We are used to cinemas, free access to many films and no longer want to watch them in quality lower than HD. We are no longer offered to just watch a movie, but are attracted by various options for animating films - from 3D to 7D.
But it wasn't always like that. And few people think about how it all began. Let's learn together the history of the development of world cinema from the first pictures to color films.
The world's first film - "Scenes from Roundhay Garden"
It is generally accepted that cinematography appeared in 1895. But it is rare to find mentions that the very first film in the world was shot in 1888 – "Scenes in Roundhay Garden" (Roundhay Garden Scene).
The Frenchman Louis Le Prince, the author of this film, used a new technology for that time: the recording was made on paper film with a photographic emulsion applied to it. The duration of the scene is only 1.66 seconds, and in it Louis captured a walk in the garden of his son, mother-in-law with her husband and friend Harriet Hartley.
The official beginning of cinema was laid by the Lumiere brothers and their most famous film "Arrival of a train at La Ciotat station" (The Arrival of a Train in La Ciotat, 1895). In Russia it is also known under the titles The Arrival of a Train and The Arrival of a Mail Train.
The plot is quite simple - in 49 seconds it shows a train stopping at La Ciotat station and passengers walking along the carriages.
Interesting fact! This film became the progenitor of the silent film plot, which was called "vagabond". Directors all over the world began to reproduce it and shoot their versions at different train stations.
Why was this particular short documentary memorable and became a canon? The creators of the film were the first to convey movement in space on a flat screen: a train appears from afar, passes across the entire screen, and people walk nearby in different plans (general, medium and close-up).
The realism of "Arrival of a Train" so astonished viewers that they jumped away from the screen, afraid that the car might run them over.
The first film with sound was "The Jazz Singer"
Sound recording technology (phonograph) already existed before the advent of cinematography. In 1894, Thomas Edison and his assistant William Dickson made the first attempts to implement sound recording in a movie camera. But the invention (kinetophonograph) remained only a technical incident due to major problems in synchronizing devices and very low sound quality.
Something similar was attempted in 1900 by Leon Gaumont: he combined Lumière's apparatus with a phonograph. However, the invention remained unsuitable for the birth of sound cinema for many years.
Technological progress required film directors to move forward: the popularity of radio had a negative impact on the flow of viewers to cinemas. Therefore, the introduction of audio accompaniment for films became a necessity.
Finally, on October 6, 1927, the world's first sound film was released. Film "The Jazz Singer" was released by the well-known company WARNER Bros. and is a sentimental comedy. The sound in this picture is not the usual conversations of the characters and the surrounding noise. Here only the superposition of musical fragments of jazz is used and only a few phrases are added (for example, "Come on, Mom, listen!").
Interesting fact! It was not by chance that the theme of music was chosen to launch sound cinema. In January 1917, the first gramophone record in the world with a jazz composition was released in the United States.
The film was dubbed using Vitafon technology – the sound was first recorded onto gramophone records, which were then synchronized with the screen.
A year later the next film was released "The Singing Fool" from the same creators, but it already contains full-fledged dialogues between the characters.
The first tape with recorded sound was released in 1928 and was called "The Perfect Crime".
The first color film - "A Trip to the Moon"
The Lumiere brothers attempted to hand-colorize films, but they themselves did not consider it serious work, so there are no references to specific films in history.
The Media Museum in the UK has been doing a lot of research and archival searching, which has resulted in the discovery of the world's first colour film called "Journey to the Moon", which dates back to 1901-1902.
It belonged to the French filmmaker Georges Méliès, who recorded the departure of the expedition to the Moon. He managed to achieve the color effect in "The Journey" using three films with different colors, namely blue, red and green. By superimposing them on each other, Georges managed to obtain an image of different shades. Unfortunately, he did not manage to complete the idea.
Before the discovery of Méliès's film, Herbert Calamus was considered the founder of color cinema. In 1912, he founded the Technicolor company with its own technology for colorizing films.
The painting was colored by specially equipping the camera with a system of glass prisms that divided the light flow from the lens into two. The filters transmitted the image in two colors to different films. It is precisely because this process of applying color is quite labor-intensive and complex that the company released its first film only in 1917.
In 1922, Technicolor showed the film Victims of the Sea on screen, which was a huge success with audiences, although it was only colored with four colors (green, red, black, white).
The first such film in the USSR – "Battleship Potemkin"It was released on December 5, 1925, and its only "color" was the painted-over bright red Soviet flag.
Despite many earlier discoveries, the official year of the appearance of color cinema is considered to be 1935. That was when director Ruben Mamoulian released his film "Becky Sharp", which is a film adaptation of the book Vanity Fair.
Today, films are a milestone in the history of cinema (as were the first cartoons). Old films are an artistic heritage, they carry great value and the experience of generations. We must not forget that progress in cinematography became possible only after these first complex discoveries.
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