Film history: new inventions and the Growth of French cinema

NEW INVENTIONS IN AMERICA

Woodville Latham with his two sons tried to get into the filmmaking industry, however, they did not get much recognition, until they created the Latham Loop. This invention made it possible to record longer movies, fixing the problem of film rolls breaking in the camera. The way it worked was that an extra loop was added, which released the tension and made the roll less likely to break.

At a similar time group of entrepreneurs created the Phantoscope, later known as the Vitascope. It was a projector designed to project movies created for kinetoscope exhibition, as the popularity of kinetoscopes was fading away. It was developed in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat, who then presented their machine to Norman Raff and Frank Gammon, who presented it to Thomas Edison, and he was the one who agreed to manufacture it. The first premiere of Vitascope screening was a Koster and Bial’s music hall in New York on April 23rd of 1896. They showed 6 movies, most of them created originally for kinetoscope. 

Another American invention from the 1890s was the Mutoscope presented by Herman Casler

Mutoscope works on the same principle as the flip book. The image on each card was made by contact printing each frame of the original 70 mm film. The frames were  later attached to a circular core and projected. The length of movies was originally described in reels. A reel typically holds about 850 cards, giving a viewing time of about one minute.

Herman casler later started working with W.K. Dickson, previously a Thomas Edison assistant. He helped Herman create a camera different from usual cameras in those times as it used 70mm film, when all of the other cameras used 35mm film rolls. This change made the recorded footage sharper. Casler and Dickson with other partners created the American Mutoscope Company. By 1997 it was the most popular film company all over the country. 

At a similar time, there have also been first attempts to record in colour. The first successful colour filming process was the Kinemacolor invented by George Albert Smith in 1906. It was filmed by alternating red and green filters onto a black and white stock, and the colour was recreated by projecting the film through spinning red/green discs. It was used for a short time from 1908 to 1914.

WHAT KINDS OF MOVIES VERE RECORDED?

Movies recorded in the early filmmaking era were divided into two main categories, the actualities, now known more by a name non-fiction, and the fiction movies. This division hasn’t changed much from then, however we didn’t have genres such as horror or thriller yet. Different types of actualities were the scenics, topicals and travelogues. I’ve talked about scenics in the last blog post, those are for example films created by Thomas Edison showing various performances. We also have two new names: topicals were showing news events and travelogues were showing views of distant lands. When screening travelogues a person would sometimes describe the places shown.

People exhibiting the movies were making programs, where you could see a mixture of different movies from topicals to fiction. During such a programme an orchestra would play music for the audience. 

GROWTH OF FRENCH CINEMA 

Lumiere brothers didn’t stay in the industry for a long time, therefore the French film industry was quickly taken by new film companies such as Pathé Frères and Gaumont. Before that, however, one Lumiere film operator originated the moving camera. In 1896 Eugene Promo placed the camera on a moving gondola, which was the first time where the camera wasn’t static but moved, showing the views around it. Later other filmmakers were inspired by this innovation and such moving shots were recorded from different vehicles.

 After the Lumiere brother’s films became old-fashioned, they stopped making movies and came back to photography. There have been also different figures which made the French film industry very important globally. One of those figures was George Melies, an imaginative magician, owning his own theatre. In 1895 Inspired by the Cinematograph he decided to add movies to his programme, becoming one of the most important filmmakers in the early years. He had an idea to create movies however at that time Lumiere brothers were not selling their cameras, so he created his own camera and started recording. In His movies he used camera effects and stop motion to show magic tricks. He also created scenery for each of his movies. Even though he is now most recognised for his fiction movies such as “A Trip To the Moon” He has created various types of films, of every genre existing back then. To add colours to his movies, they were sometimes hand-tinted, which is a very time-consuming process, as each individual frame had to be tinted. After making around 500 movies till 1912 his movies also became old-fashioned so he as well dropped out of the industry. 

That’s the time when the first French film companies were born to take over the world. 

The inventor of one of them was Charles Pathe – a phonograph seller and exhibitor in the early 1890s. In 1 895, he purchased a couple of Kinetoscopes, and the following year formed Pathe Freres. The company at fisrt made most of its profits on phonographs. From 1901, however, Pathe concentrated more on film production, and thank to that they expanded rapidly. In 1902 they began selling the Pathe camera, which became the world’s most widely used camera until the end of the 1910s. 

Pathe’s films were extremely popular, not just in France but lal over the world, after opening sales offices for example in London, New York, and Moscow. within a few years, Pathe Freres would be the single largest film company in the world. Pathé-Frères also had a huge impact on the American film industry as it was responsible for over one-third of the films shown on US screens.

Talking about America, One of the important figures for the American film industry was Edwin S. Porter working for the Edison company studios. He used innovative editing techniques to show the storyline differently than in other movies where the storyline was continuous. In his movie The Life of an American Fireman (1903), he used parallel action and cross-cutting for the first time. If you’re not familiar with those terms, parallel action is when two scenes are happening at the same time but in different locations and we get to see both of them, by using cross-cutting, where you cut from one scene to another what makes it look like they are happening at the same time. Another influential film created by Edwin s porter was The Great Train Robbery (1903), which is considered the first western, and the structure used in it was later used in other movies in the same genre. Just as in the life of an American fireman here he also used cross-cutting, in addition to that he also used camera movements such as pan and tilt and the camera was placed on the top of a train.

The great train robbery was also the first film shown in a nickelodeon. Nickelodeon at that time had a completely different meaning than today, as we know it as a TV programme, back in the days’ however, it was a name for first movie theatres. The name consists of two parts: nickel (the admission charge) and odeon- greek word for theatre. Nickelodeons were mostly showing one-reelers, literally one reel long films, one reel being about 11 minutes long. 

Soon I will write more about next periods of film history, so if this post was interesting and helpful for you, make sure to check out next posts as well. 

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