Film History

• Time of great invention and ferment in the arts:

·         Edvard Munch 1893, Edvard Munch painted the Scream [PIX]

·         Munch's Scream: http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/munch/munch.scream.jpg

·         He wrote in his dairy in 1892:

·         "I was walking along the road with two friends.
The sun was setting.
I felt a breath of melancholy -
Suddenly the sky turned blood-red.
I stopped, and leaned against the railing, deathly tired -
looking out across the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword
over the blue-black fjord and town.
My friends walked on - I stood there, trembling with fear.
And I sensed a great, infinite scream pass through nature."

·         Along with Van Gogh and Gauguin, one of the  fathers of expressionism  (for a good overview of Expressionism in all arts: http://www.euro-art-gallery.net/history/expressionism.htm ) (for a good picture review of expressionist paintings: http://www.eyeconart.net/history/expressionism.htm )

·         stolen last summer from its museum in Norway

·         Account by the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3588282.stm )

·         “Armed robbers have stolen the iconic Edvard Munch painting, The Scream, from the Munch Museum in Norway.  Two masked thieves pulled the work and another painting, Madonna, off the wall as stunned visitors watched on Sunday.

“One robber threatened staff with a gun before the pair escaped in a waiting car, a museum officer told the BBC.  The car was later recovered and police also found parts of picture frames near to where a witness reported seeing a suspect vehicle.

“The Munch Museum said the two stolen paintings were among its most valuable - worth an estimated $19m (£10.4m) together, according to the BBC's Lars Bevanger.

1. Two masked men enter through the museum cafe
2. One man holds staff and visitors at gunpoint
3. The other man goes to the gallery and tears the Scream and Madonna from the walls
4. The two men make their escape, fleeing in a black Audi
Source: VG/Aftenposten

·        many, many efforts to capture movement

·        the invention of one feeds the mind of another

·        Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904)

·         One of the inventors of that period

·         Colorful history – passionate about trying to capture and analyze motion with series of still pictures

·         At one point, murdered his wife’s lover

·         Leland Stanford, a railroad and some would say robber baron, hired him in 1872 to prove a bet about the position of a trotting horse’s legs: Does a trotting horse have all 4 feet off the ground at one time?

“As far as film buffs are concerned, it was the most important wager in history. That’s the bet made by Leland Stanford, former California Governor, racehorse aficionado and founder of Stanford University and the city of Palo Alto. His contention was that at a certain point in its gallop, a horse has all four hooves in the air. He hired British-born landscape photographer Eadweard Muybridge in 1873 to capture this using the new art of Photography.

“Muybridge’s process was time consuming, cumbersome, and far too slow to work reliably – many early attempts were blurred. Nevertheless, Muybridge successfully imaged Stanford’s horse “Occident’ with all four hooves off of the ground, and as a result stirred up a hornet’s nest of controversy – he was accused of retouching and falsifying his pictures. Later asked by Stanford to capture all phases of a horse’s movement, he developed a system using a row of cameras triggered by tripwires stretched across a racetrack. He could then capture all stages of the gallop, (and use the redundancy of multiple cameras to fend off his detractors). He also made significant technical improvements, achieving faster exposure and reducing shutter speed to a then mind-boggling 1/2000th of a second.”  (http://www.care2.com/ecards/bio/1360 )

·         Note that I find considerable disagreement in accounts as to exactly how the shutters were triggered and the shutter speed. The point is, this method was the first time anyone could capture a significant number of photographic images to show the sequence of motion, in this case a trotting and then a galloping horse.

·         He also went on to produce a large body of work which explores how people and animals actually move, doing such seemingly ordinary tasks like walking up and down stairs, hopping, picking up a baby, and so on.

sample output: http://www.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/Schools/movingpics/movingpics5.htm

·         In 1877, publishes 11-volume summary of his experiments: Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.

Inspired by Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (a physician)  photo gun 1882 -- ONE device to record motion:

·         sample pigeon landing: http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/images/marey_bird_in_flight_7.gif

·         sample multiple print: http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/images/marey_bird_in_flight_3_350.jpg

Both Marey and Muybridge inspire: Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson: The Kinetograph

• “It used rolls of film about 35mm wide, and these film strips carried rows of holes down the sides to allow the film to be pulled through the camera at an even rate. These rows of holes still appear on both ciné-film and films for use in ordinary cameras. [PIX] – note pix may or may not be true to actual Kinetograph – unable to find a properly titled photo

• “Dickson [also] developed a viewer for the films which was called a kinetoscope. You can see from the picture that it could only be used by one person at a time, looking through the viewing piece at the top of the box. The film ran backwards and forwards round a series of pulleys, and was held as a continuous loop, so that it could be watched over and over again without rewinding.“(http://www.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/Schools/movingpics/movingpics9.htm )
• [pix]

·         January 7, Thomas Edison films his assistant, Fred Ott, sneezing with the Kinetograph

·           

·         (click on link to see Fred Sneeze – link also = on PIX page) http://www.ex.ac.uk/bill.douglas/Schools/movingpics/movingpics9.htm

 ·         the invention and variations on it spread around the world with lightening speed – especially considering how people traveled and communicated at that time. Everywhere people were open to and often hungry for this new way of looking at pictures, moving pictures

·         the First three filmmakers were French: The Lumière Brothers (Louis & Auguste), and Georges Méliès.

·         Common threads: all of them abandoned filmmaking in a short time – don’t know what to make of that except note that it happened and note how difficult it is to continue a success story.

·         Ingmar Bergman’s phrase, “Every film is my last film” – he had something else in mind, but the phrase holds true to this day

 ·         February 13, August and Louis Lumière patent the Cinematograph, a combination movie camera, processor, and projector – note how relatively small it is.

• Play Lumière Brothers’ First Films  – with enthusiastic commentary by French Director and Writer, Bertrand Tavernier who has directed 32 movies, starting in 1964

·         Each = 50 seconds, / 17 meters

·         Observations?

·         Questions?

·         Note that Lumière brothers abandoned film production after the Paris Exposition of 1900, during which Louis exhibited his films on huge screens to large audiences. He devoted the rest of his life to the invention and manufacture of photographic equipment and processes. Louis died in France in 1948 at the age of 84. His younger brother, Auguste, who lost interest in films even earlier, died also in France in 1954 at the age of 92.

 4. Jump ahead 8 years to 1902 and Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon 

·         Georges Méliès seems to have been drawn to flamboyant theatrics from an early age. When he saw the Lumière Brothers first films, he jumped right in. When they refused to sell him a Cinematographe, he built his own, based on the Bioscope mechanism.

·         At first his films were very much like the Lumière brothers: slices of daily life. One day, an accident led him to much wilder adventures: while filming a Paris street scene, the camera jammed. When he got it going again, a few seconds had passed. When he then process and projected the film, he was amazed at how objects suddenly appeared or disappeared. That discovery led him to study and use the optical-mechanical characteristics of motion pictures.

·         Note that the Lumière Brothers also benefited from accidents which opened up new ideas, new ways to make films.

·         By 1897 he had built the world’s first film studio. He could film indoors with the help of artificial light.

·         A Trip to the Moon – unfortunately is narrated and the intertitles removed.

·         Now we have many shots pieced together and all sorts of cinematic devices

·         Play film(Play Voyage to the Moon in  Landmarks of Early Films Vol. 1 -- 14 min)

·         Commentary? What struck you, outside of the crudity of its devices?

·         charm

·         use of live sets

·         dissolves

·         the way the moon people go up in a puff of smoke when struck

·         filmed stage

·         Méliès died in 1938 at the age of 77. After early success, the novelty of his films wore off. In 1915 he was forced to sell almost everything, and return to vaudeville. By 1923 he is bankrupt.

·         “In 1926, now a dejected and forgotten widower, he chanced upon one of his former stars, Jeanne d’Alcy, who ran a toy concession at the Montparnasse railway station. They married and managed the concession together. A belated rediscovery of his contribution to cinema art began in 1928. In 1931 he was awarded a Legion of Honor medal and in the following year was given a rent-free apartment, where he spent the remainder of his years.” – The Film Encyclopedia, Ephraim Katz.

·         Point out how France dominated world market until 1914 when the First World War destroyed their position

5. These two films point to the two extremes of filmmaking: the “realistic” vs the “fantastic” – continues to this day

• One Year after Méliès’s Voyage to the Moon, come films by Edwin S. Porter. Some American scholars call him, “the father of the story-film.” Obviously he is not, since Méliès got there before him. While Méliès pushed further and further into fantasy, Porter developed seemingly “realistic” movies.

·         "Moving pictures" were increasing in length, taking on fluid narrative forms, and being edited for the first time. Inventor and former projectionist Edwin S. Porter (1869-1941… was one of the resident Kinetoscope operators and directors at the Edison Company Studios …[where] he experimented with longer films, and was responsible for directing the first American documentary or realistic narrative film, The Life of an American Fireman (1903). The six-minute narrative film combined re-enacted scenes and documentary footage, and was dramatically edited with inter-cutting between the exterior and interior of a burning house. Edison was actually uncomfortable with Porter's editing techniques, including his use of close-ups to tell an entertaining story.

·         With the combination of film editing and the telling of narrative stories, Porter produced one of the most important and influential films of the time to reveal the possibility of fictional stories on film. The film was the one-reel, 14-scene, approximately 10-minute long The Great Train Robbery (1903) - it was based on a real-life train heist and was a loose adaptation of a popular stage production. His visual film, made in New Jersey and not particularly artistic by today's standards - set many milestones at the time:

·         it was the first narrative Western film with a storyline, and included various western clichés (a shoot-out, a robbery, a chase, etc.) that would be used by all future westerns [Note: the same claim was made for the earlier 21-minute Kit Carson (1903)]

Play The Great Train Robbery.   Landmarks vol. 1:

·         comments?

·         it was a ground-breaking film - and one of the earliest films to be shot out of chronological sequence, using revolutionary parallel cross-cutting (or parallel action) between two simultaneous events or scenes;

·         the parallel action starts when we cut from the robbers riding off with their loot to the little girl discovering the unconscious and tied up station agent.  She cuts him free and wakes him with water

·         we cut back to the robbers who are now celebrating as they dance with their girlfriends

·         note that this cutting is an early example of time compression: while it is possible, I suppose, for the robbers to have reached their cabin during the time the little girl was reviving the station agent, it’s not likely.

·         Note that earlier in the film, while the robbers take money from all the passengers, there is NO time compression.

·         As the robbers dance, one of the gang comes in and warns that a posse is on the way [Q – how do we know what’s going on here?] (we infer that information from what we see next.)

·         Cut to the gang fleeing the posse (another time compression and example of elliptical cutting – we don’t have to see every step of the way, even though this device was not really extensively used until much later.) But his is NOT Parallel cutting – we saw the gangsters leave the hut, and now find them riding away from the posse

·         Cut to 3 robbers divvying up the loot – again NOT parallel cutting –

·         We’ll come back to this notion of parallel cutting as well as time compression when we get into the section, Film Language.

·         it did not use fades or dissolves between scenes or shots

·         it effectively used rear projection in the first scene (the image of a train seen through a window)

·         note how the image in the window moves separately from the main image – you can see that if you watch the tree on the left near the left side of the window – once the moving train comes into the shot, that movement masks and lack of registration. Once the train stops moving, you can see the rear-projection image shift again in relation to the main shot – our eyes follow the robbers and don’t really notice this shifting.

·         There is almost certainly another such rear-projection when the robbers break into the car where the money is stashed and shoot the agent – through the open door of the moving train we see a blur of scenery rushing by, which gives us the sense of train movement. Here any lack of registration is totally masked by the blurred image.

·         two impressive panning shots

·         one = when robbers flee the train, running down the hill next to the train

·         the second follows directly we see a wide shot shooting across a brook; robbers enter, cross the brook, and move to their horses; the camera pans with them (not as radical a pan as the first.)

·         it was the first real motion picture smash hit, establishing the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium

·         it featured a future western film hero/star, Gilbert M. Anderson (aka "Broncho Billy")

·         In an effective, scary, full-screen closeup (placed at either the beginning or at the end of the film at the discretion of the exhibitor), a bandit shot his gun directly into the audience.

·         The film also included exterior scenes, chases on horseback, actors [who] moved toward (and away from) the camera, … and a camera mounted on a moving train.

·         The shot facing toward the engine from the coal tender; the bandits enter in the bottom of the train, clamber up toward the engine itself; one of the engineers tries to fight one of the bandits with a shovel but is overcome, pushed to the deck and partly obscured by a round part of the engine; there’s a splice – a dummy substitutes for the defeated engineer, and the bandit whacks it hard a couple of times and tosses it over the side. [replay]

 (http://www.filmsite.org/pre20sintro.html ) with many additional observations and corrections by RW