from these still images would require further innovation. The basic concept of animation was already in the air through earlier inventions like the magic lantern and eventually the zoetrope. But a photo-realistic recreation of movement was unheard of. That’s where Muybridge comes in. His technique of capturing a series of still images in quick succession laid the groundwork for other inventors like Thomas Edison, Woodville Latham and Auguste and Louis Lumiere to develop new ways of photographing and projecting movement. Crucial to this process was the development of strips of light-sensitive celluloid film to replace the bulky glass plates used by Muybridge. This enabled a single camera to record a series of high-speed exposures (rather than multiple cameras taking a single photo in sequence). It also enabled that same strip of film to be projected at an equally high speed, creating the illusion of movement through a combination of optical and neurological phenomena. But more on that in the next chapter. By 1893, 15 years after Muybridge won Stanford’s bet, Edison had 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 (also known as “paddy wagons” with apologies to the Irish). One of the first films they produced was a 5 second “scene” of a man sneezing. A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: uark.pressbooks.pub/movingpictures/?p=26 Riveting stuff. But still, movies were born. Sort of. 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. In 1895, Woodville Latham, a chemist and Confederate veteran of the Civil War, lured away a couple of Edison’s employees and perfected the technique of motion picture projection. In that same year, over in France, Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the cinematographe which could perform the same modern miracle. The Lumiere brothers would receive the lion’s share of the credit, but Latham and the Lumieres essentially tied for first place in the invention of cinema as we know it. Sort of. It turns out there was another French inventor, Louis Le Prince (apparently we owe a lot to the French), who was experimenting with motion pictures and had apparently perfected the technique by 1890. But when he arrived in the US for a planned public demonstration that same year – potentially eclipsing Edison’s claim on the technology – he mysteriously vanished from a train. His body and luggage, including his invention, were never found. Conspiracy theories about his untimely disappearance have circulated ever since (we’re looking at you, Thomas Edison). Those early years of cinema were marked by great leaps forward in technology, but not so much forward movement in terms of art. Whether it was Edison’s 5-second film of a sneeze, or the Lumieres’ 46-second film Workers Leaving a Factory (which is exactly what it sounds like), the films were wildly popular because no one had seen anything like them, not because they were breaking new ground narratively. 1.1.1 9/7/2021 https://human.libretexts.org/@go/page/63597 A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: uark.pressbooks.pub/movingpictures/?p=26 There were, of course, notable exceptions. Alice Guy-Blaché was working as a secretary at a photography company when she saw the Lumieres’ invention in 1895. The following year she wrote, directed and edited what many consider the first fully fictional film in cinema history, The Cabbage Fairy (1896): A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: uark.pressbooks.pub/movingpictures/?p=26 But it was George Melies who became the most well-known filmmaker-as-entertainer in those first few years.