Introduction to Film Cinema and Literature

1) EVOLUTION OF FILM In 1873, Leland Stanford, a former California Governor needed help in winning a bet that he had made with a friend. Stanford was convinced that horse in gallop had all four feet off the ground and was bent on proving it. Since it was impossible to prove such a thing by merely watching a horse race, he employed the services of Eadweard Muybridge, who was a well-known photographer. Muybridge worked on the problem for four years and finally came up with a solution in 1877. He arranged a series of still cameras along a stretch of race track and each camera took its picture as the horse sprinted by. The result of the photographs proved Leland Stanford right thereby making him win the bet. But rather than forgetting about the event, Muybridge had a brilliant idea which was inspired by the pictures of the horse. He therefore began taking pictures of numerous kinds of human and animal actions. Those pictures were displayed through the Zoopraxiscope, a machine that Muybridge invented for projecting slides onto a distance surface (fig.1.1). People saw pictures as if they were in motion when the pictures were rapidly projected in sequential slides. This was made possible due to a physiological phenomenon known as persistence of vision in which images our eyes gather are retained in the brain for about 1/24 of a second. This means that if photographic frames are moved at 24 frames a second, people perceive them as actually in motion. In 1888, Muybridge finally met Thomas Edison who was a prolific inventor. Edison quickly saw the scientific as well as the economic potentials of Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, so he appointed his top scientist, William Dickson, and gave him the task of developing a better projector. Dickson identified the limitations of the Zoopraxiscope, which included shooting numerous still photos, then putting them in sequential order and then redrawing the images they held onto slides. Therefore, he combined Hannibal Goodwin’s