The beginnings of Cinema
On 28th December 1885, in Paris, there occurred a significant cultural event, the first public showing of the Lumière Bothers’ ‘Cinématographe’.
The audience in the Grand Café of the Jockey Club had each paid one Franc for a 20-minute show consisting of twelve short films. Among them was the world’s first, rather simple-minded, comedy entitled “Watering the Gardener” in which a small boy turns the water onto a gardener, rather than the garden, and an alarming ‘documentary’, “Arrival of a Train at Ciotat Station”, which made some audiences panic and flee theatres.
On 22nd March of that year there had been a private showing of “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”, which was the world’s first projected film show. It is difficult for us to imagine what those early audiences must have felt when watching the crudely flickering images which must have seemed like magic, a source of wonder and yet, as in the reaction to the train images, of fear too.
The early cinema was the result of a complex evolution during the 19th century including the magic lantern and the ‘Praxinoscope’, which projected hand-drawn imagery.
By the end of 1896, the Lumière Brothers films had made them world-famous and the “Cimématographe,” a hand-operated camera-cum-projector, was considered the cutting edge of the new technology. For a time, France was in the forefront of the new, exciting movement.
An eccentric figure in early French cinema was the magician turned film-maker, Georges Méliès (1861 – 1938), who made several hundred fantasy films between 1896 and 1913 which employed various tricks and humorous devices to create his own special surreal world, best typified by his “Le Voyage dans la lune” (1902) which combined Jules Verne and theatrical fairies but made with wit, enthusiasm and charm. They are still entertaining a century or more after they were made and must have influenced cartoon film-makers and Terry Gilliam in his Monty Python animation.
Another key figure in the early development of cinema was the American genius Thomas Alva Edison who, in 1892, had filed for patent his ‘Kinetograph’ camera and ‘Kinetoscope’ viewer which was a kind of ‘peepshow’ machine containing one minute of film. Had Edison’s revolutionary idea been more popular it would have made cinema a private experience (like TV) rather than the public experience of the Lumières, which caught the public fancy.
Edison’s engineering assistant, the English-born W. Dickson, built the world’s first film studio in 1893 in New Jersey which was basically a shed covered in black tarred paper, known popularly as “the Black Maria”. It had a roof that could let in sunlight and the whole studio could be rotated to follow the sun. Among the first ‘stars’ of this new studio were Buffalo Bill Cody, the strongman Eugene Sandow and the prize-fighter Jim Corbett.
Edwin S. Porter, (1870 – 1941) had shot an early documentary short on the America’s Cup yacht race in 1899, but by 1902 was combining documentary footage with fictional story elements in his “The Life of an American Fireman”. In 1903 he made his most famous work, “The Great Train Robbery,” a cowboy film (another first!) shot in New Jersey, not far from New York City, which ended its twelve minutes with a notorious scene of a robber firing his (silent) six-gun at the camera – how the audience must have ducked!
People flocked to see this new, exciting form of fiction and film would never be the same again. We can now see that although France had begun the cinema, leadership in the field was now passing to the Americans, where it has remained ever since. [KR]
