How the movie was born and appeared

Which of us, sitting in the dark hall of the cinema, was not proud of the great Chapaev, did not clench his fists in horror and rage at the sight of the red sailors and Bolsheviks thrown into the sea by the white gangs (“We are from Kronshtadt”), did not laugh cheerfully and joyfully at “Jolly Fellows” ", Did not experience the tragedy of a little man with Charlie Chaplin? Which of us does not sing beautiful songs from films?

Cinema is even more propaganda than radio than newspaper. Even in those distant times when the movie was just in its infancy. Is the example of the film “We Are From Kronstadt”, which has become the banner of the Spanish people in the struggle against rebel generals, not indicative in this respect?

Cinema is visited and loved by billions of viewers. Both old people and children love cinema! Cinema, showing and speaking, is understandable and close to everyone.

But very few people know how cinematography was born, this is the closest combination of art and technology, how films were made, how the films were shown on the screen.

But what a tremendous significance, what great interest it should be for a mass cinema audience to get acquainted with the history and technology of cinema, at first dumb, then suddenly talking, singing, then clothed in natural colors, and finally, pretending to show action not plane, but relief, to transmit films on a distance (television).

The invention of the "magic lantern"

The history of cinema is unusually colorful. And she is immeasurably older than is commonly thought. This is the story of Chinese shadows, the story of fooling multimillion-dollar masses of believers with the help of the “magic lantern” of the monk Kircher, the story of “live photography” that entertained the “lower classes” for many years at bazaars and fairs.

The cinema technique, including the shooting and dubbing of films, the production of mass copies from them, the projection of films on the screen, is a complex bunch of the most diverse branches of science; and technology. In cinematography, I had to deal with optics, lighting, acoustics, electrical engineering of weak and strong currents, photochemistry, precision instrumentation and a number of other industries. And today we can enjoy movies without leaving home, online.

Almost three hundred years ago, Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher invented the “magic lantern”, the principle of which for many years remained almost unchanged. This is the same closed chamber with a light source casting a sheaf of light through a capacitor onto the screen. Passing through the drawing, the light on the screen gives an enlarged image of this drawing, applied on pieces of transparent mica. This invention has been widely used by monks.

In 1796, in Paris, a certain physicist, balloonist and adventurer Robertson demonstrated a slightly improved Kircher lantern. In a bizarre, mysteriously furnished room, in clubs of steam and smoke, fantastic monsters passed, called "the spirits of the dead." And, of course, in such an environment, a fooled viewer in a ghostly shadow recognized his late parent.

But all this was still a moving pattern. These were only static “foggy pictures”.

The discovery of the cinematic effect

Workers of science and technology came to the moving drawing later. And, as in most great discoveries, a moving drawing was extremely simple to open.

Once an English scientist Roget looked out the window through the lowered curtains at a cart passing along the street. He was interested in one phenomenon. The trolley stopped, but to Roget, the wheels of the trolley through the slots of the curtains seemed to move either faster or slower. Roget saw the wheels of the cart even when they were hidden from view by a curtain rail. The result of subsequent observations of Roget was his report in the Royal Society "On the persistence (stability) of vision in relation to moving objects" (1824).

The report of Roget became interested in the famous astronomer and physicist John Herschel (1792-1871), who conducted a series of experiments. The most revealing was his experience with the coin. Herschel put the coin with an edge on the table at eye level and clicked it into rotation. He saw both sides of the coin at the same time, for the impression of the “eagle” remained even at the same time that he had already seen the “tails”. Herschel replaced the coin with a cardboard circle with cords tied around the edges (diagonally). By rotating the circle with the help of ropes, Herschel ensured that various images painted on both sides of the circle merged into the eyes of the viewer. A horizontal line on one side and a vertical line on the other gave a circle during rotation. A bird on one side and a cage on the other created the illusion of a bird sitting in a cage. Herschel called this rotating circle “thaumatrop” and entertained children and adults with it, creating new drawings. Herschel suddenly saw a drawing in motion on his thaumatrope. A dog’s head was drawn on one side of the mug, and a dog kennel on the other. When the circle rotated, it turned out a “miracle”. The dog, as if alive, looked out of the kennel, hid back, looked out again. The drawn image came to life, moved. Thaumatron, designed for static, motionless drawings, has acquired a new meaning. A drawing of a man or horse with different positions of arms or legs on both sides of the circle gave a jumping horse, a running horse, etc.

So the first cinematic effect was obtained (earlier it was called the "stroboscopic"), which served as an impetus for the invention of cinema.

Regardless of Herschel, the greatest physicist of the 19th century Faraday (1791-1867) became interested in the report of Roget. He improved the "equipment". Instead of curtains, Faraday used a continuous disk rotating on the axis with narrow slots along the radii. The effect was the same as that of Herschel. A moving object was visible even when it was closed with a solid part of a circle.

The experiments of Faraday were continued by the Belgian physicist Plateau (1801-1883), who built a device called a phenacystiscope. One side of the Faraday circle is painted black, on the other between the cracks a series of figures are shown that give movement in successive phases. The circle is held in front of the mirror, black side to the face of the observer. During rotation, the viewer saw in the mirror through the slits of the circle a figure in rapidly changing different positions. The illusion of movement turned out. A little later, in 1832, at the same time Plateau and the Austrian scientist Stamfer improved the phenacystiscope, abandoning the mirror. Their disk stroboscope consisted of two circles mounted on one axis, with drawings placed on the second circle.

A few years later Horner invented a zootrop representing a wide cylinder with slits cut out in it. Inside the cylinder against the cracks was a paper tape with drawings. During rotation, the cylinder gave the impression of genuine movement.

Attempts to display movements on the screen

Many scientists dealt with the problem of moving drawings. Some of them tried to show the moving image to a significant number of viewers, transferring it to the screen.

The most successful in this regard were the work of the French scientist Raynaud. In 1877, he invented a device called a praxinoscope. This is the same zootrop, but somewhat improved. Five years later, Reynaud created the so-called "optical theater", which at one time was very successful. Its essence boils down to the following. A fixed pattern is projected onto the screen using a projection lamp, and at the same time, a conventional praxinoscope equipped with a second projection lamp and a reflecting mirror is projected onto the screen, and drawings are shown depicting individual phases of movement. Drawings were applied to unwinding paper tape.

Application Photos

A radical revolution was made by the invention in 1829 by Daguerre and Niepce of photography. The development of photography made it possible to replace hand-drawn pictures with photographic and photographs.

Great success in applying photography to show the movement was an American Hale. He starred with his partner in six steps of waltz, made three reduced transparencies from each shot, inserted all 18 transparencies in a sequential order into the rotating circle installed in the projection lamp, and in 1870 gave the audience an extraordinary sight: on the screen, Hale and her partner performed several rounds of waltz to the music. The impression was overwhelming, because on the screen was Hale himself, whom the public knew in life.

In 1877, the photographer Maybridge (USA) first received photographs of horses in motion. For shooting, he used a large number of cameras installed along the track. The horse, running up, tearing the thread connected to the shutter of the device, the shutter clicked, and the horse was captured on the run. Showing such a series of shots in a projection lamp gave the effect of a running horse on the screen.

Significantly improved the projection technique of Georges Demeny. In 1892, he invented an apparatus for projecting transparent films. The circuit of the apparatus is simple: the tape is wound from a reel and passes through the roller and frame. Then it falls through the roller onto the finger of the disk, then onto the toothed drum and is wound onto the second reel. Behind the frame is a projection lamp, and in front - a lens and a shutter that closes the window at the time of pulling the film.

However, all these inventions were only a threshold to the invention of the cinema that we see now. All these images had a lot of drawbacks that did not allow them to be put into operation as a mass action.

Truly significant milestones in the history of cinema are the inventions of the kinetoscope by Edison (1893) and the cinema by Lumiere (1895).

Edison Kinetoscope

For filming, Edison designed cinema, which made it possible to photograph on film from 40 to 60 pictures per second. For projection, Edison invented the kinetoscope, demonstrated for the first time at the world exhibition in Chicago in 1893.

Edison’s kinetoscope was a box with two eyepieces. A film connected into an endless ribbon, passing through a system of gear rollers in front of the eyepiece, was illuminated from behind by an electric bulb. An obturator was placed in front of the film and eyepieces, which opened the eyepiece only when the image was in sight.

For the production of kinetoscopes, Edison organized a joint-stock company, and for the production of filming built a special pavilion, which went down in the history of cinema under the name "Black Maria" as the first film studio.

On April 14, 1894, the first “kinetoscope salon" was opened on Broadway in New York.

But it was not yet a cinema. Only one person could watch a tape in a kinetoscope. A kinetoscope was not designed for mass simultaneous viewing.

Lumiere Cinema

The birthplace of cinema is considered Paris. Edison’s kinetoscope was brought here from America in 1894. Here, Louis Lumiere, the inventor and owner of the photo accessories factory, became interested in him.

Lumiere designed a small, lightweight and clearly working device, which received the immortal name - cinema.

The projection and filming equipment of Lumiere did not change the principles of its structure, only certain improvements were made to it. Lumiere had to order the film in New York, but it was covered with a highly sensitive silver-bromide emulsion according to a recipe invented by Lumiere himself.

Lumiere introduced in his design a number of standards that have remained unchanged to this day. The most important was the introduction of a certain frequency of change of images, namely sixteen images per second. Sound cinema required an increase in frequency to 24 shots per second. Another standard was film width (35 mm), frame size (18 X 24 mm) and the location of the perforations.

The Lumiere apparatus is simple in design. A wooden box is mounted on a wooden tripod. The tape advances through a grab. On the inner wall of the box there is a rectangular window, which serves to transmit light to the film when shooting, in front of it there is an obturator. The tape was projected onto the screen in the same apparatus, to which a special projection lamp with an electric light source was added

On March 22, 1895, Lumiere made a report on his invention with the demonstration of the first films in the Society for the Promotion of National Industry in France. On December 28 of the same year, the first cinema session took place in the basement of the Big Cafe on Kapucin Boulevard.

On this day, cinema was born as a mass spectacle. From this day he began his victorious march around the world. The speed of its distribution is evidenced even by the fact that already in the spring of 1896 the cinema of Lumiere was shown in Russia - in St. Petersburg, Rostov-on-Don, Nizhny Novgorod.

And almost the first to give correspondence about the new spectacle was Maxim Gorky, who wrote in the Nizhny Novgorod Leaflet in 1896 about the cinema: “There are no sounds and no colors. Everything there - earth, trees, people, water and air - is painted in the most plain color. ”

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