A Brief History of Film

Part Two:  The Original Tik Tok and Instagram – Lumiere, Edison, and Glimpses of Everyday Life

by Fr. John Wykes, OMV

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.

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