History of Film
Plays and dances had elements common to films- scripts, sets, lighting, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores. They preceded film by thousands of years. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism applied, such as mise en scène. Moving visual images and sounds were not recorded for replaying as in film.
The camera obscura was pioneered by Alhazen in his Book of Optics (1021),[2][3][4] and was later perfected near the year 1600 by Giambattista della Porta. Light is inverted through a small hole or lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a projected moving image, indistinguishable from a projected high quality film to an audience, but it is not preserved in a recording.
In 1739 and 1748, David Hume published Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, arguing for the associations and causes of ideas with visual images, in some sense forerunners to the language of film.
Moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks in the 1830s with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer (Stroboscope) in Austria, Joseph Plateau (Phenakistoscope) in Belgium and William Horner (zoetrope) in Britain.
In 1877, under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The experiment took place on June 11 at the Palo Alto farm in California with the press present. The purpose of the exercise was to determine whether a running horse ever had all four legs lifted off the ground at once. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse 's, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse 's hooves. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second.[5]
Roundhay Garden Scene 1888, the first known celluloid film
The camera obscura was pioneered by Alhazen in his Book of Optics (1021),[2][3][4] and was later perfected near the year 1600 by Giambattista della Porta. Light is inverted through a small hole or lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a projected moving image, indistinguishable from a projected high quality film to an audience, but it is not preserved in a recording.
In 1739 and 1748, David Hume published Treatise of Human Nature and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, arguing for the associations and causes of ideas with visual images, in some sense forerunners to the language of film.
Moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks in the 1830s with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer (Stroboscope) in Austria, Joseph Plateau (Phenakistoscope) in Belgium and William Horner (zoetrope) in Britain.
In 1877, under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge successfully photographed a horse named "Sallie Gardner" in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The experiment took place on June 11 at the Palo Alto farm in California with the press present. The purpose of the exercise was to determine whether a running horse ever had all four legs lifted off the ground at once. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse 's, and each of the camera shutters was controlled by a trip wire which was triggered by the horse 's hooves. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second.[5]
Roundhay Garden Scene 1888, the first known celluloid film