It was once asked, "How would you like a ticket to one of the most significant forms of mass communication society has ever known?" It is a common language that lets people tell stories to understand the world and the people around them. I am talking about the film industry. This powerful form of media is at the intersection of art, industry, technology, and politics. The making of this entertainment, as it is known today, was a total accident. It is all because of the inventors and artists who were experimenting with new inventions and trying to capture moments of reality, to see the world in a whole new way. Film is a thin flexible strip of plastic or other material coated in a light-sensitive emulsion for exposure in a camera. At the beginning of its history, the film industry started as an order of images looked at rapidly one after another, which creates the illusion of motion. Fast forward to just 5,000 years ago, and we find people inventing more sophisticated devices to create that same illusion of motion. Among these pre-film animation tools, the ones we are most familiar with are called zoetropes. Think of these as a bowl with images inside and small gaps cut around the bowl. When you spin the bowl and look through the gaps the pictures seem to move. Over the years, these devices came in lots of different shapes and sizes and with many names. So for a long time, this is as close as we ever got to film. Until photography came along. Now, it is still important to not forget that no one was planning to invent movies. There was no one just striving or had some master plan to revolutionize communication or art on a global scale. Instead the film industry exists because of a series of happy accidents, new innovations, and scientific byproducts. Photography came about in the early-to-mid 1800s, at a time of great scientific and artistic innovation. What Muybridge had an experiment launched a wave of “motion studies,” as photographers and inventors all over the world began using these new technologies to break down continuous motion into individual images. Also, that was one giant step closer to motion pictures. One of those photographers was yet another Frenchman – a man named Étienne-Jules Marey, whose training in physiology led him to capture motion studies of birds in flight and human athletes in action.
Instead of tripwires like Muybridge, Marey invented what he called a chronophotographic gun and switched from sheets of photographic paper to rolls, allowing him to take bursts of photographs – twelve per second. Even with all these increasingly-fancy techniques, it is important to note that these were still just a series of photographs. Motion studies were sometimes projected, using devices like Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, but nobody was trying to make movies yet. So, the world was boring. Each of these innovations set up Thomas Edison, and a scientist who worked for him named W.K.L. Dickson to invent the kinetograph – the world’s first motion picture camera. So they, in turn, paved the way for the first filmmakers to experiment with motion picture technologies and storytelling. What we mentioned earlier that film is an illusion, but it is an illusion that’s carefully crafted by people who want to show a specific viewpoint. With aesthetic choices – from the shot angle and shot size to lens type and lighting style. Filmmakers can further affect how we, as an audience, interpret reality. Film was not a planned invention, but just stumbled in too.
In France, a pair of brothers saw the kinetograph and kinetoscope and said, “We can do better than that!” So guess what, they did. They invented a lightweight picture device that made movies and displayed them. The brothers figured out a way to use the device to play back the finished roll of film and propelling intense light through it to show pictures. Films could be shown on an entire wall or screen, letting audiences of people experience films. These brothers are the Lumière Brothers and created the first projected films. They were fascinated by Edison’s motion picture devices but immediately saw the imperfections: the camera was difficult to move, and only one person could view a film at once. So they started from the beginning and created a whole new camera. They were not the only ones tinkering with this engineering problem, in any case. Inventors were working alone all over Europe and the United States, putting the pieces together that will one day become the movie industry.
A German pioneer, by the name of Oskar Messter, completed his idea for the stop-and-go device, called the Maltese Cross. It is also called the Geneva Drive, because it was first invented in Geneva, Switzerland for use in mechanical watches. Messter’s device has stood the test of time: we still use a version of it in most projectors today. However, back to the Lumières and their motion picture camera. Their whole device was a small, portable box. It was so light a single person could carry it. A hand crank operated the camera, so it did not rely on an electric power source. It used the same 35-millimeter film as Edison’s kinetograph, but it could also develop the film that it shot. However, once the film had been developed, the Lumière device could be reconfigured into a projection machine. They could take the developed film back through the stop-and-go device, and, with a bright light source, the images would project onto any surface. This deivce could do everything. You could take it with you out into the streets, capture footage, develop the film, and then project it, whenever and where ever you wanted too. The Lumière Brothers wanted to name their device the “cinématographe,” which translates to “writing with movement.” Among the films the Lumière Brothers showed that night was “The Train Arrives at La Ciotat Station.” There was a critical and problematic time in the history when film evolved from a mere curiosity into a compelling eye-catching, storytelling device. Artists, technicians, and engineers started thinking of ways to make films longer, more complex, and more narrative. This was when it began to develop its own language, through the power of editing. So the way films were created, and viewed, became more common, too. Film studios began to appear more. Movie theaters increased. Companies were developed to create film, transport movies from place to place, and publicize them to eager audiences. As film’s environmental and financial imprint became more solid, so too did its visual language, taking a role that more closely reflects the movies you see nowadays. No longer are the days when the only way to view film was purchasing a ticket at your local cinema. Now, you can watch just about anything whenever or wherever you want. Film studios have made much of their back catalogs available to the public, with things like DVDs and Blu-ray Discs, or online streaming services. So you can screen movies on TVs, computers, tablets, phones. Home video transformed the film industry, and the ways we find and consume motion pictures. Real home movies – films you can watch at home. Today, streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, YouTube, iTunes, and Vimeo distribute films and television programs directly to consumers. They are even making their own original content. Netflix and Amazon produced and distributed TV series and films that have won the highest awards at the Emmys, Golden Globes, and Oscars! These services also provide non-traditional and independent filmmakers with a more level playing field when it comes to distributing their unique visions. There are some drawbacks to streaming distribution, to which you would need a robust, consistent Internet connection to watch anything. Not to mention, the content you are looking for may not always be available, unless you have purchased and downloaded it. So, even then, you still don’t have a physical copy to keep on your bookshelf. With that being that said, there have never been so many ways for films to find an audience. You have to look beyond the multiplex, and wherever the future of home video will take us is anyone’s guess.