In 1891, Thomas Edison invented the moving motion picture recorder, and everything changed. The active motion picture film uses an engine in front of the light source to rotate the film strip. In a small room, a light source projects a picture from film onto a screen. When active film films became increasingly a business opportunity, many investors began to make improvements to Edison's original equipment. One of these manually operated improved devices is called kinora, which was invented by the Lumiere brothers in the 1930s and was extremely successful.
In the photo studio run by their father, Lumiere the Elder, the Lumière brothers developed the "moving cinema machine" while their father, who had learned photography techniques, took charge of the photographic equipment factory. The Lumiere brothers, who came from a cinematographer background, treated the film from the beginning with a completely different mindset from Edison. This difference is not only manifested in the invention of "projection" and the improvement of film machinery and equipment, but more prominently in the difference in the fundamental concept of time and space and the fundamental aesthetic difference in their film works.
As an inventor, Edison made great contributions to film. His development of film machines and installations laid the foundation for the birth of new art. His greater glory is to give this new art a charming, poetic, hallucinatory name - film. However, Edison's concept of film and this new art has great limitations.
First, most of the films that Edison provided him with the "cinematic mirror" were shot in a device he set up called a "black prison cart." In fact, his creation itself did not depart from the original model of "photo studio". In front of the "peeping mirror" that can only be viewed by one person, the "peeping" of the viewer is nothing more than repeating the photographer's "peeping" again and again. Secondly, dixon first completed about 50 works: "Bar Yan Scene", "Annabella's Dance", "Tooth Extraction", "Barber", "Bufaro Peel", etc., most of which are simply performing entertainment scenes such as dancing, boxing, juggling, and making games. The characters in the film are performed by actors hired by Edison for the camera, like "photos of the event". This is just a few small shows that use the model of stage drama to fiction.
In contrast, the Lumiere brothers adopted a more realistic attitude. They first got rid of the shackles of the enclosed artificial space that the photo studio photographer had, and moved towards a vast, open natural space. The content of the work is also to work harder to express and reproduce the things and lives that actually exist in real life, rather than to arrange and stage things and lives that do not actually exist for the camera.
In 1895, the Lumiere brothers Louis and Auguste invented a movie machine that surprised the world. This portable device is a combination of cameras, film processing rooms and cinematographs! The two brothers filmed film in the French countryside that could only be played for a few minutes at most. Then, they process and film on the spot! The following year, the old-fashioned cinema (another variant of the active cinema projector) announced the dawn of a new era of entertainment, which worked similarly to the active cinema, but with one essential difference: the image was projected onto a large screen in the room, rather than on a small screen in a small room. Since then, the first cinema has been born, the "Nickelodeon" in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
After more than a century of long development, movies and cassettes have become more complex. Engineers used film conveyor gears and reels to assemble the motion picture machine, making it easier for the film to move quickly in front of the light source. The length of the movie changed from a few minutes to an hour or even longer. By the end of the 1920s, people who often went to the movies could already enjoy sound movies with sound channels.
On December 28, 1895, the French Lumière brothers publicly screened films such as "Factory Gate" and "Train Station" in a café, which were confirmed by film history as the birth day of cinema, but even so, the world's first film was Louis Prince's "Landhay Garden Scene". In October 1888, the French inventor Louis Prince performed a landmark work in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, using his single-lens camera and Eastman Kodak's paper film to shoot the Roundhay Garden Scene and a street scene of leeds Bridge. That's a few years earlier than his competitors, like the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison. He failed to complete the public demonstration of the new invention in the United States as planned, as he mysteriously disappeared on a train on September 16, 1890. Film historians see him as the true father of early cinema.
Louis Prince
"Factory Gate" can be called the first advertising film, officially released on March 22, 1895. Outside the door, the camera records a natural and realistic scene of an off-duty worker walking out of the door, riding a bicycle, walking. The famous French film historian Georges Sadur said that "it still makes people feel a simple charm." "The gate is slightly to the right, and there is a small door on the left in the middle, which is black because the light is dim. The gate and the small door just form the golden section. The people who come out of the gate and the people who come out of the small door also form a balance of power in the composition. "Factory Gate" shows workers leaving the factory after work, followed by a carriage of two horses carrying the factory owners into the gate.