US Cinema: Precinema History & The Cinema Of Attraction (Week 2)

 Early US Cinema History:

Edison's' camera -  - his films were made in a dedicated studio - the Black Mariah

Once the films were made they were viewed from his kinetoscope - film is on a loop instead and played repeatedly as person looks in.

Edison was famous for inventing the phonograph - first record player, that was mass produced.

Kinetoscopes were standalone devices with no sound - used in Kinetoscope parlors that quickly spread throughout the United States and Europe in 1894 right to 1895.

These films are not cinema films, not projected, they were consumed in parlors with individuals moving from one kinetoscope to the next.

Edison Kinetoscope films, 1894-1899:

• The Kiss -  early Edison film, $7.50 in todays money that would be $250. First time anyone had filmed a Kiss let alone shown it to the public. Publicity - Widow Jones stage play. Recording of parts of well known stage plays were seen a lot.  Considered by some, especially religious spectators at the time as obscene.
• Serpentine Dances - former dance that was popular in the 1890s, it presents and is available to be consumed as either art or titubation, treads a fine line as to what and isn't acceptable. Higher claim to be channeling some of the classical properties of ballet. Dance by Loie Fuller but in the film its Annabelle Moore.
• Sandow the Strongman - Eugene Sandow, German bodybuilder - Fredrich Wilhelm Muller. In this he's considered the originator of bodybuilder. Modelled on ancient Greek statues. 
• A Mucus
• Something Good Negro Kiss 

Shadow Play To The Camera Obscura:

Shadow Play - we have an image thrown onto the screen - played with light - enjoyed by an audience. Arguably 2,000 years ago we have historical evidence of cinema existing - China Hand Puppets

Shadow play was popular in the 19th Century -  books were produced of making animals and people appear on walls.

One of the inheritors of this tradition is German filmmaker Charlotte Lotte Reiniger - Silhouette animation - made 40 films over her career 

The camera obscura - Aboriginal groups in Australia - a person puts their hands onto the surface - in their mouths they have a sort of pigment which they spray and when there's enough they move their hands. - recording their presence, leave it behind for other humans to see, ''i was in this place at this time'' - evidence of this in caves in Australia dating back 2,000 years.

CAMERA - ROOM

OBSCURA - DARK

Camera Obscura - Dark Room

The earliest mention of this device is by the Chinese philosopher called Moti - he noted that light from an illuminated object that passed through a pinhole into a dark room created an inverted image. (5TH Century BC) He called this darkened room a collecting place - locked treasure room. The principals around this device. 500 years birth of Christ in China, help us think about cinema by it's nature in earlier artifacts.

Aristotle agreed with this

10th Century Arabian Scholar Al Hasan Al Basra had a portable tent room for solar observation and gave a full account of the principal

in 1490 Leonardo Davinci gave two clear descriptions of the camera obscura in his notebooks. 

16th Century - Principals of camera obscura were followed and quality of image was improved by convex lens. - work used into a painting

17-18th Century - camera obscura was used to help painters

The Magic Lantern to Photography:

the magic lantern - slide projector using handprinted glass slides - usually shown in a sequence with narration. Something of the precursor to the PowerPoint presentation.

mid 17th century, popular through to the 18th / 19th century

Images didn't speak for themselves - adding a voice to guide the viewer, give them structure/purpose

Travel Logs - popular form; in the Victorian era these focused on tales of colonial exploration. Consumed as something exotic/adventurous - through that comes the form of 'Othering'

Collective experience of projected images onto the screen

Nineteenth Century Optical Toys - Reel of Life - Zoetrope - still images used to create a moving image. 

Two Conditions : The first is that the images must be presented to the eye at least 10 per second, second condition is that a period of blackness must be in between image so that they don't blur each other -  the reason is that we see a moving image is that the brain forms a sorta mental bridge between one image and the next given rise to the idea that the static images are moving: persistent of image

There are similar devices called phenakistoscopes 

Development of Photography - Camera Obscura - photography is almost made possible. Life leaves its mark. The way the sun bleaches wood is a photograph, as is a suntan - sun leaving it's mark on the world.

Early photography follows this naturally occurring phenomena, but replace the wood and bodies with oil and then with more reactive components of different chemicals spread first on glass and then on paper.

in the 1820s a Frenchman called Joseph Niepce coated metal plates with bitumen which was an oil based derivative, which when left for a long time captured an image.

Louis Daguerre heard of Niepce's work and collaborated with him, Daguerre used silver iodized plates. These then lead to the create Daguerreotypes. These would have to be left out for long periods of time,  These appeared from the late 1920s. Only produced one copy. The glass it was taken on would be the glass the final image would be on. 

British Inventor William Henry Fox Talbott used thin layers of silver nitrate on sheets of paper instead of glass and was able to receive quite short exposure time - he took pictures of leaves etc. (1830s)

Fox Talbott had a breakthrough in the following year (1835) and realized that a transparent image (now known as a negative - because it produces a mirror image) can be rephotographed to produce a positive print.

New plates - had gelatin - mid to late 19th century lead to a wide/spread use of photographs producing portraits, images of buildings and of natural landmarks

Many people set themselves up as portrait photographers and amateur picture photographers became a common sight.

Matthew Brady - American photographer (most famous in the 19th century) - made his name taking photographs in the civil war. - shows first photographs of dead bodies on the field - couldn't capture motion so no pictures during battle were taken.

Photography is made from animal bones and bitumen - filmmakers seek more ecological solutions to this.  

The culmination of improvent in photography can be seen in the work of Eadweard Muybridge (British Photographer) - known primarily for the movement in photographer 

- in 1872, businessman Layan Stanford hired Muybridge to settle a debate, he believed there was a point in a horses gallop when all four legs would leave the ground

- in 1878 Muybridge successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using 50 cameras, each placed on the track and controlled by trick wires which were triggered by the horses legs

- each time the horse passed the camera  trip wire would trigger the camera to capture the moment

Muybridge also worked on a more powerful version of the magic lamp. 

This could be recognizable of a cinema - we have a camera, projector and a screen

Celluloid to the Kinetograph

Celluloid - key element needed for cinema to be possible

- in the 1880s a young American called George Eastman began to experiment with ways of making photography simpler

- his first design was a roll holder, which could be placed on the back of the camera (holds a roll of sensitized paper) that is capable of taking up to 48 photographers.

- as Muybridge had his 50 cameras on the track, Eastman wanted to put those 50 cameras into one camera via a roll holder.

- the popularity of the holder encouraged Eastman to work on a new design with the holder built inside the box.

- This camera appeared in 1888 and was marketed as the kodak camera

- The following year 1889, Eastman replaced the paper roll with a roll of transparent celluloid film.

- Celluloid is one of the first types of synthetic plastic produced from an oil based

- This allowed for the further development of moving pictures

- its base and emulsion made it easy for scientists to create moving pictures - was robust enough to move fast

Stop-start mechanics - have to take 20 photographs every second to create a motion. Main problem was the stop start motion which was required to take serial photographs and also to project them -  this technology has already been developed in the late 1860s (in relation to type writing, sewing machines and machine guns) You need some kind of mechanical action that pulls celluloid into the camera so that the aperture could open and expose the film to light and the aperture would close and something would be needed to pull the film open again and open the aperture expose the next frame to light, repeat this again. There was technology for this but it was the problem of importing it over to the camera.

The key person to solving this problem was Thomas Edison via his labs in New York and the particular by his assistant WLK Dixon.  French and the British also claim the credibility for the first moving camera. However Edison is best known for the invention of the electric lightbulb and the phonograph and one of his major achievements was the development of the Kinetograph.

WLK Dixon created the first prototype of the kinetograph by 1892, it uses rolls of films of about 35 millimeters wide. Dixons crucial innovation was a series of holes down the side of the celluloid film - this allows the film to be pulled through the camera in a very controlled and even way.

Dixon wrote at the time ''What is the future of the Kinetograph? ask rather from what conceivable fades of the future can it be debarred in the promotion of business interest, in the advancement of science, in the revelation of unguest worlds, in its educational and recreated powers in its ability  to immortalize our fleeting but beloved associations. The Kinetograph stands beyond the foremost creations of modern invented genius.''

New York, 9th May 1893 - possible birth of cinema -  Kinetoscope - Edison tried to sync his phonograph and kinetoscope. sound and film essential

Kinetoscope parlors spread throughout the city through 1894-1895, Edison's early films lasted for around 20 seconds, and were incredibly varied.

The Black Mariah - on a circular structure so it can be rotated - for sun. Producing films regularly from 1892

The Cinematographe

August & Louis Lumiere came from Leon in France, in 1894 they saw Edison's Kinetoscope in Paris and decided to design their camera of their own. 

By February of the following year, they produced a working model of their camera - Cinematographe

The machine was not only a camera but could be used to project films (with a magic lantern device)

The films produced by the Lumiere brothers were about 50 seconds long (longer than the Edison films)

28th December 1895 - First screening of Lumiere Brother's film; also considered as birth of the cinema. The one that had the most consensus around it. One was workers leaving their fathers factory in Leon and another - the more famous; shows a train arriving at the statue. 

a lotta people were scareeeeeee

After the screening the brothers began commercial process of the camera which was soon in high demand across the world.  Age of the cinema had begun.

Spike Lee is asked to make a short film with a Cinematographe he makes one of his baby daughter

The Cinema Of Attractions:

- 1910 through the teens - silent era films - better sense of cinema and what it is

- this period is not very well researched

- Tom Gunning tried to understand this period - understand this moment - last 5 years of 19th century and first 10 years of the 20th century.

- He came up with the term 'Cinema of Attraction'' - wanted it to label film cultures that were predominant at the time.

- Gunning says this is defined by certain kinds of films - put on display and celebrate key qualities of the media

- one of the key things he obseveres is that these are film that forwardly call attention to the fact that these are films.

- More open - lack of coherence, constancy - variety - filmmakers experimenting

- in order to figure out what cinema can do and what people will pay for

- because of this we might note that in relation to things like race and gender - theres a wider range in things at play.

- demands an active spectator - films don't seek to pretend that the audience is not there - usually seeking to engage audience directly - presume audience member that will enjoy it.

- Usually the film you're watching pretends you're not there so it puts you in a position without the awareness of characters.

- Whereas the cinema of attractions acknowledges you're here and exhibits a certain performance for that audience.

- Gunning also notes that the encounter between early cinema goers and cinema of attractions can be almost aggressive - tries to shock them and confronts them - engage them in ways which are direct

- He is taking the term 'Cinema Of Attractions' from Sergei Einzenstien who founded his work on how Cinema should be.

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