Film hw 1 Essay

In chapter two of The Cultures of American Film, the main focus is the establishment of studios. As demand for films rose in the early 1900’s, production companies needed to expand; this lead to the creation of large scale studios.

Edwin S. Porter was a filmmaker at Edison Manufacturing Company from 1898 to 1909. As a technician and a showman, he knew what the audiences were interested in while he was a touring projectionist. He employed new techniques and camera movements to boost visual communication, which became basic modes of filmmaking. For the decade, Porter was the most important and influential filmmaker in the US.

Porter had found inspiration from various European film makers and had studied in depth the effect it would have on is target market, when he finally released is first attempt, The life of an American Fireman (1903), he hadn’t polished it as well as he had hoped. However when he released The Great Train Robbery it was clear that he had introduced the west to a new style of film making and changed how narrative was expressed within film forever.

The two films Citizen Kane by Orson Welles (1941) and Sullivan’s Travels by Preston Sturgis (1941) were both created in the same year, and are both considered “Classical Narrative Hollywood”. However, though both of these films follow the basic mold of classic Hollywood, they break the mold as well. Both movies incorporate new and innovative technology, shots and concepts that are new to this time, and essentially introduce them, changing the fil m industry forever.

The invention of the cinema began in the 1890’s in America through the exploration of “persistence of vision.” This is the technique in which the human eye can begins to see the illusion of movement when twenty-four picture frames are rapidly fired one after the other. “... later research demonstrated,

With this in place, the studios were able to focus on their main issue which was getting people back in the theatres. “They decided to enhance the overall theatre experience by introducing widescreen CinemaScope and VistaVision technologies which changed the shape of the movie-screen image, with aspect ratio going from 1:33:1 to a new standard of 1:85:1 for flat or non-scope prints and up to 2:35:1 for various Scope. “ (Lewis) 3-D films were also introduced to give the viewers a new experience unlike anything viewed on television. In addition to the new film formats, the studios invested in their audio components by purchasing the new stereophonic technology to create a unique viewing and listening

The Lumiere brothers debuted their first motion picture on their brand new invention, the Cinematographe, in 1895. Since then, the movie industry has soared on to become one of the most influential mediums of the 20th and 21st century. 100 years later, Sarah Moon’s documentary Lumiere and Company (1995) reflected on the impact of the Lumiere brothers’ first films using testimonies and cinematic tributes from multiple international directors. Focusing on two Lumiere films; Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), and Demolition of a Wall (1896), as well as two cinematic tributes from two different directors; David Lynch, and Merzak Allouache, the everlasting impact of the Lumiere films can be recognized in both a current context and the context of

Since even before its inception, the idea of “Hollywood” has been consistently concerned with a single underlying concept: spectacle. The earliest movies belonged to what film historians like Tom Gunning call a “cinema of attractions.” Primitive films, the earliest shorts from the late 1890s to the early 1900s, were directed at an audience looking for a new form of entertainment. The first films were screened as the final attraction of a vaudeville show, mostly in the lower-class areas of major cities. They were a far remove from the massive modern theaters we patronize nowadays. The vaudeville tradition continued into film as a showman would introduce the film as a single still image

I choose to discuss Edwin Porter’s film, The Great Train Robbery, from 1903. I have seen this film in both my Film Literature and Foundations in Video and Audio Production courses. Both classes, as well as this course’s text, stress the importance of this film in the evolution of the art form. Porter used various techniques that would become the normal process for future film makers. This includes on-location shooting and frequent camera movements. The film is a silent film, with just a musical score. The primary editing technique that Porter and this film was recognized for, was narrative continuity. Prior to Porter, films were done in a consecutive order, where all events were played out in front of the camera. There was no implications

In the early years of post production, there was a distinct lack of editing within the film industry. Everything filmed was for the most part one continuous shot and lacking too much creativity in the post production region. Edwin Porter was one of the key founders that changed the way post production was addressed. Although he originally filmed following what is referred to as Aristotelian construction (Musser, 1991, p167) he began paying closer attention to how a story could be told more effectively through visual representation. Edwin began straying away from Aristotelian construction and instead opted to use cutting to help him create the story he wished to create. Whilst this was not an

Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles, was an exemplary and ground-breaking work. In narrative structure and film style, Welles challenged classical Hollywood conventions and opened a path for experimentation in the later 1940s. Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography and Welles’ use of low-key lighting are often discussed aspects of the movie. True, these were areas of innovation, but when watching the movie in class I was particularly struck by the use of camera movement, or “mobile framing” as described in Film Art. In this historical analysis, I will take a detailed look at how Welles and Toland use camera movement to develop and challenge the Hollywood style. By referring

“If Georges Méliès was the first to ‘push the cinema toward the theatrical way,’ as he claimed, then Edwin S. Porter was the first to push the cinema

Hollywood, the modern well oiled machine it is today started with soundless films with no story or plot. The first phase of films only focused on movement. Overtime, directors grew a desire to create stories, not just random action. Storytelling began in the early 1900s. In 1903 Edwin Porters created “The Great Train Robbery”, one of the first feature action films. Porter told a story of a robbery, chase and inevitable capture of the bad guys.

During the mid to late years of the 19th century, a new form of entertainment emerged. Film entered the stage of innovation. New marketing and technological innovations developed for film to become the art it is today. In the 1830s, Joseph Plateau designed the Phenakistoscope. This device had a picture in the middle of a wheel made with mirrors and small openings. When spun, the Phenakistoscope made the picture appear to move. The name changed to Zoetrope in the 1860s and producers advertised the product as an accessory every home needed (Dixon & Foster, 2008). Later inventions that preceded the first motion picture camera include: Henry Du Mont’s Omiscope, Henry R. Heyl’s Phasmatrope, Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoöpraxiscope, Etienne-Jules Marey’s fusil photographique and Eastman Kodak’s chronophotographs (Parkinson, 1997). With a design by Thomas Edison, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson built the first modern movie camera, the Kinetograph, in 1890 (Dixon & Foster, 2008). In 1895, Auguste and Louis Lumiére patented the Cinématographe, a machine that combined the engineering of a camera and a projector (Bergan, 2006). Businessmen capitalized on the growing need for a place to witness these brand new films, thus they charged people to see them in their living rooms (Potter, 2014). These creations made movie-making a reality.

Knowing this, Edison set out to make a motion picture machine. Edison saw no commercial value in it, which is somewhat ironic, but still decided to make it anyway. In an interview in 1887 he said, "It is possible to devise an instrument, which should do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." Edison assigned the aforementioned, William Kennedy Dickson to pursue the research and development of his idea. Dickson discovered is that they machine must use light. That may seem very obvious but light was fairly new and somebody had to come up with the idea it must be incorporated in Edison's idea. For film, Dickson used a 1 and ½ inch wide strip of celluloid. Celluloid was brittle and broke easily but it continued to be used. George Eastman discovered a better substance for film. It was called Eastman film. Eastman had developed the film for Edison's already invented kinetograph. So using that name, Dickson developed a machine he called the