Appearance
7.1 — How Cinema Was Invented
A medium built out of a bet about a horse, a defect in human vision that turned out not to exist, and two brothers who thought the whole thing had no future.
Before the film
What is persistence of vision, and why is the standard explanation wrong?
The story taught for a century is that the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second, so a rapid series of stills blurs into motion. That is true about the eye and it does not explain movies.
Retinal persistence would produce a smeared overlay of successive frames, not the sensation of something moving. The actual mechanism is in the brain, and it involves at least two effects.
The phi phenomenon, described by Max Wertheimer in 1912, is the perception of movement when two nearby lights flash in sequence — you see something travel between them, although nothing did. Beta movement is the related effect where an object appears to move between two positions.
The brain is running a model that assumes objects persist and move continuously, because in the real world they do. Given a series of slightly different pictures in quick succession, the most plausible explanation available to the visual system is that one object moved, and that is what you experience.
The nineteenth century built toys on this before anyone understood it: the thaumatrope, a disc with a bird on one side and a cage on the other that combines when spun; the zoetrope, a slotted drum of drawings; the praxinoscope, with mirrors.
Did a bet about a horse start the movies?
Close to it. The story is usually told as a wager and the documentation is thinner than the legend, but the underlying question was real and disputed.
Does a galloping horse ever have all four hooves off the ground at once? Painters had always shown horses with legs extended front and back, and nobody could see fast enough to check.
Leland Stanford, a railway magnate and horse breeder, hired the photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1872 to settle it. Muybridge eventually built an array of cameras beside a track, each triggered by a thread the horse broke as it passed, and in 1878 produced a sequence showing conclusively that all four hooves do leave the ground — but with the legs gathered underneath the body, not extended. Every horse painting before that moment was wrong.
Muybridge then built a device to project the sequence in motion, and spent the rest of his career photographing humans and animals moving. His life contains a second fact that is hard to leave out: in 1874 he shot his wife's lover dead, was tried for murder, and was acquitted by a jury on the grounds of justifiable homicide.
The first films
Who invented cinema?
Nobody, and the several people usually named each contributed one necessary piece.
Louis Le Prince shot what is generally accepted as the earliest surviving motion picture film in 1888, in Leeds — a few seconds of people walking in a garden. In 1890 he boarded a train in France and was never seen again, with no body and no luggage ever found, and his work went largely unrecognised.
Thomas Edison's laboratory, and specifically W. K. L. Dickson, developed the Kinetoscope by 1891 — a cabinet with a peephole, showing a short film to one viewer at a time. Edison saw it as a novelty amusement and, critically, did not think projection was commercially sensible, on the reasoning that showing a film to a room full of people would exhaust the audience for it faster than showing it one at a time.
The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, built the Cinématographe: a single hand-cranked device that was camera, printer and projector, weighing about five kilograms against the Kinetoscope's several hundred. On 28 December 1895 they projected ten short films to a paying audience in the basement of a Paris café.
That date is usually given as the birth of cinema, and what makes it the right date is not the technology but the business model: a room, an audience, and a ticket.
Did the audience really run from the train?
The story that audiences watching L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat panicked and fled the room is almost certainly false, or at least massively exaggerated.
No contemporary report describes a panic. The film was not shown at the first December 1895 programme. The image was small, silent, black and white, and projected on a screen in a room people had paid to sit in. Film historians now generally treat the legend as an origin myth constructed later — a story cinema told about its own power.
What is documented is genuine astonishment at a different film: leaves moving in the wind in the background of Repas de bébé. Audiences had seen photographs; what they had never seen was incidental motion — the world going on behind the subject, which no painter had ever bothered to render.
The Lumières themselves were dismissive of the medium's prospects. Louis is reported to have said cinema was an invention without a future, and they moved on to colour photography, at which they were extremely successful.
What did Georges Méliès add?
The idea that a film could show something that did not happen.
Méliès was a stage magician who ran a theatre in Paris and was in the audience in December 1895. He tried to buy a camera from the Lumières, was refused, and built one.
His central discovery was an accident. His camera jammed while filming a street scene, and when he developed the film he found a bus had apparently transformed into a hearse. The camera had stopped, the traffic had moved, and the camera had restarted — a substitution splice.
From that he built the whole grammar of trick photography: stop-motion substitutions, multiple exposures, dissolves, painted backdrops, models. A Trip to the Moon (1902), with the rocket in the moon's eye, is the film everyone has seen a still of.
Lumière filmed what was in front of the camera; Méliès filmed what was not. Every fiction film descends from the second choice.
Méliès was ruined commercially — his films were pirated in America, the market moved to longer narratives, and he ended up selling toys at a stall in Montparnasse station, where he was recognised by a journalist in the 1920s. He burned most of his negatives in a fit of despair in 1923.
Building a language
How did film-makers work out how to tell a story?
By discovering, over about twenty years, that an audience will assemble a sequence of shots into a coherent scene without being told how.
Early films were single unbroken shots from a fixed camera at the distance of a theatre seat. Every technique now taken for granted had to be invented and then had to be understood by audiences: the close-up, the cut from one place to another, the shot-reverse-shot for a conversation, cross-cutting between two simultaneous events.
The Soviet film-maker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated why it works in the 1910s. He intercut the same neutral shot of an actor's face with a bowl of soup, a coffin, and a woman. Audiences reported the actor expressing hunger, grief and desire — the same shot each time. The meaning was created by the juxtaposition, not by the performance.
That effect, the Kuleshov effect, is the basis of editing as an art rather than a splicing job. The audience does the work, and the editor's job is to give them the right materials.
Why did films stop being silent, and what was lost?
Sound was possible earlier than it arrived; the obstacles were synchronisation and amplification, and both were solved in the mid-1920s. The Jazz Singer (1927) is the usual marker.
The transition was brutal and fast. Within three years silent film was commercially dead worldwide. Careers ended for actors whose voices did not match their faces or who had strong accents, and — much less discussed — for the enormous number of musicians employed to accompany silent films in cinemas, who lost their jobs almost overnight.
Something genuine was lost. Silent film had reached an extraordinarily sophisticated visual language precisely because it could not use dialogue, and early sound film went backwards visually: the cameras had to be enclosed in soundproof boxes and could barely move, and the microphones were fixed, so scenes became static and stagey for several years until the technology caught up.
It also ended the one truly international medium. A silent film needed only its title cards translated, so films crossed borders freely. Sound partitioned world cinema into language markets, and it is a large part of why national film industries developed as they did.
Why is 24 frames per second the standard?
Because it was the cheapest rate that carried acceptable sound.
Silent films were shot and projected at variable rates, commonly 16 to 18 frames per second, hand-cranked, and the rate could be adjusted by the projectionist. That is why old silent footage looks comically fast — it is being played at 24 on modern equipment.
Sound changed the constraint completely. Sound was recorded optically on the edge of the film strip, so the film had to move at a constant speed, and the speed had to be fast enough for the audio to have acceptable frequency response. Twenty-four was the lowest rate that worked, and film stock was the largest cost in production, so the lowest workable rate won.
It has survived long past its reason, because audiences associate its particular motion blur with cinema. Films shot at higher rates look wrong to most viewers — The Hobbit at 48 fps was widely described as looking like television, which is exactly the association being triggered.
Colour and the modern shape
How did colour film work before digital?
Several ways, and the good one was extremely difficult.
The earliest colour films were hand-painted frame by frame, or tinted whole scenes a single colour by dipping the film — blue for night, amber for interiors.
Technicolor's three-strip process, from 1932, is the one that produced the look. A special camera used a prism to split the incoming light into three beams, each recorded on a separate black-and-white negative through a red, green or blue filter. The three were then recombined at the printing stage using a dye transfer process closer to lithographic printing than to photography.
The camera was enormous, needed enormous amounts of light, and could not be rented without a Technicolor consultant supplied by the company to supervise the colour design. That is why films of the period have such a distinctive and consistent palette: one company effectively art-directed all of them.
The Wizard of Oz (1939) uses it as a plot device, with the Kansas scenes in sepia and Oz in full colour.
Why is the aspect ratio what it is?
Because television forced the industry to change it.
The original standard was 4:3, or 1.37:1 — the Academy ratio — which came from Edison's original 35 mm frame.
When television arrived in the late 1940s and cinema attendance collapsed, studios needed a difference that television could not copy. The answer was width. CinemaScope from 1953 used an anamorphic lens that squeezed a wide image onto standard film and unsqueezed it in projection, giving about 2.35:1. Widescreen formats proliferated, and 1.85:1 and 2.39:1 became the two standards still used.
Television later moved to 16:9, or 1.78:1, as a compromise. It was chosen mathematically — as the ratio whose area is closest to the average of the common cinema formats when they are fitted to a screen of the same area — which is a rare case of a standard chosen by calculation rather than accident.
That is also why old films on a widescreen television have black bars at the sides, and why "pan and scan" versions of widescreen films for old televisions were so despised: they cropped the frame and threw away half the composition.
What comes next
The next page follows what was built on top of all this — the studio system, the industries that grew in different countries, and why almost every film you can name came from a very small number of companies.