The Cinema The first moving pictures, developed i

The Cinema
    In today’s lecture, we are going to look at some of the important stages in the development of films. The first movie pictures were developed in 1890s by W. K. L. Dickson, an Englishman working in the USA. He called his system the kaleidoscope. It wasn’t the cinema we know now at all. The pictures were very small and only one person at a time could watch. The earliest kaleidoscope used sound separately recorded on a phonograph, an ancestor of gramophone and record player. But there were a lot of problems involved in getting the pictures and sound together, that is, synchronized. As a result, the kaleidoscope was popularized in its silent form. The same principle was developed by the Frenchmen called cinematographe, and between 1895 and 1900 they succeeded in exporting it to other parts of Europe, to India, Australia and Japan. The cinematographe used a large screen, but the film was shown very short, only but a minute long. Like the popularized kaleidoscope, it was a silent system.
    The early films were made with fixed cameras. This greatly limited what could be achieved. So an important advance was to use a moving camera which could turn from side to side and also move about to follow the action. The film The Great Train Robbery was the first important experiment in the use of moving cameras. It was made in 1903 by an American and lasted eight minutes. In the following years, films became much longer and screens got larger. Other refinements were introduced, too. But it was not until the early 20s that an effective sound system was developed.  Leader Forrest, another American, found ways to photograph sound waves which accompanied the action. This solved the major problem of sound-picture synchronization. Although the first company to make talkies rather than silent movies used the system quite different from the Forrest’s, it was his system that created the general norm. An odd consequence of having sound was that for a few years the camera once again had to be fixed. This was because there were sounds proved to reduce the noise of the mechanism and the soundproofing was so bulky that they could not easily move about. Once again for a time, the cinema looked like the theatre.
    The last radical change in cinema was the development of colour. Colour for photography had been possible from the 1860s but early films were normally black and white and any colour was painted on by hand, and this was an expensive, slow and not very effective technique. In 1922 the first real colour film was produced, using a two- colour system called technicolour. It was quite common at that time people filmed whole sequences in one colour and the attempts to mix colours to get realistic effects were not very successful. In 1932 technicolour was improved by the use of three main colours and the same system is still used today. Colour took longer to be generally accepted than sound. It was expensive and people often felt odd that it was less realistic than black and white. This was partly, of course, because the quality was not always very high, so the scenes could look peculiar. Since the 1930s, there have been many improvements in the techniques of cinema and the style of acting has changed a good deal. But after 50 years, the basics -- moving pictures, colour and sound are still the same.