MOVIES / MOTION PICTURE

Movie or Motion Picture, a series of images that are projected onto a screen to create the illusion of motion. Motion pictures—also called movies, films, or the cinema—are one of the most popular forms of entertainment, enabling people to immerse themselves in an imaginary world for a short period of time. But movies can also teach people about history, science, human behavior, and many other subjects. Some films combine entertainment with instruction, to make the learning process more enjoyable. In all its forms, cinema is an art as well as a business, and those who make motion pictures take great pride in their creations.

The images that make up a motion picture are all individual photographs. But when they appear rapidly in succession, the human eye does not detect that they are separate images. This results from persistence of vision, a phenomenon whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. Although we do not experience the images as individual photographs, we do notice the differences between them. The brain then perceives these differences as motion.

Motion pictures are recorded using specially designed cameras that capture the images on rolls of film. After being processed and printed, the film is run through a projector, which shines light through the film so that the images are displayed on a screen. Most movies have accompanying sound.

The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface. When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Théâtre Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes.

Inventors began to conceive of combining the principles of these moving-image devices with the photographic recording of actual movement soon after the development of still photography in the 1830s. The most famous experiment occurred in the 1870s in California, where railroad tycoon Leland Stanford hired British photographer Eadweard Muybridge to settle a bet on whether a galloping horse ever had all four feet off the ground. Muybridge set up 12 cameras along a racetrack and spread threads across the track with a contact to each camera’s shutter. Moving along the track, the horse broke the threads and caused a sequence of photographs to be taken. The photos showed the horse with all four feet off the ground, and Muybridge went on a lecture tour showing his photographs on a moving-image device he called the zoopraxiscope.

Muybridge’s endeavors stimulated French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey to devise equipment for recording and analyzing animal and human movement. He built what he called a chronophotographic camera that could take multiple images superimposed on one another. His work was aided in turn by developments in photographic materials. In 1885 American inventor George Eastman introduced sensitized paper roll “film” in place of the individual glass plates then in use. In 1889 Eastman replaced the paper roll with celluloid, a synthetic plastic material coated with a gelatin emulsion.

Legendary American inventor Thomas Alva Edison drew upon the work of Muybridge, Marey, and Eastman when he turned his attention to motion pictures in the late 1880s. In his laboratories in West Orange, New Jersey, Edison assigned to a British employee, William K. L. Dickson, the task of constructing a machine for recording actual movement on film and another machine for viewing the resulting images. By 1891 Dickson had produced a motion-picture camera, called the Kinetograph, and a viewing machine, dubbed the Kinetoscope.

The Kinetograph was operated by an electric motor that moved the celluloid film roll past the camera lens. Motor-driven cameras, which were bulky and stationary, were soon replaced by movable hand-cranked cameras. Dickson’s key contribution was a sprocket mechanism linked to the camera’s shutter, which momentarily stopped the film roll for each exposure. These separate still photographic images came to be called frames. Early cameras used a number of different speeds for exposing frames, but by the advent of sound film in the late 1920s the standard had become 24 frames per second.

In early 1893 Edison constructed a motion-picture studio on his laboratory grounds, dubbed the Black Maria by his staff who thought it resembled police patrol wagons known by that nickname. On May 9, 1893, he held the first public exhibition of films shot using the Kinetograph in the Black Maria. But only one person at a time could use his viewing machine, the Kinetoscope. This boxlike structure contained a motor-and-shutter mechanism similar to the camera’s. It ran a loop of positive film past an electric light source, illuminating a tiny image, which the viewer observed through a small window. Kinetoscope viewing parlors containing many machines for individual viewing began to open in cities in 1894. Edison and Dickson apparently gave little thought to a single machine that could project moving images to a large audience, something Reynaud had achieved in his Théâtre Optique. Reynaud, however, had displayed drawings rather than images photographed by a motion-picture camera.

In France, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, who ran a factory in Lyons that manufactured photographic equipment, sought to improve on Edison’s accomplishment. By 1895 they developed a lightweight, hand-held camera that used a claw mechanism to advance the film roll. They named it the Cinématographe, and they soon discovered that it could also be used to show large images on a screen, when linked with projecting equipment. Throughout 1895 they shot films and projected them for select groups. Their first screening for the general public was held in Paris in December 1895.

Elsewhere other inventors were also busy. In Germany, the brothers Emil and Max Skladanowsky devised an apparatus and projected films in Berlin in November 1895. In Britain, a machine developed by Birt Acres and Robert W. Paul was used to project films in London in January 1896. In the United States, a projector called the Vitascope was constructed around the same time by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Armat then entered into a commercial alliance with Edison to manufacture the Vitascope, and the device exhibited projected motion pictures in New York City in April 1896.

The Lumière brothers held a unique place among all these simultaneous efforts, since they were innovative filmmakers as well as inventors and manufacturers. The many films they made during 1895 and 1896, though very short, are considered pivotal in the history of motion pictures. Arroseur et arrosé (Waterer and Watered, 1896), a brief comedy drawn from a newspaper cartoon, shows a gardener getting drenched with a hose as the result of a boy’s prank. La sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory, 1895) and Arrivée d’un train en gare (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, 1896), which shows a train coming to a station and passengers getting off, were among the so-called actuality films—films that depicted actual events rather than a story told by actors—for which the Lumières became noted.

While the blockbuster dominated the economics of motion pictures screened in theaters in the years after 1975, the advent of home entertainment delivery systems had an equally profound effect on movie culture—perhaps the most striking impact of any technological change in the medium’s history. The first new system was the videocassette recorder (VCR), which could play prerecorded videotapes or record programs shown on television for later playback. At the same time, cable television systems vastly expanded the number of channels available to the home viewer along with access to recent movies (see Broadcasting, Radio and Television: Current Trends; Television: Cable Transmission). As these new technologies came into widespread use, on the horizon loomed the computer, offering possibilities for home viewing and as a tool in media production. The digital video disc, or DVD, became one of the major techniques for viewing movies on computers and also began replacing videocassettes as the major format for home viewing.