Writing with moving images and sounds

Writing with moving images and sounds

Writing with moving images and sounds

The cinema, said Robert Bresson, "is writing with moving images and sounds". It is also an audiovisual technique, the oldest of all, whose essential links could only be assembled after more than a century of research.

First came the idea of ​​a reconstitution of the movement through the image by exploiting a physiological phenomenon, the persistence of luminous impressions on the retina of the eye, a phenomenon that gave birth to thaumatrope in 1825: by rapidly rotating on its diameter a disc with the drawing of a bird on one side and that of a cage on the other, we saw the bird in the cage, because, on the retina, each image persisted a fraction of a second, ensuring the continuity of visual sensations. In 1832, it is on this basis that the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau reconstituted the movement with his Phenakistiscope.

In 1816, Nicéphore Niépce invented photography, which in 1895 would form the second link in the cinema. In fact, photography enabled the Lumière brothers to create the cinematograph, a camera recording on film about fifteen images per second of a moving subject, thus breaking down this movement. This same camera was then used to project the images at the same frequency. The eye perceived on the screen a moving subject and not a succession of fixed views.

More than thirty years were still needed to give voice to the cinema by sound recording on the film. The 7th art was born. Now this art has become an industry which requires large capital and means of production.