History of Cinema!

  Jean Epstein (1897-1953) Born in Warsaw, which was then part of the Russian Empire. His father was French and his mother was Polish. He grew-up in Switzerland. He called France his home once he began medical school. He changed his mind to become a director when he worked part-time as Auguste Lumière’s translator.   Cœur fidèle   Cœur fidèle (1923). Faithful Heart in English. One of his first films. A woman looks at the camera who is uncertain of herself. It’s a melodrama with heightened emotion. Strange camera angles. Superimposed images. The camera loves to stay at the face of the characters. A POV sequence on a carousel that will leave you dizzy. The sequence did influence the climax in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train.   The Three-Sided Mirror The Three-Sided Mirror (1927). Story of a young man who plays with the feelings of three women. He loves a sports car a little too much. We are shown his day-dreams and his past juxtaposed with what is h...

  Bio: Glasgow, Scotland! Born on December 5th, 1969. She doesn't really talk about her childhood. She studied film and photography in college. She was also trained as a camera person there. During her early does as a filmmaker she did DP work for her first short, as well as the writing called, Small Deaths . Small Deaths was her graduation film and won her a Cannes prize in 1996. She did DP duty on two other films that weren't hers. She worked again just directing and writing two more shorts, Kill the Day and Gasman . Small Deaths , Kill the Day , and Gasman all have themes she is well-known for: cause & effect, family, thinking of the past, slices of life, children & teens.   Ratcatcher , then, came next in 1999. It was her first feature. She won all kind of awards for it and it has since been given the Criterion treatment. There was a new voice in town! She channels Ken Loach's Kes for it as they both deal with a child trying to escape the harshness of ...

"The Land of Smiles" The royal family took a notice of film when the Lumi è re Brothers were going around the world showing their work. Early movies in this country were various informational documentaries. The first true movie with a narrative came out in 1923 called, Miss Suwanna of Siam . This movie has sadly been lost and only some stills remain.   Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) was an important movie. “Chang” is Thai for “elephant” and the national animal of the country. Before they made King Kong , the American filmmakers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, came to direct this movie that has a man battling animals. Most things wouldn't fly today since real animals are killed on camera and animals are put in danger. Elephants have a stampede through a house, even. It went on to be one of the most popular movies of the late 1920s and was one of the few Hollywood movies to be shot on location at that time. After the success of Chang , the c...

  Auguste (1862-1954) and Louis (1864-1948) Lumière are the people who are credited with starting the film industry in 1895. They made money off manufacturing photographic plates. They invented the Cinematograph in Lyon, France, that was modeled on a sewing machine. With the Cinematograph a person could record, develop, and then project a movie. A person would have to crank it to make it work. It could only film less than a minute at a time and no one could make an edit. It used 35 mm film. It could shoot 16 frames a second, which stayed the norm until around the mid-1920s where the frame rate changed to 24fps (which is what it still is). These brothers made it very easy to make a film and, therefore, made it commercial.  Cinematograph In the day after Christmas in 1895, the brothers held a public gathering for 200 people at the Le Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris to showcase ten movies that they have made. The first one that was shown was Workers Leavin...

  Thomas Edison (1847-1931) was the Steve Jobs of his day. He had a factory built to create moving pictures. William K.L. Dickson (1860-1935) was the brains. He was born in France but raised in Scotland. His family moved to the US in 1879 and not long after he was working for Edison. At Edison’s factory in 1891, he created an early motion picture camera called the Kinetoscope. The Kinetoscope made it possible for one person to look into the camera and see moving images. Dickson called them peepshows ( Bioshock Infinite uses them and you can look into them). He, also, made the Mutoscope, which was a better version of the Kinestoscope. He did leave Edison’s employment and founded his own company, where he made softcore peepshows. Kinetoscope     Mutoscope Some of Dickson's work: Monkeyshines (1980) Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894)   Blacksmith Scene (1893)   The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894) William Heise (1847-1910) (on the left) helped Dickson a lot of tim...