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Dickson Greeting (1891)

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Cinema Proper: From the Kinetograph to the Cinématographe, 1891-1895 In late 1880s Thomas Edison's employee in his Meno Park laboratory, William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson (1860 – 1935), invented the 35-mm perforated film and a intermittent-motion mechanism to advance, stop, expose, and advance the film one frame at a time, 16 frames per second. Dickson arguably shot the first motion picture with this device in the "Black Maria" studio on 20 May 1891. Unsurprisingly, it was a motion picture of himself standing in front of his own invention, testing it. This film was exhibited in another Dickson invention, the Kinetoscope, which was a peep-show projector for only one person to view at a time. The first exhibition of this kind of motion picture took place on 9 May 1893, at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

The story next moves to France, where Auguste and Louis Lumière were pursuing the goal of recording and then projecting the motion picture to a large audience. They followed the progress of Dickson-Edison and adopted the 35-mm sprocketed celluloid as the best solution to the film stock, and that standard is still in use today, although it has been supplanted by many other standards, from 70mm widescreen film to "1080p" digital video to "Real-D" stereoscopic. The Lumières had rolls of 35-mm hole-punched clear celluloid manufactured in New York City, and then applied their own light-sensitive emulsion to it in their photographic factory in the industrial city of Lyon, France. Like Dickson and Edison, they devised a catchment mechanism to move and still the film past the light-collecting lens. Unlike Dickson-Edison, however, they invented a fully portable, highly-compact camera, which doubled as the film projector. Edison had spent years building a massive, rotating studio to house a very non-portable kinetograph.

There were many other inventors of the motion picture, but the ultimate prize should go to the Lumière brothers for achieving what cinema became for the next 100 years: a medium that can be projected on large screens for many people to watch together, in public. That genre, not the peepshow machines that Edison produced for amusement parks and vaudeville houses, was the basis for the entire global motion picture industry until the advent of Television in the 1950s.

The Lumières began to make movies as we know them today, in 1895 with their Cinématographe, a combined camera and projector. With it they shot and exhibited the first motion picture as we know the genre today: one that is recorded on a continuous strip of film and projected, using the same film stock, on a screen that is viewed by many people simultaneously. That first movie, La Sortie de l'usine Lumière de Lyon (Workers leaving the Lyon Lumière Factory), marvelously introduces the essence of this new culture industry. Auguste and Louis chose first to film their own workers on whom the industry is based.

My account of motion pictures follows the cinematic industry workers through the workshops and landscapes that they inhabited. They include thousands of workers in thousands of roles, from writers and directors to actors and set designers; from artists and artisans to day-laborers. Early U.S. production arose close to the origins of the industry, the vaudeville venues of immigrant New York City and the hotbed of inventors and skilled artisans, and production facilities in Greater New York and New Jersey. Competing with Edison and the Lumière brothers, the Biograph Company, made most of its films from 1908 to 1912 in its New York City “studio,” a brownstone mansion at 11 East 14th Street. The leading director of those films was D. W. Griffith (1875-1948). Griffith and his many contemporaries produced an endless stream of “one-reelers,” silent sketches of every imaginable subject matter, from slapstick comedies to class conflict dramas about the injustices of the capitalist system, as in his A Corner in Wheat (Biograph (New York City, 1909).