The Invention of Moving Pictures ― The Dawn of Cinema

When the world’s first audience sat gazing at a screen in a darkened room, all that appeared on that white cloth was a single train gliding into a station. People, horses, the leaves of trees ― everything moved exactly as in reality. It was the first ‘moving picture’ humankind had ever held in its hands. Cinema, which now seems so ordinary to us, had a clear and definite age of beginning. At the close of the nineteenth century, from the moment photography, machinery, and light were bound together as one, the 120-year story of the screen reflecting the world began. In Episode 1, we trace the long, quiet dawn during which motion came to dwell in the still image.

The Dream of ‘Capturing’ Motion

The history of people longing to give motion to pictures was far older than cinema itself. Toys in which slightly different pictures were drawn on a spinning disc, so that the images appeared to move when peered at through slits, had been enjoyed in many places since the first half of the nineteenth century. They exploited persistence of vision, a property of the eye, to make still drawings appear to move. Yet these were, after all, pictures drawn by hand, and not the scenes of reality themselves.

The turning point arrived together with advances in photographic technology. In the 1870s, the American Eadweard Muybridge, seeking to answer the question of whether there is an instant when all four of a galloping horse’s legs leave the ground at once, is said to have lined up many cameras along the horse’s path and tried photographing it in sequence. Each frame was a still photograph, but lined up in order, they revealed motion broken into its parts. Carve motion into fine slices and capture it, then join the slices again, and it should appear to move ― this very idea became the foundation of cinema to come.

In time, what was wanted was no longer scattered cameras but a single machine that could photograph and project a continuous sequence of images. The maturing of techniques for fixing images onto transparent film gave a great push as well. The dream of capturing motion had come within reach at last.

Edison’s ‘Peep-Box’

One of the first to give that dream a practical form was the American inventor Thomas Edison. At Edison’s laboratory, his assistant William Dickson and others are said to have led the work of devising a system to photograph and play back moving pictures. What emerged from this was the camera called the Kinetograph and the device for viewing it, the Kinetoscope. This is said to date from around 1891, and the device is reported to have appeared at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Edison’s Kinetoscope had one notable feature, however. It was a system in which only a single person at a time could peer at the images inside through a viewing window on top of the box. Insert a coin and look through the window, and inside the box a short strip of film would turn, showing dancing or exercising figures in motion. It was certainly a groundbreaking experience, but it was at the same time a ‘private spectacle’ that only one person could enjoy at a time. From the later scene of the cinema, where many people share the same images in one place, there was still a distance.

1895: Light Cast Onto the Screen

From the peep-box to the large screen. Those who took this decisive step were the Lumière brothers of France, Auguste and Louis. Raised in a family that manufactured photographic dry plates, the two learned of Edison’s Kinetoscope and are said to have wondered whether its images might be shown not to one person but to many at once. The Cinématographe they completed was a light machine that played three roles in one: it was a camera, it could be used for developing, and it served as a projector as well. Shine a strong light through the images on the film and cast them large onto a white cloth ― this made it possible for a crowd to view the same images together in one room.

In 1895 the Lumière brothers obtained a patent for the Cinématographe, and that December, in a room of a café in central Paris, they are said to have held a paid screening. This day is generally taken as the ‘birth of cinema.’ Workers leaving the factory gates, a baby’s meal, a scene of sea-bathing ― not special stories, but ordinary, everyday scenes of a few dozen seconds moved, for the first time, before many people. Best known among them is a single piece in which a train glides into a station. The anecdote that the audience, startled by the train coming toward the screen, rose from their seats has been passed down, but how far this was actually true is disputed, and some regard it as a legend that swelled in later years. In any case, the experience of familiar reality revived as light shook people’s hearts deeply.

Because the Cinématographe was light and easy to carry, the Lumière brothers sent technicians out across the world, having them film and screen at the same time. By 1896 these images crossed to London and New York, and the ‘moving picture’ reached Japan as well. Landscapes and people of various places were filmed and then projected in other lands. Cinema became, soon after its birth, an art that crossed borders.

The one who pointed early toward an answer was Georges Méliès of France, who had once been a stage magician. From devices such as stopping the camera midway through filming to swap out his subjects, he gave rise to special-photography techniques that made things vanish or transform. In ‘A Trip to the Moon,’ released in 1902, he depicted a fanciful journey shot to the moon by cannon, joining elaborately crafted backdrops and dozens of scenes, and proclaimed boldly that film could tell not only records of reality but stories of the imagination too. The moving picture, begun from a few dozen everyday seconds, thus began to grow into a vessel that holds story. In time the screen would take wing toward a great art that carries laughter and tears.