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Podcast Transcript
Perhaps the greatest advancement in the arts in the 20th century was the creation of motion pictures.
Motions Pictures was a brand-new art form. While initially it was just recorded stage presentations, it eventually evolved into something much more.
Today, it is a multi-billion-dollar industry, which is all due to countless technical advancements that have occurred over the decades.
Learn more about the history of motion pictures, how they were created and how they evolved on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
Whether you call them motion pictures, films, or movies, no one can deny the huge cultural impact they have had on our society.
Unlike other art forms, motion pictures are uniquely modern and have only tenuous precedents that came before them.
If we want to find ancient historical antecedents to motion pictures, the closest we can probably find is shadow puppetry. First practiced in China around 200 BC, it wasn’t projecting images so much, just casting shadows and blocking light.
In the 17th century, the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens invented something he called a magic lantern. The magic lantern used light and lenses to project images painted on a glass plate.
We don’t know when someone discovered that a series of still images could represent motion, but the earliest example we have comes from an illustrated 15th-century German poetry book called the Sigenot. It shows small images that represent intervals of time between them, but they don’t quite show fluid movement.
Using still images to create the illusion of motion was first created in the 19th century.
In 1825, the British physician John Ayrton Paris invented the thaumatrope, which consisted of a disc with images on both sides that appeared to combine into one when spun rapidly, demonstrating an early understanding of persistence of vision.
In 1832, the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau created the phenakistoscope, which was a spinning disc with sequential images that, when viewed through slits in the disc while it spun, gave the illusion of motion. Simultaneously, Austrian mathematician Simon von Stampfer developed a similar device known as the stroboscope.
In 1834, William Horner invented the zoetrope, which was a cylindrical device with images inside that appeared to move when the cylinder was spun and viewed through slits.
These devices were all basically toys. They were interesting to people who had never seen such things before but served no real purpose.
The advent of film photography in the 19th century offered new opportunities for the study and display of motion.
One of the first and most famous uses of photography and motion was done by the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
In 1878, he conducted a groundbreaking experiment to settle a debate about whether all four of a horse’s hooves leave the ground simultaneously during a gallop. He set up a series of 12 cameras along a racetrack, each triggered by a tripwire as the horse passed. The resulting sequential photographs captured each phase of the horse’s stride, proving that at certain points, all four hooves were indeed off the ground.
This experiment not only answered the question but also laid the foundation for motion picture technology, showcasing the potential of using multiple images in rapid succession to represent motion.
Using 12 cameras to capture one motion wasn’t very efficient. It didn’t take long to realize that you could capture motion much better if one camera could take a series of images in sequence.
In 1891, Thomas Edison developed a device known as a Kinetoscope and later a Kinetograph. The Kinetoscope was a cabinet that someone could look in that would loop through the film to show a moving image.
The Kinetograph was an early motion picture camera.
Edison’s system was not very practical in that it could only be viewed by a single person.
The first system that we would recognize today as a motion picture was created by the French photography manufacturers Auguste and Louis Lumière.
The system developed by the Lumière Brothers could record moving images and project them on a screen for group viewing. They called their system the Cinématographe.
On March 22, 1895, they presented the first-ever motion picture exhibition for an audience of around 200 people.
They made simple movies of people going about their daily lives on the street. There was no plot or story; the moving image was the attraction.
One of their innovations was putting perforations in the film so it could be advanced with a sprocket.
Many of their films still exist today and can be seen on YouTube, often digitally enhanced.
In the first years after the turn of the century, the technology began being used to tell stories. Editing and camera work techniques were developed to make the films more interesting.
The 1902 film A Trip to the Moon by a French magician named Georges Méliès was the world’s first science fiction film and adopted many techniques that would be used in later films, including jump edits and special effects. It was only 9 to 18 minutes long, depending on the number of frames per second it was played.
By 1915, moves were becoming very big affairs. Birth of A Nation was the first single 12-reel film. The film was over 2 hours long and had a production budget of over $100,000, which was an enormous amount at the time.
Film studios developed large production lots with sets to meet the constant demand for new films.
All of the films at the time were silent. Theaters often hired organists to provide some music beyond the sound of the projector, but there was never any dialogue.
Eventually, sound and films were integrated together. The first system was known as the Vitaphone System.
Developed by Western Electric and Bell Telephone Laboratories and adopted by Warner Bros., the Vitaphone was one of the first successful sound-on-disc systems. Sound was recorded on a phonograph record that was played in sync with the film projector. The system required precise synchronization between the record and the film reel, which was achieved using mechanical linkages.
This system was used for the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer, in 1927. The Jazz Singer wasn’t totally recorded with sound, only sections. The first film totally recorded with sound was Lights of New York in 1928.
The Vitaphone System was cumbersome.
A system that integrated sound into the film itself would be much simpler and would not require synchronization with an external audio source. The Movietone sound system was released soon after the Vitaphone system.
The Movietone captured analog sound by literally making an image of the soundwave that appeared alongside the film. There were two methods of recording sound using this technique. Variable density and variable area.
Sound completely changed the way movies were produced and recorded. Studios now had to be built for sound and acoustics. Some actors were unable to make the transition to talking. Theaters also had to be equipped for sound, which was not inexpensive.
However, it was a hit; soon, almost every film was a “talkie.”
The next hurdle to overcome was color—all films up until this point were recorded in black and white.
The first attempts at creating color motion pictures date back to before the introduction of sound. At first, film frames were colored by hand, but it was an incredibly laborious process.
The technology that was eventually adopted was Technicolor.
Technicolor was a company founded in 1915. Their first process was known as Two-Color Technicolor. It used a prism to split the beam from the camera lens into two rolls of film, one which was dyed red and the other green.
While this method produced acceptable results, it was limited to a range of colors and was not entirely satisfactory for capturing the full spectrum of color.
This was replaced in 1932 with Three-Color Technicolor.
A special camera was developed that used a beam-splitter to expose three separate strips of black-and-white film simultaneously. Each strip captured a different primary color (red, green, and blue).
The three black-and-white negatives were used to create three color matrices. Each matrix was dyed its respective color (cyan, magenta, and yellow) and then successively printed onto a single strip of film, creating a full-color image.
This process allowed for rich, vibrant colors and became the standard for color films from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s.
The first three-color film was Becky Sharp, which was released in 1935. However, the big year for color was 1939, with the release of two of the biggest films of all time, both shot in color: The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind.
Three-color Technicolor was used extensively up to the early 1950s. It was eventually replaced with Eastmancolor, which was a single film color process developed by the Eastman Kodak company.
In addition to sound and color, there was another area of innovation that took root in the 1950s: Aspect ratios.
Early films were mostly shot in the same dimension. In 1932, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established what became known as the Academy Ratio as the standard for motion pictures.
The Academy Ratio was 4:3 or 1.33:1. If you ever see an older film on your television set, it will probably have black bars on the sides in order to compensate for the different aspect ratio.
Beginning in the 1950s, films began to adopt wider and wider aspect ratios. The European Widescreen ratio was set at 1.66:1.
In response, the American widescreen standard was set soon after with a ratio of 1.85:1. 1.85:1 is still a very common aspect ratio in films.
However, there was a desire for ever wider film ratios to provide audiences with an even more immersive experience.
In 1953, Cinemascope was launched, and it was a truly ultrawide format. It had an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. Many of the big-budget epic films of the era were shot in Cinemascope, including such pictures as Ben Hur.
Cinemascope was an anamorphic system where a special lens was used to bend light so it would fit on standard 35mm film. Another lens was then used in projection to display the image.
I should also mention Cinerama, which was launched in 1952, was an extremely wide system where three 35mm projectors were used together to project a single image on a parabolic screen. There were special Cinerama theaters that were built to display these films, so the format never saw widespread adoption.
If Cinerama was a gimmick, and Cinemascope was a hack to fit a wide format image on standard 35 mm film, the way to truly deliver a high-quality widescreen experience was to use a larger filmstock.
The answer was 65 mm and 70mm film. Although there are obvious differences in size, both are collectively called 70mm.
There were a host of different large film formats which were released in the 1950s and 60s. Todd-AO, Todd-70, Super Panavision 70, Panavision System 65, Dimension 150, and others.
These 70mm films provided a much larger area for collecting light and provided much more detail.
Some of the truly epic and classic films of this era were all shot on 70mm film. Parts of Ben Hur, in particular the chariot racing scenes, Lawrence of Arabia, West Side Story, Cleopatra, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Patton, and many others.
The problem with 70mm film is that it was expensive. It ceased to be used in the early 1970s but had recently made a minor resurgence. In 2015, it was used with Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
While 70mm mostly died out in the 1970s, a new large-scale format slowly arose to replace it. IMAX.
IMAX is just a 70mm film that is run sideways. The image takes up a larger area this way, but the aspect ratio isn’t as wide.
IMAX, like Cinerama before it, required custom theaters with enormous screens. Many of the first screens were actually installed at amusement parks. For years, the only films shot on IMAX were custom-produced shows, usually documentaries, designed to showcase the format.
However, there has been more recent adoption of the format for feature films. Parts of Interstellar, Oppenheimer, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and others have been shot in IMAX.
There is much more to the story of motion pictures. I haven’t even touched on the topics of digital recording and digital projection, so I will leave that subject for a future episode.
Motion pictures are the art form of the modern world. However, there is more to it than just the art of making films. There is also a technical element that has been constantly evolving for over 120 years. That innovation has led to films that provide an experience unlike anything we’ve had before.
