In the Paris of the belle epoque, posters were the best form of advertisement. The first screening had only attracted 30 people, but after word spread of the incredible experience, thousands wanted to see the moving pictures in early January See also: These beautiful antique photos were made with potato starch.
However, the Kinetoscope could show a motion picture to only one person at a time. When he returned home from Paris, Antoine encouraged his sons to begin working on a new invention.
At the end of the show there was complete chaos. Everyone wondered how such a result was obtained. We can now record and play back life. We will be able to see our families again long after they are gone. They focused their ever present curiosity on tackling another technical challenge: color photography.
The autochrome remained the most widely used photographic plate capable of capturing color for more than 30 years. All rights reserved.
History Magazine. Everyday Images Again, the French were working towards the same end. A New Art Form While the first films were of commonplace occurrences — trains approaching, people dancing, and animals playing — filmmakers soon started to incorporate story lines and music into their works.
Between the years of and , thousands of silent films were produced, with an ever increasing sophistication of story line and technical craftsmanship. Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America. Her work helped lay the foundation for modern codebreaking today. I n the summer of , hundreds of wildfires raged across the Northern Rockies. By the time it was all over, more than three million acres had burned and at least 78 firefighters were dead.
It was the largest fire in American history. Edison, after all, had commisioned the kinetoscope to create a visual accompaniment to the phonograph, and many early theaters had orchestra pits to provide musical accompaniment to their films.
Even the smaller picture houses with lower budgets almost always had an organ or piano. When Warner Bros. In , Warner debuted the system with the release of Don Juan , a costume drama accompanied by a recording of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra; the public responded enthusiastically.
The film was a major breakthrough. Audiences, hearing an actor speak on screen for the first time, were enchanted. Charles Higham. The Art of the American Film: — By , three-fourths of Hollywood films had some form of sound accompaniment, and by , the silent film was a thing of the past. The hand-painting technique became impractical with the advent of mass-produced film, and the tinting process, which filmmakers discovered would create an interference with the transmission of sound in films, was abandoned with the rise of the talkie.
Judith S. Baughman and others, vol. However, because only two colors were used, the appearance of The Toll of the Sea , The Ten Commandments , and other early Technicolor films was not very lifelike. By , Technicolor had designed a three-color system with more realistic results, and for the next 25 years, all color films were produced with this improved system.
Despite the success of certain color films in the s, Hollywood, like the rest of the United States, was feeling the impact of the Great Depression, and the expenses of special cameras, crews, and Technicolor lab processing made color films impractical for studios trying to cut costs.
The spike in theater attendance that followed the introduction of talking films changed the economic structure of the motion picture industry, bringing about some of the largest mergers in industry history.
By , eight studios produced 95 percent of all American films, and they continued to experience growth even during the Depression. The five most influential of these studios—Warner Bros. However, postwar inflation, a temporary loss of key foreign markets, the advent of the television, and other factors combined to bring that rapid growth to an end.
In , the case of the United States v. Paramount Pictures —mandating competition and forcing the studios to relinquish control over theater chains—dealt the final devastating blow from which the studio system would never recover. Control of the major studios reverted to Wall Street, where the studios were eventually absorbed by multinational corporations, and the powerful studio heads lost the influence they had held for nearly 30 years. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture , ed. James Press, , vol.
While economic factors and antitrust legislation played key roles in the decline of the studio system, perhaps the most important factor in that decline was the advent of the television. In an attempt to win back diminishing audiences, studios did their best to exploit the greatest advantages film held over television. For one thing, television broadcasting in the s was all in black and white, whereas the film industry had the advantage of color.
While producing a color film was still an expensive undertaking in the late s, a couple of changes occurred in the industry in the early s to make color not only more affordable but also more realistic in its appearance. In , as the result of antitrust legislation, Technicolor lost its monopoly on the color film industry, allowing other providers to offer more competitive pricing on filming and processing services.
At the same time, Kodak came out with a multilayer film stock that made it possible to use more affordable cameras and to produce a higher quality image. In the late s, only 12 percent of features were in color; however, by after the release of Kodak Eastmancolor more than 50 percent of movies were in color.
Another clear advantage on which filmmakers tried to capitalize was the sheer size of the cinema experience. With the release of the epic biblical film The Robe in , 20th Century Fox introduced the method that would soon be adopted by nearly every studio in Hollywood: a technology that allowed filmmakers to squeeze a wide-angle image onto conventional mm film stock, thereby increasing the aspect ratio Width-to-height ratio of a film.
This wide-screen format increased the immersive quality of the theater experience. Nonetheless, even with these advancements, movie attendance never again reached the record numbers it experienced in , at the peak of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The Cold War with the Soviet Union began in , and with it came the widespread fear of communism, not only from the outside, but equally from within. To undermine this perceived threat, the House Un-American Activities Committee HUAC commenced investigations to locate communist sympathizers in America, who were suspected of conducting espionage for the Soviet Union.
In the highly conservative and paranoid atmosphere of the time, Hollywood, the source of a mass-cultural medium, came under fire in response to fears that subversive, communist messages were being embedded in films. These 10, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were fired from their jobs and sentenced to serve up to a year in prison. They designed a peep-show style viewing device called the Kinetoscope. This ran a continuous 47 foot film loop on spools between an incandescent lamp and a shutter for individual viewing.
The French were also working on developing motion picture cameras. Actually it was during a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the next motion picture innovation. It ran 16 frames per second, was hand-cranked, weighing only 20 pounds, compared to the Kinetograph which was battery driven and 1, pounds. The portability of this device affected the kinds of films that were made with each. Both style films however, contained virtually no narrative or story.
Both films were made of a single unedited shot emphasizing lifelike movement, rather than conveying any semblance of a story. Many creators were involved in the process across decades. The first film that had a story and was feature length was the Australian production called The Story of the Kelly Gang. Between the years of and , thousands of silent films were made and it was there that story line was developed and technical craft became honed.
The same idea holds true for the equipment that made movies and photographs possible. The camera was invented over time and by several people, though some more critical in the process than others.
Find out more in our next article. Create robust and customizable shot lists. Upload images to make storyboards and slideshows. Previous Post. Next Post. A visual medium requires visual methods.
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