A Brief History of Film
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
Part One: Muybridge and His Trotting Horse
To think the medium that produced such screen gems as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron began with a barroom bet seems so outlandishly vulgar as to be unbelievable. At yet that is how it happened – at least that’s what some people say.
It seemed simple enough – even for brains sufficiently dulled by a few drinks. The question was – when trotting, does a horse ever have all four hooves off the ground at the same time? Some said no. Others, including Eadweard Muybridge, said yes. He went about to prove his point using one of the most amazing technological advancements of the 19th Century – photography.
It was a summer day in 1878 when Muybridge set up his cameras, twelve of them, along the side of a racetrack. Each camera had electrical wires extending across. As the now-famous horse, Occident, trotted by, it tripped the wires which tripped the shutters. Muybridge now had twelve still pictures of Occident trotting -- and proof that a horse can have all four hooves off the ground at the same time.
But this was just the beginning. Muybridge soon discovered that the photographs, when passed by the eye in rapid succession, ceased to resemble separate images and became a “moving” image. It was an amazing illusion – and not really a new one. The French has developed the phenakistiscope back in the 1830s. It provided drawn images that, when projected correctly, gave the entertaining illusion of motion. Now with the advent of photography plus the capability of taking more than one photo in succession, the animation toys of yore suddenly became much more powerful, with fully realized actual photographic images of animals and people coming to life in a way that had never been possible.
Muybridge made the study of motion his life-long work, creating innumerable short “motion pictures” of animals, men, women, acrobats, athletes, and dancers. By the time of his death in 1904, Muybridge had secured his place in film history.
Part Two: The Original Tik Tok and Instagram – Lumiere, Edison, and Glimpses of Everyday Life
A young gymnast does a flip. Workers leave the factory. A train arrives at the station. A couple shares a passionate kiss.
Such brief “movies,” sometimes only seconds in length, are common in our own 21st Century. Perhaps such social media apps as Instagram, Tik Tok, or YouTube Shorts come to mind. But the idea of being entertained by brief clips is decidedly old school.
Very old school. Extremely old school.
For this approach to visual storytelling is actually a throwback to the very beginning of movies. Each example that I mentioned in the first paragraph is from the 19th Century – films made 130 years ago.
Things have really come full circle, haven’t they?
In the beginning, of course, brief “tests” like these were all that was possible. And necessary. People were amazed by these life-like photographs that moved. Others were aghast at this latest technology which showed ghostly moving images in silence and, even worse, in a strange colorless world of blacks, whites, and greys.
But it was the “amazed” crowd that won the day and people in general couldn’t get enough of these thrilling glimpses.
In France, the Lumière Brothers created an amazing process by which a film base was covered with photographic emulsion and then perforated, allowing the film to be advanced one frame at a time past the aperture. The brothers took their new device out into the streets – capturing everyday events that wowed audiences. Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) and Baby’s Breakfast (1895) were amazing enough.
But it was their Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station (1896) which created film history when audiences, thinking that the hyper-realistic images of a photographed train would run them over, reportedly ran to the back of the theater, fearing for their lives. Some modern critics doubt the truth of this story. I do not. We need to remember that for people in those days, seeing a Lumiere film projected on screen in the 19th Century had the same impact as us watching a display on The Sphere in Las Vegas in the 21st Century. In each case, the technology was showing a clarity and realism that had never been seen before.
Over in the USA, inventor Thomas Edison and his assistants were busy creating their own movie magic. Fred Ott’s Sneeze (1894) is my favorite. With a sprightly running time of five seconds, the film shows Fred Ott (one of Edison’s assistants) sneezing for the camera.
Unreeling at a truly epic running time of eighteen seconds, The Kiss (1896) shows performers May Irwin and John Rice, well, kissing. Many critics denounced the film as obscene, most especially since the couple is presented in closeup (extremely rare for the time) and is shown kissing three times – not just once. One reviewer called the work “disgusting”. Audiences didn’t seem to mind too much, and many such similar films were produced over the next several years.
Nowadays, youngsters from Generation Z and Generation Alpha post and share short five-second or ten-second clips of plane turbulence, funny pet tricks, and physical feats of strength – convinced that they have revolutionized the way moving images are captured and edited. But all they have done is reverted to old school ways of filmmaking. Very old school.
But the story doesn’t end there. What is neat is that some of these younger people have rediscovered the films of yore and have re-posted them – many times using colorization and a higher frame rate to enhance the picture. Because of this, Lumiere and Edison have found new audiences, so that even that passionate kiss from 1896 and Fred Ott’s wonderful sneeze are being shared on Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts.
Things have really come full circle.
Part Three: “Once Upon A Time” – The Movies Become Stories
by Fr. John Wykes, OMV
I was watching a Tik Tok video recently of a weightlifter going over the proper way to do a bench press. The video was noteworthy because it was longer than just 10 or 15 seconds, but more like 45 seconds or a full minute. One viewer commented, “Wow, a TikTok video that actually has a beginning, a middle and an end. What a refreshing change of pace!”
I had to laugh. The sentiment could have been expressed with equal fervor back in 1903 – when the first film with a story was released.
But I digress.
Actually, there were a number of films released before 1903 that had something resembling a plot. Georges Méliès, the French magician filmmaker who wowed audiences with his beautiful visual effects, filmed the story of Joan of Arc in 1900 and sent men to the moon in 1902. Granted, these films were short and primitive. But they did tell a story and had the semblance of a plot.
It is The Great Train Robbery (1903) that gets all the attention and all the credit. Directed by Edwin S. Porter, the film told the story, using multiple shots from various angles, of a train robbery. With a gargantuan running time of 12 minutes, the movie had suspense, drama, action, and even an unforgettable final shot of a gun being fired directly at the camera.
The language of film was being created quickly. But lessons were often learned the hard way.
Take, for example, Life of an American Fireman (1903), also made by Porter, which depicts a fireman rescuing a woman and her baby from a burning building. Porter wanted to get inventive and show the event from multiple angles. In the final film, we first have a shot from the inside. The woman and the child are in the room as the fireman enters and rescue them. Then we have a shot from the outside. We see the fireman climb up the ladder to the window, disappear inside, then reappear outside with the woman and then the child. Motion pictures being as unique as they are as a visual art form, including not only the dimensions of space but also of time, it became obvious, only in hindsight, that it made no sense to have the same event presented twice, from beginning to end.
It was only years later that others re-edited the sequence in a way that made sense – first we have a shot from the outside and see the fireman enter the house. The we cut to the inside shot of the woman and child in the house and the fireman enters to rescue them. Then we cut back to the outside of the house to see the fireman carry both the woman and the child to safety. This was the first example of cross cutting – something we take for granted today but was completely new back in the early 1900s.
As the language of film developed, the desire to create grander stories, even epics, took hold of these first moviemakers. We learn about the silent movie masterpieces of the 1910s and 1920s in our next article.