Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Camera
Eadweard Muybridge’s work on series photography
grew out of a $25,000 bet. In 1872 a businessman and
former governor of California, Leland Stanford, hired
Muybridge, an English photographer and inventor, to
show that at some point galloping horses lifted all four
hooves off the ground. Muybridge proved this in 1877
when he set up a series of cameras along a Sacramento
racetrack and attached the cameras’ shutters to wires that
were tripped by the horse as it passed by. The result of
this experiment was a series of images of continuous
motion broken down into individual photographic units.
However, before this process could be applied toward
motion picture photography, Muybridge’s multiple cameras
needed to be condensed into a single camera. This
was accomplished by French scientist Étienne-Jules
Marey (1830–1904), whose 1882 invention, the chronophotographic
gun, could shoot pictures at a rate of twelve
images per second. The chronophotographic gun originally
used a circular, rotating glass plate on which the
images were imprinted, but Marey soon began using
paper roll film, which allowed for more exposures at a
faster rate. Like Muybridge, Marey was primarily interested
in series photography for the purpose of studying
motion, and not in the tremendous entertainment potential
of motion pictures.
By the late 1880s numerous scientists and inventors
from around the world were working to develop a camera
that could record motion. In 1891 American inventor
Thomas A. Edison (1847–1931) applied for a patent for
a motion picture system developed primarily by his laboratory
assistant, William Kennedy Laurie (W. K. L.)
Dickson (1860–1935). The system featured a camera
called the Kinetograph (from the Greek for ‘‘motion
recorder’’) and a viewer called the Kinetoscope (from
the Greek for ‘‘motion viewer’’). The Kinetograph used
flexible celluloid film that had been introduced to the
market in 1889 by American businessman and entrepreneur
George Eastman (1854–1932). Dickson and Edison
included an intermittent mechanism in the camera so
that each frame would stop before the lens long enough
for the shutter to open and expose the film, and perforations
were added to the filmstrip to ensure that the film
would be advanced by regular intervals. The intermittent,
or stop-motion, device and the perforations in the filmstrip
were essential components of the motion picture
camera, because without the ability to stop the film the
images would be blurred. An intermittent device was first
used by Marey in 1888, and stop-motion mechanisms
ultimately became a standard element in both cameras
and projectors. The perforations in the film made it
possible for a clawed gear to hook on to the film and
pull it in front of the lens, one frame at a time, ensuring
synchronization of the filmstrip and shutter. This technology
is still used in modern motion picture cameras.
At first, Edison was not interested in moving pictures
as an entertainment form in their own right.
Instead, his intention was to use the Kinetograph to
provide images to accompany his popular phonograph,
although his efforts to synchronize sound and image on
the two machines were ultimately unsuccessful. Edison
felt that it would be more profitable to show his movies
on individual viewing machines rather than projecting
them before an audience, and with this in mind, he
introduced the Kinetoscope, a machine that allowed
individuals to watch short films of about fifty feet
(approximately thirty seconds). Kinetoscope parlors,
where people could pay around twenty-five cents to view
these short films or listen to recorded sound on individual
phonographs, began appearing around the country in
1894.
While Edison’s laboratories were perfecting the
Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, a pair of French brothers,
Auguste Lumière (1862–1954) and Louis Lumière
(1864–1948), were developing an apparatus that could
be used as a camera, printer, and projector. This
machine, called the Cinématographe, was completed in
1895. The Lumières’ machine was technologically similar
to Edison’s Kinetograph in its use of intermittent motion
and perforated film. The primary difference between the
two machines was that along with the ability to record
images, the Cinématographe could also print and project
the film. Also, the Cinématographe was hand-cranked
and lightweight, making it possible for the Lumières to
take their camera on location and film short documentaries,
or actualités, involving scenes from everyday life.
Some of the popular actualités from 1895 include La
Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière (Workers Leaving
the Lumière Factory), L’Arrivée d’un train à la Ciotat
(Arrival of a Train), Le Déjeuner de bébé (Feeding the
Baby), and L’Arroseur arrosé (The Sprinkler Sprinkled ).
By contrast, the Kinetograph weighed several hundred
pounds due to Edison’s insistence that it run on electricity,
necessitating a heavy battery. Because of this,
Edison’s early films were shot entirely in his studio, and
generally consisted of staged scenes involving dancers,
acrobats, strongmen, and popular actors and vaudevillians
of the day. Also unlike Edison’s films, which were
meant to be viewed individually on Kinetoscopes, the
films created on the Cinématographe were projected on
a screen in front of an audience. On 28 December 1895
the Lumière brothers gave an exhibition of their actualités
at the Grand Café on the Boulevard des Capucines in
Paris, charging one franc admission; this was the first
commercial exhibition of films projected for an audience.
Edison responded to the success of the Cinématographe
and other portable cameras in 1896, when he developed a
180 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM