Topic : Discuss in detail how American filmmakers Edwin Porter and D.W Griffith built on early films by the Lumiere brothers and George Melies. Use examples from the oeuvre of each filmmaker to substantiate your argument. This essay will outline an introduction to the premature years of motion pictures and developments that helped shape cinema as we know it today. This paper will explore the roles of the early pioneers and the extent to which their contributions shaped cinema. In particular, it will look at how E.S Porter and D.W Griffith improved on the early years of cinema as result of influences from Louis and Auguste Lumiere and George Melies. The 18th century has marked the commencement of the innovation of cinematography. The invention of cinema owes its existence to a few investors and scientists who are broadly known for laying down its foundation. Among those pioneers are the Lumiere brothers who were some of the earliest contributors to cinema, inventing the first real film camera called the "cinematographe", which effectively functioned as a camera, projector and printer all in one (Barnauw, 1993:6). Thus giving rise to the art of film making. Initially, in the early years of cinema since there was no developed structure [or language] to tell cinematic stories, the early Lumiere brother?s films such as Workers leaving the Lumiere factory (1895) and The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895), were composed of a single shot, no camera movement and only one continuous action from beginning to end (Obalil, 2007). Also since the camera was fixed and captured only what were before its lens without any manipulation these films ... ... middle of paper ... ...ieved by the 08/02/2008. http://www.earlycinema.com/timeline/index.html: retrieved by the 08/02/2008. Knight, A. The Liveliest Art, Mentor Books, New American Library, (1957). p.25. Larson, E.H. George Melies, (2006). [Online] Available at http://www.nwlink.com/~erick/silentera/Melies/melies.html Lenin, M. Griffith classic: the making of birth of a nation, (2004). [Online] Available at http://www.leninimports.com/dw_griffith.html Louis Lumière, The Cinematograph, La Nature, 12 October 1895. In Auguste and Louis Lumière. (Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, ed.) Letters. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. p.302. Obalil, L.J. Edwin S. Porter, (2007). [Online] Available at http://www.filmreference.com/Directors-Pe-Ri/Porter-Edwin-S.html Smith, D. Cinematic Reflections, (2005). [Online] Available at http://www.cinematicreflections.com/BirthofaNation.html
My initial idea for this paper was to focus on the technical aspects of the film—the hybrid of animation and live action. I first saw this technique used in The Three Caballeros (Ferguson & Young, 1944) and was going to research this film, but the amount of literature on t...
‘12 years a Slave, award winning film director Steve McQueen associates making a film to, "writing a novel – you're telling a story. " This message is powerful and defines the true purpose of filmmaking that is, ‘to tell a story.’(Victorino) Hollywood has capitalized on the aspect of visual storytelling first introduced in 1985 by the Lumiere brothers with their first movie ever made for projection -- Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory. They (Hollywood), then designed a Studio System called Classic Hollywood Cinema to Finance, Organize, Produce, Market, Distribute, and Exhibit movies for financial gain while entertaining movie goers. This term was coined by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger and Kristin Thompson to define Hollywood’s film making during the period of 1913 to 1960. From the D.W. Griffith successful 1913 first movie ever shot in Hollywood, ‘In Old California’, to the James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar grossing over 760 million in the box office, this process continues to be effective and lives on today.
Since the late 1890’s films have been constantly changing the history of pop culture and the way people view war, politics, and the world as a whole. As the timeline of the history of film progressed, there were many different phases: gothic noir, slapstick comedy, tragedy vs. love, romance, and many more. Towards the more recent times, the central ideas of films started drifting to the greatness of the directors. Directors such as Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and many more were noted as outstanding directors of action and cinematography. In this paper I will speak about Wes Anderson, Martin Scorsese, and the ever so infamous Baz Luhrmann. These directors have changed the way filmmaking has been and will be looked at from this point on.
As cinematography was aimed for its peak in the 1920’s, opportunity was great as the film industry was subsidized, whic...
Technology has had a huge impact on the world, especially the film industry. It has had a long past and as the technology advances, it becomes more and more realistic. It all began with the first machine patented in the United States that showed animated pictures or movies. It was called the “wheel of life” or “zoopraxiscope” and was patented in 1867 by William Lincoln. Moving drawings or photographs were watched through a slit in the zoopraxiscope. However, modern motion picture making began with the invention of the motion picture camera. Frenchman Louis Lumiere is usually credited with the creation of the first motion picture camera in 1895, but several others were invented around the same time. What Lumiere invented was a portable motion picture camera, film processing unit and a projector called the Cinematography, all three functions in one invention. This made motion pictures very popular and it is also known as beginning the motion picture era. In 1895, Lumiere and his brother were the first to present projected, moving, photographic pictures to a paying audience of more than one person. However, they were also not the first to project film. In 1891, the Edison Company successfully demonstrated the Kinetoscope which allowed one person at a time to view moving pictures. Also in 1896, he showed the improved Vitascope projector and it was the first commercially successful projector in the United States.
American cinema has marveled audiences for over a century and during that timeframe there have been several advancements worthwhile of mentioning. The creation, introduction, and development of the camera is clearly one of the advancements which set the stage for films, beginning with the basic image to those utilizing multiple images in order to create movement. Then came the addition of sound into films which added another element for viewers to enjoy and finally the use of light to enhance the movement being displayed. For the most part, these techniques were rudimentary in nature until 1941 when the film Citizen Kane was released and forever changed the film industry. The remainder of this paper will analyze how Citizen Kane challenged traditional filmmaking techniques to revolutionize and benchmark the film industry for all production studios.
Films were a new exciting form of entertainment from their debut in the early 1900’s to today, the film making business hit a growth period in the 1920’s. It was a time when movies came and went quickly and films that had no pretense of being art were made in mass. During this time of rapid change in the film making business, a certain aspiring director began his dream of working with cinema. Eventually, the talented and mysterious director, Alfred Hitchcock, played a huge part in establishing his and others’ masterpieces as an art.
The aim of the essay is to look at early cinema and compare and contrast between the editing techniques used by various filmmakers. The essay will look at editing techniques the French Filmmaker Georges Méliès’ applied in his films A Trip to The Moon and The Vanishing Lady, as I move forward I will look at American Filmmakers and their films such as Edwin Porter’s The Great Train Robbery and D.W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and finally move to Russian Cinema in which I will look
With the discovery of techniques such as continuous editing, multiple camera angles, montage editing, and more, silent filmmaking developed from simple minute-long films to some of the most beautiful, awe-inspiring films that have ever been created—in only a few decades. In Visions of Light, someone alluded that if the invention of sound had come along a mere ten years later, visual storytelling would be years ahead of what it is today. This statement rings true. When looking at the immense amount of progress that was made during the silent era of films, one must consider where the art of film has been, where it is, and where it is
In the beginning, all films were short. Audiences were not aware of this as they gazed at the marvelous new form of entertainment. As the 20th century began to approach, films started to get even longer. The very first film was introduced to audiences in 1894 through an invention created by Thomas Edison called the Kinetoscope. This device was made for viewing slideshows individually. Most films of the time depicted celebrities, current world affairs and other scenes in one shot scenes. The best known film from this era was the Lumière brothers’ Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat which was filmed in 1895. This film depicted a locomotive hurtling towards the audience.
In this essay i am going to talk about the history of fim and the art movements which have a relationship to the cinematic modes of representation. the history of film began in the 1890s with the invention of the first motion picture camera. the first films were very short, usually less than one minute, and would usually be a single scene, from life or staged, of everyday life, public event or slapstick. there was no cinematic technique, no camera movements, and a flat compostition, like a stage. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, is credited with the invention of a practicalle form of celluloid strip containing a sequence of images. the basis of a method of photographing and projecting moving images. Following this Thomas Edison introduced two pioneer inventions at the 1893 Chicago world fair, the kinetograph and the kinetoscope. the kinetograph was the first practical movie picture cameras. it was designed for films to be shown by one individual at a time, through a peephole window on top of the device. the first film publically shown on it was "Blacksmith Scene", directed by Dickson and shot by Heise. It was produced at the Edison moviemaking studio, known as the Black Maria.
After reading the article “The Myth of Total Cinema” by Andre Bazin, it opens the discussion of the origins of cinema whether to consider the economic and technical evolution impacted inventor’s imagination causing fortunate accidents that created a phenomenon in cinema. However, this leads inventors to compete with each other over techniques of bringing their imagination to reality but, all agreed that cinema needed to be transparent, flexible, and have a resistant base that was capable of capturing an image instantly.
The concept of ‘cinema of attractions’ encompasses the development of early cinema, its technology, industry and cultural context. The explanation of how it is perceived by early cinema audiences is closely related to the effects of history at that time. How Gunning coined the term ‘cinema of attractions’ pertains to the history of the film industry at the turn of the 20th century and his interpretation of the audience and their reaction film technology. Single shots, the process of creating a moving picture and the juxtaposition of limited techniques, coupled with a new invention of showing a moving picture.
Society in most places was beginning to change in the late 1800s. The cinema was invented in 1895 a few years after Art Nouveau began. There was technological progress the industrial era was co...
“As regards montage, derived initially as we all know from the masterpieces of Griffith, we have the statement of Malraux in his Psychologie du cinema that it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language” (Bazin 24). This tool was, at the time, the best and most sophisticated available to the director, so that was the tool most often used. This routine use resulted in a deep understanding of what film montage could produce successfully. “Through the contents of the image and the resources of montage, the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on the spectator. By the end of the silent film we can consider this arsenal to have been full” (Bazin 26). While this tool was able to produce great works it proved to be limiting. Montage was a film form, which produced great films of a specific variety. However, film still had a long way to go before it reached