EOTO

Motion Pictures

Video producer Craig Benzine said it best by describing film as being, "a universal language that let us tell stories about our collective hopes and fears, to make sense of the world around us and the people around us.”

In 1878 a man named Leland Stanford had bet with his friends involving how a horse runs. The differencing opinions were if at one point all four legs of the horse were off the ground or if there was always at least one. Twelve photography cameras were set up and in settling the bet, something far greater was discovered. When showing these pictures at a rapid speed, the motion picture was born.

Later Thomas Edison had his photographer, William Dickenson, find a way to make this process easier and with more film. He came up with a box that would run the film through it called the Kinetoscope, but one of the problems with it was only one person could view it at a time. That was until a german man named Ottomar Anschutz found a way to project the film. The first actual film was in 1888 called Roundhay Garden Scene, and film is a very loose term as it is only a few seconds of people in a garden. After this, film took off especially at the turn of the century with revolutionary motion pictures. 

Cupid Angling (1918) was a major step in the industry as it was the first film to be in color. Following that a few years later was The Jazz Singer (1927) which was the first film with sound. This art form now combined all art forms into one: photography, storytelling, painting, acting, poetry, theatre, music, etc.

And once it was seen this way, several artistic movements happened in cinema.

The German Expressionism movement of the late 1910s dealt with the more scary and somber aspects of filmmaking as many were inspired by the horrors and aftermath of war. This gave us movies like Nosferatu and Metropolis.

Later down the line, the French New Wave movement occurred in the late 1950s in which traditional filmmaking techniques were rejected and were more experimental. This is one of, if not the, most important movements in cinema. It had revolutionary artists making their own rules to make the films they wanted to see. Taboo subjects and editing techniques came from this movement, such as the idea of the montage.

America then had a New Wave of their own in the form of the New Hollywood movement of the mid-1960s. This gave young, fresh-faced filmmakers of the new generation the ability to come to prominence. Two films that kicked off this movement were The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde, both released in 1967. These movies paved the way for big manes like Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas.