The birth of cinema

The birth of cinema

Cinema was born at the end of the 19th century. To designate the research that leads to the invention of cinema, so before the first films in 1891, we speak of pre-cinema. It is often said that the inventors of cinema were the Lumière brothers. They themselves did not claim as much and corrected this assertion by recalling that the cinema was the result of research feverishly pursued all over the world and that everyone had arrived at his ends "in a handkerchief". In fact, the first films, as Laurent Mannoni, a film historian and curator of cameras at the Cinémathèque française, put it, were recorded by the "Kinétographe (in Greek, writing of the movement): camera of the American Thomas Edison, patented August 24, 1891, employing 35mm perforated film and intermittent film feed system by "ratchet wheel". Between 1891 and 1895, Edison made some seventy films.

"But the illusion of moving images had been given before (early nineteenth century) by scientific toys that use drawings of a subject in the different phases of a gesture split into a dozen or two thumbnails one looks the succession by slits or by means of mirrors in rotation. These 'living room toys', favored by a rich public, were aimed at developing scientific curiosity in the minds of children from good families. These include the Phénakistiscope of the Belgian Joseph Plateau, the Zoetrope of the English William George Horner, the Folioscope of the French Pierre-Hubert Desvignes, which is an adaptation of the Flipbook of the English John Barnes Linnett, and the Praxinoscope of the French Émile Reynaud. Not to mention the Zoopraxiscope of the British photographer Eadweard Muybridge, but it should be noted that Muybridge and his famous French equivalent Étienne-Jules Marey and his assistant Georges Demenÿ have developed various machines or optical processes in a more scientific than commercial purpose, to try to decompose, and thus to study, the movements of human beings or animals, and in general any phenomenon too rapid to be analyzed by the human eye (examples: drop of a drop of water, explosions or chemical reactions).