The letter

One letter a week, starting soon.

The week's signal, what the makers shipped and what the reviewers found, and the editor's note. No tracking, no ads, nothing else.

We keep your address, your language and the date you joined, nothing else. Every letter has a one-click unsubscribe link that deletes the record.
Cinema history3 min read

LESSON 132

Cinema technology 1: the first moving pictures

From peepshow to projected screen.

IN THIS LESSON

  1. Before the camera
  2. Edison and the Kinetoscope
  3. The Lumieres and projection
  4. What changed
  5. Practice: seeing the basics

Before the camera

Soon after photography appeared in 1839, people imagined combining it with optical toys that made drawings appear to move. The step forward came with chronophotography: in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge published photographs of a horse in motion, and those small pictures were soon placed in spinning viewers to show the action. In 1887 Ottomar Anschutz showed his Electrotachyscope, which displayed motion sequences on a small glass screen to paying audiences across Europe and the United States. These devices showed that a series of still images could be read as motion.

Edison and the Kinetoscope

Thomas Edison described the Kinetoscope in 1888, and his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson developed it between 1889 and 1892, along with the Kinetograph camera with its stop-and-go film movement. The Kinetoscope was a cabinet for one viewer at a time, looking through a peephole at a loop of perforated film passing over a light with a fast shutter. It was publicly shown in Brooklyn in 1893, and the first commercial Kinetoscope parlour opened in New York on 14 April 1894 with ten films. Edison and Dickson also set the four-perforation 35 mm frame that cinema still uses.

The Lumieres and projection

In France, Auguste and Louis Lumiere built the Cinematographe, a single machine that could film, print and project. On 22 March 1895 they screened a single film, Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, to about 200 members of an industry society in Paris, probably the first presentation of projected film. The paid public show they gave on 28 December 1895 at the Salon Indien of the Grand Cafe in Paris, has traditionally been called the birth of cinema, although an American projector called the Eidoloscope gave a paid show in New York that May.

What changed

Projection turned moving pictures from a solitary peepshow into a shared event, and Edison's individual-viewer model was soon overtaken. Within a year, cinemas were open in many French and Italian cities, Brussels and London, and Edison's Vitascope became the first commercially successful projector in the United States in 1896. Films were short, silent and shot from a fixed camera, but the core idea of a strip of frames, a shutter and a light has lasted into the digital age. Every later lesson in this series builds on it.

Practice: seeing the basics

This is working practice. Make a flip book of twelve drawings or a sequence of twelve photos and flip it fast: you have built the principle of the Kinetoscope. Then watch Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, which is in the public domain, and count the shots. Notice the fixed camera, the length of the single take and how people move toward and past the lens. Then film your own 50-second fixed shot of a busy doorway and compare it with the Lumieres' version, thinking about what a cut would add.

Try it today

  1. 01Make a 12-page flip book of a ball bouncing.
  2. 02Shoot 12 still photos of a friend walking and play them as a sequence.
  3. 03Watch a Lumiere film from 1895 online.
  4. 04Note what the camera does and does not do.
  5. 05Film one 50-second fixed shot in the same spirit.