Lights, Camera, History: The Story of Cinema!

 

Hi everyone, today I want to talk to you about how cinema was born. Over the centuries, various instruments have been built to project images, such as the "magic lantern" invented in the seventeenth century. Cinema, however, was born only at the end of the nineteenth century, thanks to two previous inventions: photography and film. Exploiting their potential, in 1891 Thomas Edison invented a device, the kinetoscope, which allowed one to see moving images, and a few years later two French brothers, the Lumières, created an instrument which allowed both filming and projection: the cinematograph. Success was immediate, and improvements were gradually made to the equipment, with the introduction of sound in the 1920s, and the ways of "constructing" films changed. Cinema, thanks to its popularity, had a profound impact on cultural evolution and political life. After the Second World War, despite having to face competition from television, it remained one of the most popular media. Let's look at its history from the beginning to today.

The first attempts to project images began many centuries ago. Already in the 1st century BC, Chinese shadow theater was born in the Far East, that is, the projection of shadows on a clear "screen". In the West, experiments for image projection had been carried out since the fifteenth century, but the first working instrument, the magic lantern, was invented only in the seventeenth century. The lantern was made up of a box with a small hole, inside which a candle was positioned, which projected images slid onto special plates.

 Other instruments for projecting images were built in the following centuries. For the birth of cinema, however, two steps were necessary: photography, invented in the 1820s, given that photographic images, scrolled in rapid sequence, are perceived by our brain as a moving scene; the invention in the 1980s of film, a perforated celluloid tape, on which negative images are reproduced and thanks to which they can be scrolled in rapid sequence. Through film, Thomas Edison, one of the best-known inventors of the 19th century, created the first movie camera, known as the kinetograph, and the first instrument for showing moving images, the kinetoscope. The instrument, consisting of a box containing a film with images, was presented to the public in 1891. The operation was as follows: the spectator brought his eye close to a lens and, turning a handle, slid the film and watched the "film". The kinetoscope had many characteristics in common with cinema, but also an essential difference: vision was not collective, but individual. Moreover, it was soon surpassed by another tool.

 

In 1894 two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, invented a machine capable of both filming and projecting moving images: the cinematograph. They then shot the first "film", The Exit from the Lumiere Workshops, which lasted 45 seconds and showed a group of workers leaving the factory. In the following months, they shot other short films, always filmed live, and on 28 December 1895, they organized the first public screening in Paris. Cinema was born. 

The films by the Lumière brothers were composed of a single sequence shot. Over the years, editing, putting together multiple scenes on the same film, and fictional cinema, which shot not reality, but specifically acted scenes, were introduced. Thanks to these innovations, narrative cinema developed, which does not require the presence of narrators. In fact, until the 1910s, there was a narrator present during the screenings who commented on the images, but later films were made that could be understood without the aid of a narrative voice. The 1915 American film Birth of a Nation, directed by David W. Griffith, is generally considered the first example of narrative cinema. Since the 1910s, moreover, the United States has established itself as one of the countries with the greatest development of the "seventh art". More specifically, a small village in California became the center of the American film industry: Hollywood. Cinema also reached Italy, where cinema houses were founded already in the early years of the twentieth century.

 

As the years passed, cinemas spread not only to large cities but also to small towns. The modest ticket price allowed large segments of the population to attend the screenings. For this reason, cinema was one of the media that contributed to the rise of mass society, ensuring that the population participated in national events and public life. In cinemas, moreover, not only films were shown, but also newsreels, that is, news programs similar to modern television news, which were not seen at home but in cinemas. Cinema also had profound consequences on a cultural level. Among other things, it favored the homologation of tastes, since the same films were seen in different countries and sometimes even on a global scale. The diffusion of American films, in particular, was one of the elements that gave rise to the myth of the American way of life. The political impact of cinema was also profound because it had the power to influence public opinion. In authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, such as Italian fascism, films and newsreels were used to consolidate support for the government. 

Until the 1920s, films were silent because the film could only record images and not sounds and during screenings in the theater there was sometimes a musician or a gramophone present to "accompany" the viewing. Experiments to create films capable of recording sounds and images together began in the first decade of the twentieth century but were successful only in the second half of the 1920s. Sound offered cinema new possibilities, further developing its potential as a means of mass communication. In some countries, it also contributed to spreading the national language, as happened in Italy: citizens, many of whom were used to exclusively using the dialect, became familiar with Italian thanks to film and newsreel screenings that included some sound, The Jazz Singer, was made in 1927 in the United States.

 

 With sound, cinema became similar to what we know today. After the Second World War, however, further innovations were introduced, not only in terms of content but also in terms of technology. One of the most important was color, which, although experimented since the beginning of the twentieth century, became widespread after the Second World War. More recent are other innovations, such as the large-scale use of special effects and digital cinema. Cinema, in essence, has continued to have a great impact on public opinion and on the diffusion of certain cultural models. After reaching the peak of popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, it began to decline due to television, which took some of its audience away. Cinema, however, continues to be one of the main means of communication and one of the citizens' favorite shows.

Today’s Blogger 

Hello, I’m Isabel Baiocchi, I am 15, and I’m in the third year at high school. I’m glad to take part in this project because it’s interesting and truly amazing