Day Forty-Eight : Silent Night, Holy Movies

Tuesday 14th January 2020

In my opinion, the true starters of film are the French, this is because a lot of the pioneers of film came from France for example Étienne-Jules Marey who was one of the first to experiment with film, Louis Le Prince who created what is now the oldest surviving film in 1888 and the Lumière brothers who created the Cinématographe, which proved to be a more portable and practical device than both of Edison's as it combined a camera, film processor and projector in one unit. There are some commendable non-French people who helped in the creation of film like Eadweard Muybridge who made the first projected proto-movie and Thomas Edison who invented the Kinetograph and the Kinetoscope.

https://www.history.com/news/the-lumiere-brothers-pioneers-of-cinema

Louis Lumière began experimenting with the equipment his father was manufactured. In 1881, 17-year-old Louis invented a new “dry plate” process of developing film, which boosted his father’s business enough to fuel the opening of a new factory in the Lyons suburbs. By 1894, the Lumières were producing some 15 million plates a year. That year, Antoine Lumière attended an exhibition of Edison’s Kinetoscope in Paris. Upon his return to Lyons, he showed his sons a length of film he had received from one of Edison’s concessionaires; he also told them they should try to develop a cheaper alternative to the peephole film-viewing device and its bulky camera counterpart, the Kinetograph. While the Kinetoscope could only show a motion picture to one individual viewer, Antoine urged Auguste and Louis to work on a way to project film onto a screen, where many people could view it at the same time.

Auguste began the first experiments in the winter of 1894, and by early the following year the brothers had come up with their own device, which they called the Cinématographe. Much smaller and lighter than the Kinetograph, it weighed around five kilograms (11 pounds) and operated with the use of a hand-powered crank. The Cinématographe photographed and projected film at a speed of 16 frames per second, much slower than Edison’s device (48 frames per second), which meant that it was less noisy to operate and used less film. After a number of private screenings, the Lumière brothers unveiled the Cinématographe in their first public screening on December 28, 1895, at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard de Capuchines. In early 1896, they would open Cinématographe theatres in London, Brussels, Belgium and New York. After making more than 40 films that year, mostly scenes of everyday French life, but also the first newsreel (footage of the French Photographic Society conference) and the first documentaries (about the Lyon Fire Department), they began sending other cameramen-projectionists out into the world to record scenes of life and showcase their invention.

By 1905, the Lumières had withdrawn from the moviemaking business in favour of developing the first practical photographic colour process, known as the Lumière Autochrome. Meanwhile, their pioneering motion picture camera, the Cinématographe, had lent its name to an exciting new form of art (and entertainment): cinema.