Click on any time period and get a specific introduction to film and its connection to that time and place.
Hold your hand out (arm extended) at eye level; wave it to the left and right. Come on, do it. See that? Trails. The ancient Egyptians knew that your retina retains an image for an immeasurable moment before it is replaced with another image. This "persistence of vision" is what causes you to see those trails. It's an ocular effect.
Many types of pre-cinematic devices show the processes involved in sequencing moving images.
Throughout the 1880s Muybridge and Marey experiment with "series photography" to study human and animal locomotion. The images in the video (see left) were taken using a single camera (see the image to the left) taking multiple exposures.
Edweard Muybridge publishes numerous "progressive movement" photographs that, legend has it, inspire Edison's lab to develop the technology for capturing movement on a single device.
Throughout the 1890s, Thomas Edison's lab worked on the ability to record sequential images (and sound) with an automatic machine.
At roughly the same moment as Edison develops the ability to record movement on a mechanical camera (Marey's camera took sequential pictures by pulling a trigger), the Lumiere brothers develop the same capacity in Paris.
Like Edison and other filmmakers in the 1890s, Louis and August Lumiere were involved in the "showing function" of early moving pictures.
Marey and Muybridge, Edison and Lumieres employed the moving camera in order "to show": Edison films brief, theatrical routines; the Lumiere brothers filmed something closer to real life. Melies finds that the moving camera (and some editing) could tell stories (something we take for granted). Take a look at some of the "trick films" Melies made and the 12-minute TRIP TO THE MOON, both linked to the left and contained in the day's notes on course website, which you should mosdef check out
As we see in our class notes, Melies linked together scene+scene+scene+...to make TRIP TO THE MOON. Around the same time, Porter comes to understand that linking SHOTS together (rather than lengthy scenes) would become the building block of cinematic grammar. More than Melies (but less than DWGriffith), Porter moves us toward the continuity that most cinema will rely for the next century.
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