Early films consist solely of images and have no sound, hence the name silent film. To depict what was happening on the screen, text panels were shown from time to time, reproducing the most important lines of dialog and briefly guiding the audience through the story.
When film became popular around the turn of the 20th century, it was disparaged by many critics as a lesser art form. It was also considered potentially harmful to both the eyes and nerves. A number of theories emerged about how people exposed to moving images could be harmed and become a danger to those around them.
As part of the degrading view, film was portrayed as a substitute for theater and entertainment for the underclass excluded from the rest of the arts. However, in her essay Theorizing the Cinema, the Masses, and the Nation, Sabine Hake argues that class had no clear connection with the target audiences of early cinema, but that it was generally people seeking relaxation and entertainment who were drawn to the cinema. However, one group seemed to be over-represented, and that was younger working-class women, who in the movies could experience something that compensated for what was denied them in real life.
However, film would later gain the status of the “seventh art form” and film historian Ronald Bergan likens film and its early appeal to “a magic carpet that in an instant flies the audience away from the harsh realities of life.” This is still very much the case today, even if audiences have become accustomed to the moving image medium in a different way.
The Starting Point of Film History and the Precursors of the Cinematograph
The starting point of cinema is usually attributed to the Lumière brothers’ cinematograph, which they introduced in 1895. The very first film is considered to be The Workers Leave the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La Sortie des usines Lumière), shown on December 28, 1895.
However, it is wrong to say that the film came about through a single innovation – the Lumière cinematograph also had its predecessors. It has been pointed to roots as distant as the shadow play in China that emerged around 100 BC, where shadow images were shown on a white screen by placing a lamp behind and a person in between.
The prerequisite for film was the camera, and in the 11th century the camera obscura was invented, a kind of light lens that could depict reality in an image. It was rather a very dim and blurred image. The first real photographs were only taken in the 19th century.
The natural progression was moving pictures and the first step came when Thomas Alva Edison invented the method of using cellulose nitrate film and small pieces of film could then be viewed in a viewing cabinet (kinetoscope). But it is the cinematograph that is considered the real starting point of film history.
Film screenings could initially take place in a variety of settings (the first screening took place in a café), but soon the first movie theaters would be built in France. The French model would soon be copied in other parts of Europe and in North America. The 4,000-seat Capitol Theater in New York became the largest cinema in the world when it opened in 1919 (the word cinema comes from the Greek words bios for life and grapho for drawing). In Sweden, the first cinemas were built in 1905, although films had been shown earlier under more makeshift conditions.
The Early Development of Cinema
The first film, The Workers Leave the Lumière Factory in Lyon, consisted only of what is indicated in the title. Films at this time lasted only a few seconds or minutes. But as the medium evolved, longer stories began to be told in moving images and more of the visual possibilities were exploited – one Lumière film shows the demolition of a wall, but in reverse, creating the first ever special effect in film.
The Lumière brothers made films that today would be called documentaries. Considered by many to be the first to create films with the ambition not only to depict what was happening in front of the camera but to create a story and a visual world of their own, Georges Méliès was the first to do so. He shot films in a studio and was responsible for several cinematic innovations.
His earliest films were primitive in several respects. Film sequences were shot in their entirety with a stationary camera. The motionless camera made the shot static, with the people involved filmed in full figure.
The development did not last long, however, and soon moving cameras and alternating frame sizes were introduced. Films began to be edited and the action became part of the medium. In The Great Train Robbery (1903), audiences saw for the first time a film in which the action took place in two different locations at the same time, using shots that were edited and shown alternately.