History of Motion Pictures

History of Motion Pictures 

While there were many inventions of cameras before, dating all the way back to the Edison comapny successfuly demonstrating Kinetoscope, French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere are often credited with inventing the first modern motion picture camera. The Lumiere's camera was different from others because it was a portable motion picture camera, a film processing unit, and a projector called the Cinematographe all in one device. The Cinemotographe was hand-cranked and weighed less than 20 pounds. This largely affected the types of films that were being made.

The Cinematographe made motion pictures extremely popular. Some historians have gone as far as to say that the Lumiere's invention gave birth to the motion picture era. In 1895, Lumiere and his brother demonstrated photographic moving pictures on a screen for a paying audience of more than just one person. They showed ten 50-second films which were mainly documentary views or "actualities" shot outdoors on location. Before the Cinematographe, Edison films were featuring material such as circus acts that could be taken into a small studio to perform before the camera. With both of these types of films they were only composed of a single unedited shot emphasizing lifelike movement.

In the United States the Kinetoscope had reached its limit by 1895 and Edison bought the righs to a state-of-the-art projector that was developed by Thomas Armat and began selling and manufacturing it as his own invention known at the Edison Vitascope. During this time, emphasis was placed on the projection device itself and films achieved popularity in vaudeville attractions. These vaudeville houses headlined the names of the machines instead of the names of the films.

In 1902, Georges Melies produced a 30-scene narrative that was nearly 14 minutes long and was the first film to achieve international distribution. It established fiction film as a mainstream product. This started the evolution of more sophisticated narrative and editing techniques. For example, Edwin S. Porter, projectionist and engineer who joined the Edison Company in 1900 began progressing rapidly into trick films and short narratives based on political cartoons and contemporary events.

David Wark Griffith known as D.W Griffith produced hundreds of one-reel films in the period from 1908-1912. However, Griffith and others in the industry wanted to move beyond the simple formula but industry owners were resistant. The dissidents left the east and found themselves near Los Algeles where they could experiment with longer films, subsequently, D.W Griffith froduced the first successful full-length feature film, the Birth of a Nation. Despite the intense racism of the film, it was significant in the way that is made movies a middle class medium and demonstrated the popularity of movies.