A History Of The Cinema From Its Origins To 1970

To try to chart the origins of the cinema in terms of its inventors and inventions is to open up a maze of claims and counter-claims, of parallel discoveries and freakish anticipations. Even in the 1890s these claims were the source of a number of lawsuits over patents that make Dickens’s celebrated case of Jarndyce versus Jarndyce. in Bleak House, seem by comparison a model of legal simplicity.

Was it R. W. Paul in England or one of three sets of brothers-the Lathams in the United States, the Skladonovskys in Germany or the Lumieres in France — who gave the first film show? Or was it any one of a dozen other claimants? How do we distinguish, in fact, between a projection of moving images which is interesting and no more, and one which marks a new stage in technology ?

Watersheds, when looked at closely, become less and less distinctive. In 1888. Thomas Alva Edison, aided by W. K. L. Dickson, constructed the kinetoscope, a peep-show that ran fifty feet of moving film. Yet Edison’s discovery was not isolated. It depended on the film roll promoted by the inventor of the Kodak, George Eastman: and Eastman in turn had profited from Hannibal Goodwin’s recognition that celluloid would make a suitable base for the film strip. Who was the father of what, and where, and to whom ?

Again and again events appear to be marked by coincidence. Why was it that in 1839. quite independently of each other. Daguerre announced his invention of the daguerreotype. Bayard of his paper positives and William Henry Fox Talbot of his calotypes; all of them, by the way. potentially excellent forms of photography? And why in 1832 should Plateau and Stampfer, also unknown to each other, have simultaneously invented the phenakistoscope and the stroboscope, laboratory models that gave the illusion of moving images; and why did many other devices of a similar kind appear at this time?

The civilized world was fascinated by movement and the recording of movement. Machines had at last undermined the assumption that movement was of necessity linked to nature, to the power of the horse or the wind. Science had already shaken the belief in some immutable social and natural order, the great chain of being: and the steam engine, an autonomous source of energy, disturbed it even further. A favourite hero among the Romantic poets, Prometheus, had stolen the secret of lire from the gods: but Prometheus had been punished appallingly for his theft. By inference, accordingly, it was thought that the new technology, and the new ideas about the social order associated with it, would exact a heavy price. If the French Revolution had aroused fears as well as hopes about the nature of change. Stephenson’s Rocket, which was at first a cause for elation, shocked the country when, on its first run on the Liverpool-Birmingham line in 1830. it killed a Member of Parliament. William Huskisson. If Shelley in a long epic was to praise Prometheus’ defiance, his wife was to give voice in her novel Frankenstein to a far less agreeable view of human progress.

In this way the fascination with movement was charged with deep feeling. Yet the motives for this fascination, and the uses to which it was put, could not have been more varied. With hindsight it is possible to see how Kadweard Muybridge’s sequence photographs of the IS 70s (which he and the painter Meissonier set in motion on the zoopraxiscope) and l)r E. J. Marey’s chronophotography of the 1880s anticipated the cinema. But neither men saw (heir work in this light: and to separate their discoveries from the motives that lay behind their discoveries would be to give a mystifying account of how the cinema came about.

Darwin might have been pleased at the intricacy of this evolution, and astonished by its speed; for its mutations occurred in a time span of less than a century. It was to become the most influential form of entertainment the world had known: yet the wishes of showmen played only a small part in its development.

Its momentum came from the Industrial Revolution. Bertrand Russell once said that the effect of this Revolution had been “to make instruments to make other instruments, to make still other instruments ad infinitum’.’’ Edison modelled his kinetoscope on the phonograph on the principle that a system which recorded and replayed images might be arrived at by imitating one which recorded and replayed sounds. (In fact, the analogy turned out to be misleading.) In the same way, the investigation of the chemical constituents of matter had laid the ground for the discoveries of those emulsions and fixatives necessary to photography. J. H. Schultz. followed by Tom Wedgwood, son of the famous potter, demonstrated that silver nitrate could register light and shade: John Herschel discovered (in 1819) that silver salts could be dissolved in hypo: Blanquet Evrard improved the quality of these salts with albumin. Yet there was an interaction throughout society that makes it loo simple to say that the enunciation of theory led to its application which in turn led to its exploitation-though commercial urgency certainly concentrated the mind of inventors after Edison had more or less abandoned the kinetoscope, and showmen realized they could get round his inadequate patents.

Yet even if we stratify the various figures involved in this evolution as scientists, inventors and showmen, and even if we attempt to define their aims, and the perhaps haphazard cross-fertilizations between their differing interests, we shall miss the main source of pressure, which lay rather in a change of consciousness change of consciousness — a change that is related primarily to an understanding of visual experience. We can describe this change most dramatically by asking two questions: what was the missing link between Newton’s work on optics and the emergence of the film camera: and why should Daguerre have painted Diorama backcloths that looked like photographs long before he had invented the kind of photography known as the daguerreotype”

The missing link was an old science given a new direction: physiology applied to the Held of optics. In 1811 Charles Bell, in a pamphlet circulated among his colleagues, made an announcement which was to be confirmed publicly by Magendie in 1822 and which was to be known eventually as the Bell-Magendie law. Bell had discovered two kinds of nervous system: the sensory nerves which lead from the posterior roots of the spinal cord and the motor nerves which lead from the anterior roots of the spinal cord. ‘This dichotomy of nervous action into sensory and motor’, writes Edwin Boring, ‘reminded the physiologists that the mind’s sensations were as much their business as the muscles’ movements.4 The work of such scientists as Hermann von Helmholtz in analysing these sensations prepared a base for the emergence, in the mid 1870s, of a new science: that of experimental psychology.