The origins of cinema

The origins of cinema

Origins of cinema

Cinema was born in the late nineteenth century. If the animation goes back at least to the seventeenth century, with the "magic lantern", it was not until 1891 to see the first patent on the animation of photographic images and the successful production of a first film camera. The collective spectacle that will result is born a few years later.

In many articles and books, we can still read today, and especially in France, "the inventors of cinema are the Lumière brothers". They developed and built a machine to record and project in public moving photographic views, which they called the Cinematograph. At the time, the press, invited to the first Lumière screenings, speaks, not of the Cinematograph, but of the "Kinétoscope (or Kinétographe) of the Lumière brothers". On December 22, 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière present their invention to the scientists of the Society of Encouragement, they still call "Projection Kinetoscope" or Kinetic Light their cameras for shooting and viewing. The camera, invented by Thomas Edison and his principal collaborator, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson in 1891, the Kinetograph, the first camera, and the apparatus allowing to see the films individually, the Kinetoscope, are cited in references, proof of their anteriority. The invention of the Lumière brothers, or more precisely that of Louis Lumière and his engineer, Jules Carpentier, is both a camera and a projector (and even a copy printer), which will appeal to wealthy fans. Moreover, with the possibility of seeing animated photographic views on the big screen, the Lumière brothers are launching the cinema show. This invention, which improves others, more rudimentary, immediately appears as a fatal competitor to pre-existing animated shows.

In French, the apocope of the trademark Cinématographe, the cinema, will prevail in everyday language in a few years. But in other countries, it's moving pictures, movies, and also Kino. The Larousse Encyclopedia states: "This worldwide impact will lead many historians to consider December 28, 1895, as the date of birth of the cinema". It evokes the projection that the Lumière brothers organized in Paris, for the general public, in the Indian Salon of the Grand Café, at No. 14 Boulevard des Capucines, but it was not the first time that animated photographic views, according to the Louis Lumière's own terms, were shown in public. Certainly, the success of the projections of the Grand Café gives a new beginning to the exploitation of the films, as Edison still practiced it in 1895, explains with humor Edouard Waintrop, a critic of cinema and general delegate of the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes. "While Mr. Edison has developed a small box with very dim lighting that allows only one or two isolated people to experience this moving picture phenomenon, the Light has chosen a system to share the experience at an entire assembly ". To make the two inventors the fathers of the cinema is nevertheless abusive. To make them the initiators of animated screenings on the big screen is no less so since it is their compatriot Émile Reynaud who, first, in October 1892, organized before a paying public meeting the first animated projections on big screen of the first drawings animated (the animation is part of the cinema). The Lumière brothers themselves did not claim as much and corrected the assertion that made them the only inventors of cinema, as reported by Maurice Trarieux-Lumière, grandson of Louis Lumière and president of the Association Frères Light: "My grandfather has always recognized with perfect honesty, I bear witness, the contributions of Janssen, Muybridge and Marey, inventors of chronophotography, Reynaud, Edison and especially Dickson".

Building the machine called "the Cinematograph" does not mean inventing what is at the heart of the 7th Art, its very essence, the films (according to Dickson, it is Edison who, first, adopted the English word film, which designates a veil, a layer, to works of cinema, in reference to the photosensitive emulsion lying on one side of the support). No movies, no cinema! And the Edison-Dickson couple is at the origin of the first films of the cinema, as Laurent Mannoni, curator at the French Cinémathèque of pre-cinema and cinema apparatus, affirms: the first films were recorded by the "Kinétographe (in Greek, movement writing): Camera of the American Thomas Edison, patented on August 24, 1891, employing 35 mm perforated film and a system of intermittent advance of the film by "ratchet wheel". Between 1891 and 1895, Edison made some seventy films. However, still for Laurent Mannoni, "the cinema did not miraculously appear in 1895", and "the industry of" animated photographs "could hatch, in the 1890s, thanks to practices and practices established since centuries ".

The four fundamental stages of the invention of cinema, therefore of what is the very object of the cinematic creation: the films, except for the invention of gelatin silver, a gelatinous emulsion - made from elements of animal origin - containing a suspension of silver bromide crystals, the basis of silver photography, which concerns primarily photography, can be classified chronologically as follows:

1. 1888: the American John Carbutt invents a flexible support cellulose nitrate, in strips of 70 mm wide marketed by the industrialist George Eastman.

2. 1891: The American Thomas Edison, assisted by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and William Heise, designs the 35mm vertical scroll film, 2 sets of 4 rectangular perforations per frame, as we know it today (after a brief passage in 19 mm format scrolling horizontally). The two men are developing the Kinetograph camera, and the Kinetoscope, an individual viewing device. They record the first films of the cinema and can show them moving to the public thanks to the Kinetoscope.

3. 1892: The Frenchman Émile Reynaud designs the first cartoon film, which he draws directly on a perforated flexible tape 70 mm long indefinite (made of multiple squares of gelatin, reinforced with shellac and fine springs), scrolling horizontally. He began, with the help of a machine of his conception, the Optical Theater, the first public projections of moving images on the big screen. He commissioned the first original music composed expressly for a film, three years before the Lumière brothers' screenings.

4. 1895: Louis Bisontins and Auguste Lumière, better known under the name of the Lumière brothers, synthesizing the discoveries of their predecessors, conceive in Lyon the Cinématographe, a camera capable of recording photographic images in motion on an Eastman film of 35 mm wide to 2 sets of 2 round perforations per frame (device abandoned since), and to restore them in projection. They organize the first paid public screenings of photographic images in motion on the big screen, or at least those which provoke the greatest worldwide impact, because before them, other projections of the same type took place, in Berlin (Max Skladanowsky and his brother Eugen, with their Bioskop) and in New York (Woodville Latham with his Panopticon).