A film, movie, or motion picture is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, emotions, or atmosphere through the use of moving images that are generally, since the 1930s, synchronized with sound and sometimes feature other sensory stimuli.
Films are produced by recording people and objects with cameras or by creating them using animation techniques and special effects. They comprise a series of individual frames, but when these images are shown rapidly in succession, the illusion of motion is seen by the viewer. Flickering between frames is not noticeable due to an effect traditionally known as persistence of vision, and now more specifically known as flicker fusion, whereby the visual system processes a sufficiently fast succession of pictures and interruptions into a steady image of averaged brightness.
Films are widely considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten, and inspire audiences. The visual elements of cinema need no translation, giving the motion picture a universal power of communication. Any film can become a worldwide attraction, especially with the addition of dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue. Films are also artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them.
The art of film has drawn on several earlier traditions in fields such as oral storytelling, literature, theatre, and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving or projected images include shadowgraphy, camera obscura, shadow puppetry, and magic lantern.
The stroboscopic animation principle was introduced in 1833 with the stroboscopic disc (better known as the phénakisticope) and later applied in the zoetrope (since 1866), the flip book (since 1868), and the praxinoscope (since 1877), before it became the basic principle for cinematography.
Experiments with early phénakisticope-based animation projectors were made at least as early as 1843 and publicly screened in 1847. Jules Duboscq introduced phénakisticope projection systems in France in the 1870s.
Photography was introduced in 1839, but initially photographic emulsions needed such long exposures that the recording of moving subjects seemed impossible. At least as early as 1844, photographic series of subjects posed in different positions were created to either suggest a motion sequence or document a range of different viewing angles. The advent of stereoscopic photography, with early experiments in the 1840s and commercial success since the early 1850s, raised interest in completing the photographic medium with the addition of means to capture color and motion. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published the idea to combine his invention of the phénakisticope with the stereoscope, as suggested to him by stereoscope inventor Charles Wheatstone, and to use photographs of plaster sculptures in different positions to be animated in the combined device. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented such an instrument as the "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope", but he only marketed it very briefly, without success. One Bïoscope disc with stereoscopic photographs of a machine is in the Plateau collection of Ghent University, but no instruments or other discs have yet been found.
In the late 1840s, the first examples of instantaneous photography came about. This provided hope that motion photography would soon be possible, but it took a few decades before it was successfully combined with a method to record series of sequential images in real-time. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge managed to take a series of photographs of a running horse with a battery of cameras in a line along the track and published the results as The Horse in Motion on cabinet cards. Muybridge, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschütz, and others, would create many more chronophotography studies. Muybridge had the contours of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with his zoopraxiscope in his lectures from 1880 to 1895.
Anschütz made his first instantaneous photographs in the early 1880s, developing a portable camera that allowed shutter speeds as short as 1/1000 of a second. The quality of his pictures was generally regarded as much higher than that of the chronophotography works of Muybridge and Marey. In 1886, Anschütz developed the Electrotachyscope, an early device that displayed short motion picture loops with 24 glass plate photographs on a 1.5 meter wide rotating wheel that was hand-cranked to a speed of circa 30 frames per second. Different versions were shown at many international exhibitions, fairs, conventions, and arcades from 1887 until at least 1894. Starting in 1891, some 152 examples of a coin-operated peep-box Electrotachyscope model were manufactured by Siemens & Halske in Berlin and sold internationally. Nearly 34,000 people paid to see it at the Berlin Exhibition Park in the summer of 1892. Others saw it in London or at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. On 25 November 1894, Anschütz introduced a Electrotachyscope projector with a 6x8 meter screening in Berlin. Between 22 February and 30 March 1895, a total of circa 7,000 paying customers came to view a 1.5-hour show of some 40 scenes at a 300-seat hall in the old Reichstag building in Berlin.
French inventor Émile Reynaud had already mentioned the possibility of projecting images of the Praxinoscope in his 1877 patent application. He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société française de photographie in 1880, but did not commercially produce his praxinoscope a projection before 1882. It received an Honourable Mention at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He then further developed the device into the Théâtre Optique, which could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, patented in 1888. He created several movies for the machine by painting images on gelatin plates that were mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. From 1892 to 1900, Reynaud presented animated shows, called Pantomimes Lumineuses, to visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris.
1880s–1890s: First motion pictures
By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph a rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film.
Movies were initially shown publicly to one person at a time through "peep show" devices such as the Electrotachyscope, Kinetoscope, and the Mutoscope. In the late 1890s, exhibitors managed to project films on large screens for theatre audiences.
The first public screenings of films where admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons (using films produced by their Eidoloscope company), by German brothers Emile and Max Skladanowsky, and by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, best known for L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), with 10 of their own productions. Private screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the others'.
The earliest films were very short, typically a few minutes or less. Generally, they were a simple, singular, static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Examples of early films include Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) and its alternate versions, in which a still camera shows employees leaving their workplace through a gateway, and A Trip Down Market Street (1906), which had some sense of movement because it was shot from a cable car.
Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. (The filmmakers who first put several shots or scenes discovered that, when one shot follows another, that act establishes a relationship between the content in the separate shots in the minds of the viewer. It is this relationship that makes all film storytelling possible. In a simple example, if a person is shown looking out a window, whatever the next shot shows, it will be regarded as the view the person was seeing.) Each scene was a single stationary shot with the action occurring before it. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles.