History of film
The history of film chronicles the development of a visual art form created using film technologies that began in the late 19th century.
This article is about the history of film as an artistic medium. For the history of motion-picture technology, see History of film technology.
The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. There were earlier cinematographic screenings by others, however, the commercial, public screening of ten Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895, can be regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. The earliest films were in black and white, under a minute long, without recorded sound, and consisted of a single shot from a steady camera. The first decade saw film move from a novelty, to an established mass entertainment industry, with film production companies and studios established throughout the world. Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed, with film editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films.
Popular new media, including television (mainstream since the 1950s), home video (1980s), and the internet (1990s), influenced the distribution and consumption of films. Film production usually responded with content to fit the new media, and technical innovations (including widescreen (1950s), 3D, and 4D film) and more spectacular films to keep theatrical screenings attractive. Systems that were cheaper and more easily handled (including 8mm film, video, and smartphone cameras) allowed for an increasing number of people to create films of varying qualities, for any purpose including home movies and video art. The technical quality was usually lower than professional movies, but improved with digital video and affordable, high-quality digital cameras. Improving over time, digital production methods became more popular during the 1990s, resulting in increasingly realistic visual effects and popular feature-length computer animations.
Various film genres have emerged during the history of film, and enjoyed variable degrees of success.
Novelty era (1890s – early 1900s)[edit]
Advances towards projection[edit]
Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Louis Le Prince, William Friese-Greene, and the Skladanowsky brothers made pioneering contributions to the development of devices that could capture and display moving images, laying the groundwork for the emergence of cinema as an artistic medium. The scenes in these experiments primarily served to demonstrate the technology itself and were usually filmed with family, friends or passing traffic as the moving subjects. The earliest surviving film, known today as the Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), was captured by Louis Le Prince and briefly depicted members of his family in motion.[15]
In June 1889, American inventor Thomas Edison assigned a lab assistant, William Kennedy Dickson, to help develop a device that could produce visuals to accompany the sounds produced from the phonograph. Building upon previous machines by Muybridge, Marey, Anschütz and others, Dickson and his team created the Kinetoscope peep-box viewer, with celluloid loops containing about half a minute of motion picture entertainment.[16] After an early preview on 20 May 1891, Edison introduced the machine in 1893.[17] Many of the movies presented on the Kinetoscope showcased well-known vaudeville acts performing in Edison's Black Maria studio.[18] The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895.[17] As the initial novelty of the images wore off, the Edison Company was slow to diversify their repertoire of films and waning public interest caused business to slow by Spring 1895. To remedy declining profits, experiments, such as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, were conducted in an attempt to achieve the device's original goal of providing visual accompaniment for sound recordings. Limitations in syncing the sound to the visuals, however, prevented widespread application.[19] During that same period, inventors began advancing technologies towards film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format.[20]