On Thursday, thirty minutes into the screening of Star Wars: The Force Awakens that I was watching, the screen went blank. One moment, I was preparing myself for the action sequence that was just about unfolding, and the next moment I am staring at a huge white screen with the lights turning on all around me. No, I hadn’t woken up from my dream. It was, in fact, a technical glitch that had necessitated this sequence of events…
Hours after the error had been rectified and even more so after the movie got over, I was still thinking about something that had crossed my mind earlier. I decided to get to the bottom of it, to find out where the practice of screening a movie and charging an admission for the audience had all started. And it so happens that it was on December 28, 1895 that the first such public performance was conducted.
Evolution of the technology The technology behind movies didn’t develop in a flash. The phenakistoscope, considered the precursor to modern motion pictures, included a spinning disc with slots to view a series of drawings, that in turn produced the effect of a single moving image.
Though this came about in the 1830s, it needed decades of advances to become something better. Thomas Alva Edison and his assistant William Dickson came up with a kinetograph, the first motion picture camera, in 1890. And in the next year Edison invented kinetoscope, which enabled a single viewer to use a peephole in a machine to watch a strip of film as it moved past light.
Improving on Edison’s model Antoine Lumiere was invited to a demonstration of a kinetoscope in 1894. Though he was impressed by what he saw, he came back to his sons, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, and told them that they can come up with something better. It was this expectation from their father that led to the Lumiere brothers, who were successfully running a photographic plate factory in Lyon, France, to work on the problem of combining animation with projection.
Early in 1895 they came up with a solution for the same. A combination of a movie camera and a projector that could display moving images for an audience in a screen, Louis Lumiere’s cinematographe was patented and used in a private screening in March. As a smaller, lighter alternative to Edison’s kinetoscope, it also consumed lesser film and allowed simultaneous viewing by multiple parties.
On December 28 that year, they marked the beginning of cinema (derived from cinematographe) history by screening their movie at the Grand Cafe on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris. Scenes from everyday French life came to life on the big screen.
Within months, the cinematographe made its presence felt in much of Europe and North America. The Lumiere brothers, on their part, opened theatres (known as cinemas) and also sent crewmen to different countries, both to showcase their device and shoot new clips.
Despite their success with the cinematographe, Louis moved on to stereoscopy or 3D imaging in later years, while Auguste focussed his energies on medical research. This was because they believed that “the cinema is an invention without any future”. If only they were still around…
Reach the writer at ganesh.a.s@thehindu.co.in
