More than 750 illustrations and stills accompany a comprehensive, informative overview of the history of motion pictures, capturing the technological and stylistic evolution of the cinema in relation to the diversity of global culture, politics, society, and the arts.
Chapter One
CINEMA, SOCIETY,
AND SCIENCE
In speaking of film history, we should be wary of talking about
origins. Motion pictures (which here as elsewhere will be variously
and interchangeably called film, cinema, the movies)
had many beginnings. While we seek to pinpoint exact moments
in order to celebrate the medium's anniversaries and centennials,
the fact remains that large-screen projection of multiple
moving images forming a narrative has existed for centuries, delivered
by a variety of technologies. Claiming to specify where
things started begs more questions than it answers. Let us speak
instead of an emergence—of cinema arising at a particular time out
of a prior history, to captivate and dominate an epoch, and destined
perhaps to stand as prehistory to some other medium of
moving images preparing in turn to emerge.
THE PREHISTORY OF CINEMA
A shift away from an emphasis on origins casts new light on cinema's
prehistory—the period of motion picture devices and entertainments
before the development of filmmaking apparatus in the
1890s. It makes possible a way of thinking about the past that does
not treat the narrative of time as, inevitably, a story of progress: as
if we stood on the shoulders of our ancestors, growing bigger and
better with each new generation. Earlier in time does not have to
mean—as it sometimes has in modern histories—less sophisticated,
less civilized, more crude. While our machinery undoubtedly
has grown more sophisticated, the same is not necessarily the
case for the human mind or character, or for people's capacity to
experience life in complex and sophisticated ways. We would do
well to regard earlier times not as diminished in relation to our
own, but simply in some ways different.
When this principle is applied to cinema's prehistory, what becomes
apparent is a rich and varied world of screen presentations
in the time before movies (fig. 1.1). If the cinema was something
new for spectators of the 1890s, seeing larger-than-life projections
of still and moving images was not. In Asia, shadow puppets had
formed a part of popular entertainment and ceremonies for centuries;
their most widely known manifestation appeared on the Indonesian
island of Java, where intricately perforated puppets
made of thin leather, in lamplight, cast filigree shadows. Different
kinds of screen entertainment had also been seen in early modern
Europe. Inventors in the Netherlands in the mid-seventeenth century
used the sun as a light source (or at night, light from a candle)
to project images painted on a reflecting surface through a
lens onto a wall. Within a few years others had devised a projector
which contained light source, image, and lens all in one portable
apparatus. This was called the magic lantern.
Magic Lanterns
Over the next two centuries magic lanterns and their entertainments
became more and more elaborate (figs. 1.2-1.4). One of the
most impressive magic lantern presentations was the Fantasmagorie
(known in English as Phantasmagoria) staged by a Belgian,
Étienne Gaspar Robert (1763-1837), who went by the name
Robertson. It premiered in Paris in 1798 and later toured Europe.
With his audience on one side of a translucent screen, Robertson
on the other side had his lantern mounted on wheels. Moving the
lantern, adjusting the lens to maintain focus, and using a shutter
for dissolves (the fading of one image into another), Robertson
projected macabre scenes of skeletons, ghosts, and other frightening
figures simulating lifelike motion.
The development in subsequent years of dual- and even triple-lens
projectors made it possible for operators to surpass Robertson's
spectacle without having to match his athleticism. These
machines smoothed the transition from image to image, enabling
lanternists to construct complex narratives out of multiple slides in
a manner not unlike a sequence of shots in a movie. Magic lantern
entrepreneurs put together a full evening's program with segments
such as travel scenes, popular science, art appreciation,
comedy, and melodrama (see box, page 19).
Motion Toys
As screen entertainment for public consumption expanded in the
years before cinema, so too did devices proliferate for enjoying
moving images privately in the home. These are often thought of
merely as toys: small portable units that came with disks or paper
strips containing a sequence of images which, when set in motion,
gave the illusion of movement. Yet their origins lay in scientific
experimentation. Scientists in the 1820s became intrigued with a
phenomenon they called persistence of vision—the eye's capacity
to retain a visual image after its source has been removed. A paper
by Peter Mark Roger (1779-1869), famous later for his Thesaurus
prompted several efforts to construct mechanisms that could turn
separate still pictures into a single moving image. Though the concept
of persistence of vision continues to surface in film histories
the term is no longer accepted in the field of perceptual psychology;
the visual image retained by the eye has become known as a
positive afterimage, and its connection to the perception of apparent
motion is not clear. No one disputes, however, that these devices
produce the illusion of motion.
The inventors of motion toys gave them high-sounding, tongue-twisting
names. The Thaumatrope (1826, attributed to John Ayrton
Paris) was simply a round card attached to a string, with separate
but related drawings on either side: for example, a horse on one
side, a rider on the other side; when the card was spun, the rider
appeared to be riding the horse. The Phenakistoscope (early 1830s,
several inventors) was a plate-sized, slotted disk with a sequence of
drawings around its circle; when the disk was spun in front of a
mirror, a person looking through the slots would see the drawings
appear to move (figs. 1.5-1.7). The Zoetrope (1860s, also several
inventors) was a bowl-like device with a strip of drawings around
the interior circumference; when the bowl was spun, viewers
peered through slots in the sides to watch drawings seemingly in
motion (fig. 1.12). (The name Zoetrope resurfaced in the 1970s
when the United States producer-director Francis Ford Coppola
used it for his production company and studio.) The Praxinoscope,
developed in the 1870s in France by Émile Reynaud (1844-1918),
was like a Zoetrope, only it also utilized mirrors (fig. 1.13).
Théâtre Optique
Motion devices soon outgrew the home. They began to compete
with magic lanterns in the public entertainment sphere. Reynaud,
after inventing the Praxinoscope, developed a projecting version,
using a reflector and a lens lo enlarge the apparatus's moving images
(on the same principles of projection that had been used for
still images as far back as the seventeenth century). Expanding his
efforts, he constructed tire Théâtre Optique, an even more sophisticated
projection system (fig. 1.14). He drew pictures on long bands
which wound through the apparatus much like a reel of film
moves through its own projecting device; his individual narratives
contained up to seven hundred separate drawings and a single
story went on for fifteen minutes. The Théâtre Optique made its
debut in Paris in 1892 and lasted until 1900, when it was undone
by competition from the cinema.
As screen entertainment, the Théâtre Optique fell just short of
what cinema was to provide. Only its lack of a catchy name may
have kept it from enduring fame as a symbol of technological futility,
like the Stanley Steamer, the steam-driven automobile that
failed against the challenge of the internal-combustion engine.
Panoramas and Dioramas
While we focus inevitably on the late nineteenth century's
historic transformation of moving image
technology and culture, the end of the eighteenth
century also marked significant innovation in screen entertainment.
The era of the 1780s-90s saw not only Robertson's
Fantasmagorie and other enhanced magic lantern programs,
but also the panorama, a large-scale painting designed to take
up the complete interior circumference of a circular building.
What is credited as the first of these opened in Edinburgh,
Scotland, in 1788, and the idea spread to London and France.
(On this principle, the Walt Disney company opened at its
Disneyland park in 1955 a circular moving image photographed
by eleven cameras, called Circarama.) Strictly speaking,
the early panoramas were not moving images, but smaller-scale
versions were produced for home use, some on scrolls that
could be unrolled to create an illusion of movement.
In the early nineteenth century, the sensation of movement
was introduced into public exhibitions of static pictures through
the diorama. (One of its developers was Louis Jacques Mondé
Daguerre [1789-1851], who later became an inventor of photography.)
The diorama involved either a singe pointing or a
canvas painted on both sides. Audiences sat in front of the work
as shifts in lighting produced changes in the image. In the case
of two-sided paintings especially, diorama shows offered narratives
of visual spectacle—changes in the weather, in seasons,
from day to night—that effected substantial transformations
and lasted up to fifteen minutes with a singe work.
As with the panorama, the magic lantern, and motion toys,
the diorama concept was developed into products for home
entertainment. A popular diorama toy was the Polyrama
Panoptique, a viewing box into which pairs of slides could be
inserted. By manipulating a hinged lid, the viewer could shift the
light and change the picture.
RECORDED MOVEMENT
What Reynaud's device lacked was images of movement recorded
at the source. Ever since the development of still photography in
the 1830s, inventors had been exploring ways to take a sequence
of photographs rapidly enough to record a movement in all its
phases, not just arrest a single image. These efforts gained the substantial
support in the 1870s of the railroad tycoon and former
governor of California Leland Stanford, who was determined to
find out whether a trotting horse ever had all four legs off the
ground at the same time. To settle the question, he hired British
émigré Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), who was well-known
in California as a wilderness photographer.
Muybridge's Horse
Muybridge's famous experiments, begun in 1872, culminated in
1878 with a sequence of photographs that proved that yes, a galloping
horse did indeed have all tour legs raised at once. He placed
twelve cameras in a row alongside a track, spread threads across
the track, and attached them to a contact with each camera's shutter
(fig. 1.15). As the horse moved, its legs broke the threads, causing
the cameras to operate in sequence. The result wax a dozen
photographs showing successive phases of a horse's gait (fig. 1.16).
Within a year he expanded the system to twenty-four cameras
with timed electronic controls, which made the sequence more accurate
than the thread method. The international acclaim for
Muybridge's achievements prompted him to go out on the lecture
circuit, and he joined the world of screen entertainment with his
own version of a magic lantern device, the Zoopraxiscope. This
was a projecting version et the Phenakistoscope using rotating
disks on which were painted images of horses in motion drawn
from his sequence photographs (he discovered, however, that he
had to elongate the drawings in order for the projected illusion of
movement to look natural). Over the next decade he greatly publicized
the possibilities for sequence photography of motion.
Étienne-Jules Marey
The French scientist Étienne-Jules Marcy (1830-1904), a specialist
in animal motion, was among the many whom Muybridge
stimulated. When he utilized the photographer's methods, however,
Marey found them inadequate for recording birds in flight.
He adapted a device that had been developed by an astronomer,
Pierre-Jules-César Janssen (1824-1907), for recording the transit
of the planet Venus across the sun. Marey's own version, developed
in 1882, was a "photographic gun" equipped with a disk
functioning as a shutter to record sequential images on a rotating
photographic plate (fig. 1.17). This worked well to capture the
flight of birds, but it was limited to twelve separate images. As a
next step, Marcy devised a stationary camera (called a chronophotographic
camera) that could take a considerably greater number
of images superimposed on one another, producing a single picture
of motion for scientific study (fig. 1.18).
"Film"
The pace of development quickened. In England, France, Germany,
the United States, and elsewhere during the 1880s, inventors
and entrepreneurs worked on machinery for motion
photography. Key advances in the still photographic field came
from the work of the American inventor and manufacturer
George Eastman (1854-1932). In 1885, with William H. Walker,
Eastman developed a new kind of recording material to replace individual
coated glass or gelatin plates: sensitized paper, coated with
gelatin emulsion, on a roll, called film. In 1888 Eastman introduced
a box camera with the film roll loaded inside it under the
trade name "Kodak." A year later, the paper roll was replaced by
celluloid, a synthetic plastic material invented in the 1870s, which
utilized the chemical compound cellulose nitrate. Marcy immediately
took up this innovation for his chronophotographic camera,
constructing a mechanism that could move roll film through the
apparatus, hold it still momentarily for an exposure to be taken,
and systematically repeat the operation. This fulfilled his desire for
an ample number of separately recorded images of movement. Almost
alone among the many experimenters in the medium, Marey
was uninterested in carrying his work forward into the world of
screen entertainment and was motivated chiefly by the development
of technology for research purposes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A WORLD HISTORY OF FILM
by ROBERT SKLAR.
Copyright © 2002 by Harry N. Abrams, Inc..
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2002 Harry N. Abrams, Inc..
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0-8109-0606-6
The beginning of film's second century has been mostly marked by a lamentable lack of quality in both American and European films. This book is a timely reminder that film remains a truly worldwide art form, nourished and renewed from diverse and unexpected sources most recently, Australia, China, and Iran. Sklar (Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies) here attempts the impossible, compressing over 100 years of film history into one oversized volume. He surveys output and trends from most major countries over the decades while providing a time line that describes other news and cultural events. Sidebars also highlight topics like independent films, gay and lesbian cinema, the new women directors, method acting, and much more. More a chronological study than an encyclopedia, this book will be useful to beginners seeking to clarify basic film concepts like neorealism or "new wave." The author's need to say something about everything contributes to a rather bland tone, and he certainly cannot do justice to directors like Spielberg, Hitchcock, or Ford in a few paragraphs. Photographs are the main attraction, and some have a wonderfully candid quality, like one showing Ingmar Bergman setting up a shot for The Seventh Seal while an actor playing the figure of Death relaxes on a nearby boulder. Up-to-date and enhanced by a glossary of film terms, this book will serve as an introductory study for film students. Recommended for large academic and public library film collections. Stephen F. Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Legendary critic and New York University cinema studies professor Robert Sklar chronicles over 100 years of cinema in A World History of Film. Lushly illustrated with color and black-and-white photos, the book covers everything from 1920s American animation to Czech films of the '60s to Titanic. Sklar concisely explains the rise and fall of various cinematic trends documentaries and fiction films alike describing the most important films of each movement. He covers Latin American, Asian and African cinema, including early 20th-century filmmaking in Brazil and Japan. ( Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
