Film
A locomotive races toward the audience at high speed, and according to legend, people panic and bolt from the theater. That moment captures something about film, a work of visual art that simulates experiences and communicates ideas, stories, emotions, and atmosphere through moving images. The trick is older than it seems. A series of individual frames, shown rapidly in succession, gives the viewer an illusion of motion. The eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source is removed, an effect called persistence of vision, while a psychological response known as beta movement supplies the perception of motion itself. From those two quirks of human sight, an entire art form grew. How did spinning discs and glass plates become the silver screen? Why did color take far longer to win than sound? And what makes critics, montage, and a Vietnam veteran named John Rambo all part of the same story?
The stroboscopic animation principle arrived in 1833 with the stroboscopic disc, better known as the phenakisticope. From that seed grew the zoetrope in 1866, the flip book in 1868, and the praxinoscope in 1877, each a step toward cinematography. Experiments with phenakisticope-based projectors ran at least as early as 1843, with public screenings in 1847, and Jules Duboscq introduced projection systems in France in the 1870s.
Photography, introduced in 1839, at first demanded such long exposures that recording moving subjects seemed impossible. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published the idea of combining his phenakisticope with the stereoscope, a suggestion from stereoscope inventor Charles Wheatstone. In 1852, Duboscq patented such an instrument as the Stereoscope-fantascope, ou Bioscope, but marketed it only briefly and without success. A single Bioscope disc survives in the Plateau collection at Ghent University, yet no instruments have ever been found.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge used a battery of cameras in a line along a track to photograph a running horse, publishing the results as The Horse in Motion on cabinet cards. He had the contours of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with his zoopraxiscope in lectures from 1880 to 1895.
Ottomar Anschutz made his first instantaneous photographs in 1881 and built a portable camera with shutter speeds as short as 1/1000 of a second in 1882. In 1886, he developed the Electrotachyscope, which displayed short motion picture loops using 24 glass plate photographs on a rotating wheel 1.5 meters wide, hand-cranked to roughly 30 frames per second. Starting in 1891, Siemens and Halske in Berlin manufactured some 152 coin-operated peep-box models, and nearly 34,000 people paid to see one at the Berlin Exhibition Park in the summer of 1892. On the 25th of November 1894, Anschutz unveiled a projector with a 6 by 8 meter screening in Berlin.
Emile Reynaud mentioned projecting Praxinoscope images in his 1877 patent and presented a projection device on the 4th of June 1880. He developed it into the Theatre Optique, patented in 1888, painting images on hundreds of gelatin plates mounted in cardboard frames on a cloth band. From the 28th of October 1892 to March 1900, he gave over 12,800 shows to more than 500,000 visitors at the Musee Grevin in Paris.
By the end of the 1880s, lengths of celluloid photographic film and motion picture cameras using a single lens let action be captured on one compact reel. Movies were first shown to one person at a time through peep show devices such as the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope. Not long after, exhibitors managed to project films onto large screens for theatre audiences.
In 1895, the first public screenings at which admission was charged came from the American Woodville Latham and his sons, using films from their Eidoloscope company, from the Skladanowsky brothers, and from the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Private screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the others. The Lumieres are best known for L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, from 1896, screened with ten of their own productions.
The earliest films were a single static shot of an event with no editing: employees leaving a factory gate, people walking in the street, the view from the front of a trolley on Main Street. Around the turn of the 20th century, filmmakers began stringing several scenes together to tell a story. They discovered that when one shot follows another, the act establishes a relationship between the two in the viewer's mind. Show a person looking out a window, and whatever appears next is read as what the person sees.
The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, while the American industry flourished with Hollywood. D. W. Griffith stood out with The Birth of a Nation, from 1915, and Intolerance, from 1916. In the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang caught up, alongside the contributions of Charles Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others.
By 1930, silent film was practically extinct in the US and already being called the old medium. The change was swift. In the 1920s, electronic sound recording made it practical to synchronize speech, music, and sound effects with the action on screen. These sound films were set apart from the silent movies by being called talking pictures or talkies.
Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and the Vitaphone used by Warner Bros. laid the groundwork for synchronized sound. The Vitaphone system, produced alongside Bell Telephone Company and Western Electric, met initial resistance over expensive equipping costs. Acceptance came with Don Juan, from 1926, and The Jazz Singer, from 1927. Europe standardized on the Tobis-Klangfilm and Tri-Ergon systems. Greater fluidity gave rise to more complex and epic movies like King Kong, from 1933.
Color replaced black-and-white far more gradually than sound replaced silence. Early color processes often produced colors that looked far from natural. The crucial innovation was the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, first used in animated cartoons in 1932, then applied to live-action shorts, specific sequences, and finally to an entire feature, Becky Sharp, in 1935. Although expensive, increased box office revenue generally justified the cost. The Wizard of Oz, from 1939, became one of the first mainstream films to use color.
In 1966, Dolby Laboratories introduced the Dolby A noise reduction system, which became a recording standard and eliminated the hiss left by earlier efforts. Dolby Stereo followed, letting cinema designers consider acoustics when planning theaters, so smaller venues could rival larger city ones. By contrast, Cinerama's seven-channel system had demanded a large staff to operate and maintain it.
In the early 1950s, black-and-white television drew criticism that it had failed the lofty intellectual and cultural expectations placed on it. To lure audiences back, theaters installed bigger screens and introduced widescreen processes, polarized 3D projection, and stereophonic sound, while more films were made in color. Color receivers had been available in the US since the mid-1950s, but they were very expensive and few broadcasts were in color.
During the 1960s, prices came down, color broadcasts became common, and sales boomed. After a final flurry of black-and-white films in mid-decade, all Hollywood studio productions were filmed in color. Exceptions came only at the insistence of star filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock, whose Psycho dates to 1960.
The decline of the studio system in the 1960s reshaped how films were made. Various New Wave movements, including the French New Wave, New German Cinema, Indian New Wave, Japanese New Wave, New Hollywood, and Egyptian New Wave, drove the changes, along with film-school-educated independent filmmakers.
Digital technology became the driving force through the 1990s and into the 2000s. Digital 3D projection largely replaced earlier problem-prone systems and grew briefly popular in the early 2010s with films like Avatar, from 2009. In the late 2010s, large-screen cinema systems using 35mm and 70mm film emerged, with companies like the IMAX corporation.
The concept of film as an art form began in 1911 with Ricciotto Canudo's manifest The Birth of the Sixth Art. The Moscow Film School, the oldest in the world, was founded in 1919 to teach and research film theory. Formalist theory, led by Rudolf Arnheim, Bela Balazs, and Siegfried Kracauer, emphasized how film differed from reality and so could count as a valid fine art. Andre Bazin reacted against this, arguing that film's artistic essence lay in its ability to mechanically reproduce reality, which gave rise to realist theory.
Film is considered to have its own language. James Monaco wrote a classic text on the subject, How to Read a Film. Director Ingmar Bergman called Andrei Tarkovsky the greatest director, the one who invented a new language true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream. One example of that language is a sequence of back-and-forth profiles, one actor's left, then another's right, repeated, which audiences read as a conversation. This describes the 180-degree rule, a visual storytelling device woven into the Hollywood style during film's classical era.
Montage is a film editing technique in which separate pieces of film are selected, edited, and assembled into a new section. By juxtaposing shots, it can condense time, space, or information, or use flashbacks, parallel action, and symbolic meaning. The concept emerged in the 1920s, with Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov developing the theory. Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, from 1925, used complex juxtapositions for visceral impact.
Montage runs through modern cinema in many forms. Fast-paced editing drives Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, from 2000, and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead, from 2004. Music video influence shapes Guardians of the Galaxy, from 2014, and Baby Driver, from 2017. The sports and training montage condenses growth in Rocky, from 1976, The Karate Kid, from 1984, and Million Dollar Baby, from 2004. Cross-cutting builds tension in Christopher Nolan's Inception, from 2010, and Dunkirk, from 2017. Thematic montage carries family, nostalgia, and loss in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums, from 2001.
By 1917, Charlie Chaplin held a contract calling for an annual salary of one million dollars. Making and showing motion pictures became a source of profit almost as soon as the process was invented. The Lumieres toured the Continent, exhibiting films privately to royalty and publicly to the masses, adding local scenes in each country and finding entrepreneurs to buy their equipment. The Oberammergau Passion Play of 1898 was the first commercial motion picture ever produced. From 1931 to 1956, film was the only image storage and playback system for television programming, until videotape recorders arrived.
Much of the US film industry centers around Hollywood, California. Other regional centers exist worldwide, such as Mumbai-centered Bollywood, the Hindi cinema of the Indian film industry, which produces the largest number of films in the world. Profit is a key force, given the costly and risky nature of filmmaking; many films run over budget, an example being Kevin Costner's Waterworld. The Academy Awards, known as the Oscars, are the most prominent US film awards.
Film criticism splits into academic criticism by scholars and journalistic criticism in newspapers and broadcast media. Reviewers normally see a film once and have only a day or two to form an opinion. Mass-marketed action, horror, and comedy films tend not to be greatly swayed by a critic's overall verdict, but for prestige dramas and art films, poor reviews from leading critics often reduce attendance. Some films are kept from reviewers entirely to avoid a public panning, a tactic that usually backfires.
The test screening can reshape a film before release. After a test audience responded very negatively to the death of protagonist John Rambo, a Vietnam veteran, at the end of 1982's First Blood, the company wrote and re-shot a new ending in which the character survives. Of the ten billion videos watched online annually in 2008, film trailers ranked third, after news and user-created videos. A teaser, by contrast, lasts only 10 to 30 seconds.
Cellulose nitrate was the first film base used to record motion pictures, but its flammability led to safer materials, and most large commercial films are still shot and distributed as 35 mm prints. Originally moving picture film ran at various speeds on hand-cranked cameras; research indicates most films were shot between 16 and 23 frames per second and projected from 18 frames per second upward. When synchronized sound arrived in the late 1920s, a constant speed became necessary for the sound head. The standard of 24 frames per second was set with Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer and their Vitaphone system in 1927, chosen as the slowest and cheapest speed allowing sufficient sound quality.
Film preservation is a matter of concern to historians, archivists, and companies guarding their products. Most films on cellulose nitrate base have been copied onto modern safety films. Some studios save color films using separation masters, three black-and-white negatives each exposed through red, green, or blue filters, essentially a reverse of the Technicolor process. As of 2006, digital methods used for restoration were a poor choice for long-term preservation due to their obsolescence cycle. As of 2005, most major motion pictures were still shot on film.
Independent film often takes place outside Hollywood, initially produced without financing or distribution from a major studio. Over two-thirds of the films Warner Bros. released in 2000 were joint ventures, up from 10 percent in 1987. The advent of consumer camcorders in 1985, and high-resolution digital video in the early 1990s, lowered the technology barrier. Filmmakers can now shoot, edit, score, and mix a film on a high-end home computer, though financing, distribution, and marketing remain difficult, which is why most rely on film festivals. Internet video sites such as YouTube and Veoh further changed the landscape.
Animation produces each frame individually, whether as a computer graphic, a photographed drawing, or a model changed in small steps, with the illusion of continuous movement arising from the phi phenomenon at 16 or more frames per second. Limited animation cut costs using shortcuts, pioneered by UPA, popularized by Hanna-Barbera, and used by Osamu Tezuka in Japan. A different path runs the other way: camera-less animation, made famous by Norman McLaren, Len Lye, and Stan Brakhage, is painted and drawn directly onto film and run through a projector, much as Brakhage's 1963 film Mothlight was made without a camera at all.
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Common questions
What is a film and how does it create the illusion of motion?
A film, movie, or motion picture is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and communicates ideas, stories, emotions, and atmosphere through moving images, generally synchronized with sound since the 1930s. The illusion of motion comes from showing individual frames rapidly in succession, aided by persistence of vision, where the eye retains an image for a fraction of a second, and by a psychological effect called beta movement.
When were the first paid public film screenings held?
The first public screenings at which admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons, by the Skladanowsky brothers, and by the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere. Private screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the others.
How did sound and color come to film?
Electronic sound recording in the 1920s made synchronized speech, music, and effects practical, and by 1930 silent film was practically extinct in the US. Color replaced black-and-white more gradually, with the three-strip Technicolor process first used in animated cartoons in 1932 and applied to an entire feature, Becky Sharp, in 1935.
Why was 24 frames per second chosen as the film standard?
When synchronized sound arrived in the late 1920s, a constant speed was required for the sound head, and 24 frames per second was chosen as the slowest and cheapest speed that allowed sufficient sound quality. The standard was set with Warner Bros.'s The Jazz Singer and their Vitaphone system in 1927.
What is montage in film and who developed it?
Montage is a film editing technique in which separate pieces of film are selected, edited, and assembled to create a new section or sequence, often to condense time, space, or information. The concept emerged in the 1920s, with Soviet filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Lev Kuleshov developing the theory, and Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin from 1925 is a prime example.
How did test screenings change the film First Blood?
After a test audience responded very negatively to the death of protagonist John Rambo, a Vietnam veteran, at the end of 1982's First Blood, the company wrote and re-shot a new ending in which the character survives. Previews are sometimes used to judge audience reaction, which if unexpectedly negative may result in recutting or refilming.
Where are the major centers of the film industry?
Much of the US film industry is centered around Hollywood, California. Other regional centers exist worldwide, such as Mumbai-centered Bollywood, the Hindi cinema of the Indian film industry, which produces the largest number of films in the world.