Part 1.The birth of film. The silent era

In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair Thomas Edison introduced to the public two pioneering inventions: the Kinetograph, the first practical moving picture camera, and the Kinetoscope. The latter was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of celluloid film (powered by an electric motor) was backlit by an incandescent lamp and seen through a magnifying lens. The spectator neared an eye-piece. Kinetoscopeparlours were supplied with film snippets of recorded mundane events (such as Fred Ott’s Sneeze, 1894) as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations.

Kinetoscope parlors soon spread successfully to Europe. Edison, however, never attempted to patent these instruments on the other side of the Atlantic, since they relied so greatly on previous experiments and innovations from Britain and Europe. This enabled the development of imitations, such as the camera devised by British electrician and scientific instrument maker Robert William Paul. Paul had the idea of displaying moving pictures for group audiences, rather than just to individual viewers, and invented a film projector, giving his first public showing in 1895.

At about the same time, in France, Auguste and LouisLumière invented the cinematograph, a portable, three-in-one device: camera, printer, and projector. In late 1895 in Paris, they began exhibitions of projected films before the paying public. They quickly became Europe’s main producers with such vignettes as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and The Sprinkler Sprinkled (both 1895).

The movies of the time would usually present a single scene, authentic or staged, of everyday life. The standard length of a film remained one reel (about ten to fifteen minutes), through the first decade of the century. The cinematic techniques were hardly developed: no editing and usually no camera movement. But the novelty of realistically moving photographs was enough for a motion picture industry. Inventors and producers had tried from the very beginnings of moving pictures to marry the image with synchronous sound, but no practical method was devised until the late 1920s. Thus, for the first thirty years of their history, movies were more or less silent, although accompanied by live musicians.

In 1902 Paris stage magician Georges Méliès created A Trip to the Moon, possibly the first movie to portray space travel. He pioneered many of the fundamental SFX techniques used in movies for most of the twentieth century, demonstrating that film had unprecedented power to distort visible reality rather than just faithfully record it.

The Australian film The Story of the Kelly Gang (also screened as Ned Kelly and His Gang) by Dan Barry and Charles Tait is widely regarded as the world’s first “feature length” film. Its 80-minute running time was unprecedented when it was released in 1906. It wasn’t until 1911 that countries other than Australia began to make feature films. By this time 16 full length feature films had been made in Australia.

Soon Europe began creating multiple-reel films. With international box office successes like Queen Elizabeth (44 min, France, 1912), Quo Vadis? (120 min, Italy, 1913) and Cabiria (200 min, Italy, 1914), the feature film began to replace the short as the cinema’s central form. Along with it, they gained recognition as a genuine art form with a secure place in the emerging culture of the twentieth century.

Until this point, the cinemas of France and Italy had been the most globally popular and powerful. But the United States was already gaining quickly when World War I (1914-1918) caused a devastating interruption in the European film industries. The American industry, or “Hollywood”, as it was becoming known after its geographical center in California, gained the position it has held, more or less, ever since: movie factory for the world, exporting its product to most countries on earth and controlling the market in many of them. By the 1920s, the USA reached what is still its era of greatest-ever output, producing an average of 800 feature films annually, or 82% of the global total. The comedies of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, the swashbuckling adventures of Douglas Fairbanks and the romances of Clara Bow made these performers’ faces well-known on every continent.

The newborn Soviet cinema was the most radically innovative. There, the craft of editing, especially, surged forward, going beyond its previous role in advancing a story. Sergei Eisenstein perfected the technique of so-called intellectual montage, which strove to make violently clashing images express ideas and provoke emotional reactions in the viewer.

The possibilities of cinematography kept increasing as cameras became more mobile and film stocks more sensitive and versatile. Screen acting became more of a craft, without its earlier theatrical exaggeration and achieving greater subtlety and psychological realism.

8. Answer the following questions taking into account the information given in Part 1 of Text 1:

1) When did the era of realistically moving photographs begin?
Who managed to substitute an eye-piece by a projector?

2) What are the distinctive features of the first one-reel films?

3) Who is the creator of the first “space travel” film?

4) When did the first feature films appear?
What country/city gained the position of the largest film industry?

5) In what way did the Soviet cinema develop?

9. Read Part 2 of Text 1 and fill in the gaps (1-7) with the following word combinations:

the musical film; global appeal; the stringent limitations; total changeover; the “Vitaphone” system; the classic movie stars; orchestral scores.

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