Arkansas Society for Cinema and Television Production (ASCTP)

(a Non-Profit Education Corporation)

RTV 3303-001 Spring 2010 Class #1

Glossary of Film Terms:

http://www.filmsite.org/filmterms1.html

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film, Third Edition. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.

(3^rd edition is fine. Available used from Amazon. Ten bucks is the low price as of 1/14/10).

Suggested reading: first two chapters, pp. 1-58.

…motion pictures have existed for a century mainly as a remarkably effective way for people to tell stories about people. (xix)

…the history of film as we have experienced to date is the history of a narrative for…the language common to the international cinema from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the present has been narrative in both aspiration and structural form. (xxiii)

,,,,persistence of vision…is a characteristic of human perception…whereby the brain retains images cast upon the retina of the eye for approximately one-twentieth to one-fifth of a second beyond their actual removal from the field of vision.

…the phi phenomenon…is the phenomenon which causes us to see the individual blades of a rotating fan as a unitary circular form or the different hues of a spinning color wheel as a single, homogeneous color. Together, persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon allow us to see a succession of static images as a single unbroken movement and permit the illusion of continuous motion upon which cinematography is based. (p.1)

Persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon were exploited for the purpose of optical entertainment for many ears before the invention of photography.

… still photography was invented by Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre

The very first photographs were actually made by Daguerre’s business associate Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826 using a camera obscura (“dark room”)…a sealed chamber or box with a tiny hole in one wall. (p.2)

Eadweard Muybridge introduced “serial photography” in 1877 with the use of twelve electrically operated still cameras with trip wires across a race track to photograph a running horse. (p.4)

The Edison Laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey invented the Kinetograph, the first true motion-picture camera.

….cinema was born as an independent medium only after the cinema machines had evolved for other purposes…the cinema at its material base is a technological form—one in which technological innovation precedes the aesthetic impulse (pp. 5-6)

…in terms of structure, the earliest films are simply brief recordings of entertaining or amusing subjects in which the camera…was treated as an unblinking human eye…(p.8)

The French magician and showman George Melies was the cinema’s first narrative artist. By adapting certain techniques of still photography, theater spectacle, and magic-lantern projection to the linear medium of the film strip, he innovated significant narrative devices like the fade-in, the fade-out, the overlapping or “lap” dissolve, and stop motion photography. (p. 15)

By far the most successful and influential film Melies made….was Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) (p.16)

Edwin W. Porter began as a projectionist and mechanic, before joining the Edison Manufacturing Company and becoming a director….Porter was powerfully influenced by Melies A Trip to the Moon (1902)…he claimed that it was the Melies film that had given him the idea for “telling a story in continuity form”.

The Great Train Robbery (1903)…the cinema’s first Western and….the first film to exploit the violence of armed crime….The most significant thing about the film, for us, however, is its editing continuity…Porter cut between his scenes without dissolving or fading and—most importantly—without playing them to the end….it posits that the basic signifying unit of film—the basic unit of cinematic meaning—is not the scene, as in Melies, and not the continuous unedited film strip, as in the earliest Edison and Lumiere shorts, but rather the shot… (p.25)

…Porter had shown that the narrative structure of cinema need not be that of scenes arranged according to the dicta of the legitimate stage, which must observe the unities of time and place, but could be that of shots arranged according to rules which film generates for itself.

…The Great Train Robbery probably did more than any film made before 1912 to convince investors that the cinema was a money-making proposition, and it was directly instrumental in the spread of permanent movie theaters, popularly called nickelodeons or “store theaters,” across the country. (p.28)

Before the rise of these nickelodeon theaters (1905-6), exhibition was carried out in a wide variety of sites: vaudeville theaters, summer parks, small specialized storefront theaters, lecture halls, churches, saloons, between acts of plays by repertory companies touring the nation’s opera houses. (p. 29)

By 1908…there were ten thousand nickelodeons and one hundred film exchanges operating in the United States, and they were supplied by about twenty “manufacturers” who churned out films at the rate of one to two one-reelers per director per week…films were generally shot out of doors in a single day on budgets of two hundred to five hundred dollars and rigorously limited to one reel of about one thousand feet in length, with a running time of ten to sixteen minutes, depending upon the projection speed….most early filmmakers felt that they were doing little more than grinding out cheap entertainment…between 1903 and 1912 the industry’s level of artistic and technical competence scarcely ever rose above the marginally adequate. (pp. 32-3)

American cinema’s two arch-antagonists: organized religion and the political Right…the movies suddenly threatened the very substantial revenues of churches, saloons, and vaudeville theaters from coast to coast. (pp. 34-5)

Motion Picture Patents Company, or the MPPC…a protective trade associate under Edison-Biograph leadership…also know as “The Trust”-sought to control every segment of the industry through issuing licenses and assessing royalties therefrom…the entire MPPC system was geared toward the production of one-reelers, and its licensees were expressly forbidden to make or to distribute films of greater length. (pp. 35-7)

The multiple-reel film—which came to be called a feature, in the vaudevillian sense of a headline attraction—had gained general acceptance in 1911 with the release of … European imports…but it was the smashing success of the four-reel French film Queen Elizabeth (1912)…starring the celebrated stage actress Sarah Bernhardt, that convinced the industry of the feature’s commercial viability in Americad. Even more persuasive was the huge American success of the nine-reel (two hours) Italian superspectacle Quo vadis? in the spring of 1913. (p. 38)

The feature film (arbitrarily defined in this era as any film of four or more reels) made motion pictures respectable for the middle class by providing a format analogous to that of the legitimate theater and suitable for the adaptation of middle-class novels and plays. (p. 39)

The Move to Hollywood

…mass migration of production companies from the East which occurred between 1907 and 1913…in the wake of the nickelodeon boom…it became necessary to put production on a systematic year-round schedule…what producers required was a new industrial center—one with warm weather, a temperate climate, a variety of scenery, and….access to acting talent…By 1915, there were approximately fifteen thousand workers employed by the motion picture industry in Hollywood and over 60 percent of American production was centered there. (pp. 42-3)

Jesse L. Lasky’s Feature Play Company’s six-reel The Squaw Man (Cecil B . DeMille, 1914) was the first important feature made in Hollywood. (p. f44)

Hollywood’s rise to power was assured by the First World War, which temporarily eliminated the European competition (mainly the French and Italian)…When war broke out on the Continent late in the summer of 1914, the European industries were virtually shut down since the same chemicals used in the production of celluloid were needed to manufacture gun power….in 1914 the United Sates produced just a little over one half of the world’s motion pictures…by 1918 it was making nearly all of them. (pp. 46-7)

French director Louis Feuillade…was the progenitor of mise-en-scene (literally, “putting-in-the-scene”) aesthetics…which put major emphasis on the creative use of movement and space within the shot rather than upon the relationship between shots, as does montage. (pp. 50-1)

http://www.atariarchives.org/cap/showpage.php?page=11

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Homemade “birdcage thaumatrope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UVbL-sDGFA

Homemade Phenakistoscope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAoa0mv2id4

Praxinoscope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rmoAWgn7BI&NR=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Upx4Ej0xGM&NR=1

Zoetrope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3yarT_h2ws

Sony Bravia commercial inspired by Zoetrope:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZURW23Zj5Pc&NR=1

Bronco Billy Anderson:

http://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/encyclopedia/entry-detail.aspx?entryID=534

The Great Train Robbery (1903)