The history of film chronicles the artistic and cultural development of a visual art form that uses film technologies that began in the late 19th century, influenced by the existing screen culture of magic lantern shows, and by traditions in photography, theater, and other popular media.
The advent of film as an artistic medium is not clearly defined. There were moving picture screenings long before the commercial, public screening of ten Lumière brothers' short films in Paris on 28 December 1895, which has generally been regarded as the breakthrough of projected cinematographic motion pictures. The earliest films were typically in black and white, under a minute long, without recorded sound, and consisted of a single shot from a steady camera. The first decades saw film move from a novelty, to an established mass entertainment industry, with film production companies and studios established throughout the world. Conventions toward a general cinematic language developed, with film editing, camera movements and other cinematic techniques contributing specific roles in the narrative of films.
Popular new media, including television (mainstream since the 1950s), home video (1980s), and the internet (1990s), influenced the distribution and consumption of films. Film production usually responded with content to fit the new media, technical innovations (including widescreen (1950s), 3D, and 4D film), and more spectacular films to keep theatrical screenings attractive. Systems that were cheaper and more easily handled (including 8mm film, video, and smartphone cameras) allowed for an increasing number of people to create films of varying qualities, for any purpose including home movies and video art, outside the conventions of the production systems of big studios. The technical quality tended to be lower than professional movies, but improved with digital video and affordable, high-quality digital cameras. Improving over time, digital production methods became more popular during the 1990s, resulting in increasingly realistic visual effects and popular feature-length computer animations.
Various film genres have emerged during the history of film, and enjoyed variable degrees of success.
Precursors
The use of film as an art form traces its origins to several earlier traditions in the arts such as (oral) storytelling, literature, theatre, opera, and visual arts. Cantastoria and similar ancient traditions combined storytelling with series of images that were shown or indicated one after the other. Predecessors to film that had already used light and shadows to create art before the advent of modern film technology include shadowgraphy, shadow puppetry, camera obscura, and the magic lantern.
Around 1790, old traditions of charlatans and entertainers using camera obscura or magic lantern to project images of demons or ghosts were further developed into a type of multimedia show known as phantasmagoria. These popular shows entertained audiences using mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolves, live actors, smoke (on which projections may have been cast), odors, sounds and even electric shocks. While the earliest magic lantern shows were often designed to frighten viewers, advances by projectionists allowed for creative and even educational storytelling that could appeal to wider family audiences. New magic lantern techniques such as the use of dissolving views allowed for smoother transitions between two projected images and aided in providing stronger narratives, while chromatropes provided colourful animations of intricate abstract patterns.
In 1833, scientific study of a stroboscopic illusion in spoked wheels by Joseph Plateau, Michael Faraday and Simon Stampfer led to the invention of the Fantascope, also known as the stroboscopic disk or the phenakistiscope, which was popular in several European countries for a while. Plateau thought it could be further developed for use in phantasmagoria and Stampfer imagined a system for longer scenes with strips on rollers, as well as a transparent version (presumably associated with projection). Plateau, Charles Wheatstone, Antoine Claudet and others tried to combine the technique with the stereoscope (introduced in 1838) and photography (introduced in 1839) for a more complete illusion of reality, but until innovations in photo-sensitive chemicals and technologies to exchange the pictures allowed sharp recordings of sequences, such experiments relied on stop motion techniques to depict simple periodic movements.
With the 1878 publication of The Horse in Motion cabinet cards, Eadweard Muybridge introduced a method to record motion sequences that became known as chronophotography. Muybridge and later chronophotographers, like Étienne-Jules Marey, Georges Demenÿ, Albert Londe, and Ottomar Anschütz, almost exclusively used the technique for scientific study of locomotion of animals and humans. In 1880, Muybridge started lecturing on animal locomotion and used his Zoopraxiscope to project animations of the contours of his recordings, traced onto glass discs. In 1887, Anschütz started presenting his chronophotographic recordings in motion with his Electrotachyscope, displaying short loops on a small milk glass screen. By 1891, he had started mass production of a more economical, coin-operated peep-box viewing device of the same name that was exhibited at international exhibitions and fairs, including the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, or for longer periods at for instance the Berlin Exhibition Park (with nearly 34,000 paying visitors in summer 1892), at The Crystal Palace in London, and in several U.S. stores. Shifting the focus of the medium from technical and scientific interest in motion to entertainment for the masses, he recorded wrestlers, dancers, acrobats, scenes of everyday life, and probably some staged comical sequences. Extant records suggest some of his output directly influenced later works by the Edison Company, such as the 1894 film Fred Ott's Sneeze.
From October 1892 to March 1900, inventor Émile Reynaud exhibited his Théâtre Optique ("Optical Theatre") film system at the Musée Grévin in Paris. Reynaud's screenings of animated stories such as Pauvre Pierrot and Autour d'une cabine were accompanied by live music, songs and some synchronised sound effects, and attracted over 500,000 visitors over the course of 12,800 shows.
Edison's Kinetoscope peep-box viewer, mostly developed by lab assistant William Kennedy Dickson, was introduced to the public in 1893, with images on celluloid loops showing about half a minute of motion picture entertainment, mostly performed by well-known vaudeville acts in the company's Black Maria studio. The Kinetoscope quickly became a global sensation with multiple viewing parlors across major cities by 1895. As the initial novelty of the images wore off, the Edison Company was slow to diversify their repertoire of films and waning public interest caused business to slow by Spring 1895. To remedy declining profits, experiments, such as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film, were conducted in an attempt to achieve Edison's original goal of combining the phonograph with visual recordings. Limitations in syncing the sound to the visuals, however, prevented widespread application. During that same period, inventors began advancing technologies towards film projection that would eventually overtake Edison's peep-box format.
On 25, 29 and 30 November 1894, Anschütz projected moving images from Electrotachyscope discs on a large screen in the darkened Grand Auditorium of a Post Office Building in Berlin. From 22 February to 30 March 1895, a commercial 1.5-hour program of 40 different scenes was screened for audiences of 300 people at the old Reichstag and received circa 4,000 visitors.
Novelty era (1890s – early 1900s)
Early projection, proliferation of actualities and newsreels
Throughout the late 19th century, several inventors such as Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Louis Le Prince, William Friese-Greene, and the Skladanowsky brothers developed devices that could capture and project moving images. The scenes in these experiments primarily served to demonstrate the technology itself and were usually filmed with family, friends or passing traffic as subjects. Initial advertisements promoted the devices used to screen films rather than the films themselves. As the technologies became more familiar to audiences, their potential for capturing and recreating events was exploited primarily in the form of actualities and newsreels. Actualities began as a "series of views" that often contained shots of beautiful and lively places or performance acts. During the creation of these films, cinematographers often drew upon previously established aesthetic values, such as framing. Due to the short length (often only one shot) of many actualities, catalogue records indicate that production companies marketed to exhibitors by promoting multiple actualities with related subject matters that could complement each other. To enhance the viewers' experience, showings could be accompanied by live musicians in an orchestra, a theatre organ, live sound effects and commentary spoken by the showman or projectionist. Films were mostly screened inside temporary storefront spaces, in tents of traveling exhibitors at fairs, or as "dumb" acts in vaudeville programs.
The early era of filmmaking, dubbed "the cinema of attractions" by film historian Tom Gunning, offered a relatively cheap and simple way of providing entertainment to the masses, with relatively little attention to story-telling. Film was rarely recognized as an art form by exhibitors or audiences. Regarded by the upper class as a "vulgar" and "lowbrow" form of cheap entertainment, films largely appealed to the working class and were often too short to hold any strong narrative potential.
The first paying audience for a motion picture gathered at Madison Square Garden to see a staged actuality that purported itself to be a boxing fight filmed by Woodville Latham using a device called the Eidoloscope on May 20, 1895. Commissioned by Latham, the French inventor Eugene Augustin Lauste created the device with additional expertise from William Kennedy Dickson and crafted a mechanism that came to be known as the Latham loop, which allowed for longer continuous runtimes and was less abrasive on the celluloid film.
The first public screening by Auguste and Louis Lumière, on December 28, 1895, consisted of ten films and lasted roughly 20 minutes. It mainly presented actualities, such as Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, but the show also included the staged comedy L'Arroseur Arrosé. The Cinématographe was an instant success, bringing in an average of 2,500 to 3,000 francs daily by the end of January 1896. Following the first screening, the order and selection of films were changed often. Following the success of their 1895 screening, The Lumière brothers sent cameramen across the world to capture new subjects for presentation. After the cinematographer shot scenes, they often exhibited their recordings locally and then sent them back to the company factory in Lyon to make duplicate prints for sale to whoever wanted them.
The Lumière brothers' primary business interests were in selling cameras and film equipment to exhibitors, not the actual production of films. Despite this, filmmakers across the world were inspired by the potential of film as exhibitors brought their shows to new countries.
In the process of filming actualities, especially those of real events, filmmakers discovered and experimented with multiple camera techniques to accommodate for their unpredictable nature.