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Cinema art of the XX century
The birth of cinema in a form close to what we can observe now occurred on December 28, 1895, when the first cinema session was held in one of the halls of the Grand Cafe on Capuchin Boulevard.
However, to make this possible, humanity has taken three serious steps.
On the way to cinema
The first step towards cinema was made in 1686, when the "magic lantern" was invented — the camera obscura.
The magic lantern in simplification was a box with a magnifying tube and a lamp inside.
Behind this lamp there was a reflector reflector, between the pipe and the box there was a gap where the ink drawn frame was placed.
The second step to the cinema was made in 1839 by Michael Faraday and his friend Max Roger.
The whole of Europe tried to invent an apparatus to revive the drawing.
Faraday's device was called a Phenakistiscope.
A number of consecutive pictures were attached to the device.
The scientist Joseph Plato was engaged in the decomposition of motion into phases (for example, human movement).
When Faraday got his hands on these works, he had very little time left before completing the finakisitoscope.
The third step took place in 1877.
It became possible thanks to the works of Louis Daguerre and Jose Niels.
California Governor Leonard Stephard and photographer Edward Maybridge conducted an interesting experiment.
Leonard was very fond of horses, and argued with Maybridge on the topic of whether "a horse breaks off its legs during a gallop or not".
They purchased 60 cameras and placed them on both sides of the treadmill (30 cameras each).
Booths were installed opposite them, in which people controlling the cameras were located.
A cord was stretched between the camera and the booth.
When the horse started to gallop and found itself on the segment where the cameras were installed, it touched the thread with its foot, after which the camera was triggered and an image of one of the phases of the horse's movement was obtained.
This was the first attempt to decompose the movement into phases
The birth of cinema Among all the other inventors who were looking for a way to create "moving pictures", four outstanding people came closest to creating cinema.
These are Thomas Edison, the Lumiere Brothers, and Joseph Timchenko.
In 1894, Thomas Edison (his inventions — the telephone, city lighting) transferred the development of cinema to Heinrich Wilkes.
Under the guidance of Edison, Wilkes invents the kinestoscope device.
This device was so arranged that only one person could observe the" moving pictures " that it demonstrated.
About a hundred such devices were produced.
This kinescope had the parameters of the future equipment of the Lumiere brothers.
For example: the width of the film is 35 mm, the display speed is 23-24 (conditional) frames per second.
The aspect ratio of the frame is 1:1.32.
In 1893, Ukrainian engineer Iosif Timchenko invents a projector for watching a movie.
He was the deputy chief engineer of the Baltic Plant.
After reading about the development of "live pictures", he also got involved in the process of invention.
In 1893, Timchenko began to study this issue.
He invented a camera that shoots on perforated film, and also invented a projector and tried to shoot half a dozen stories about his family and his children.
After some time, he demonstrated his device to the Russian scientific society.
His merits were appreciated, but no money was allocated for further development and study; then he turned to the society of entrepreneurs, which included the owner Putilov, the banker Dmitry Rubinstein, the owner of the shops Eliseev, the baker Phillipov, etc.
But even there, his proposal did not meet with support.
But Timchenko did not stop there, he turned to Savva Ivanovich Mamontov.
At the beginning of 1894, in the spring, he came to Moscow and told about his inventions, and also outlined his idea to Mamontov, to which he said: "This has a great future, but I donot have money."
A year later, the Lumiere brothers demonstrated their discovery cinema, or cinematography — and went down in history as the creators of cinema as an art genre....
The first steps of cinema.
The Era of Silent cinema
"Silent cinema" is a generally accepted designation of cinema in the first decades of its history, when films were released on screens without synchronously recorded sound.
It was the lack of available technical capabilities for recording and synchronous sound reproduction that turned out to be the most important circumstance that determined the artistic specifics of films during this period.
A specific feature of silent films is the use of titles — intertitles) - text inserts that gave explanations about the plot, reproduced the replicas of characters or even commented on what was happening for the audience.
The titles did not appear in the cinema immediately, and their function changed significantly over time.
They were used as titles of editing parts, as a substitute for sound speech, as a means of presenting the plot and linking individual plot fragments, and so on.
At first, films were sold for rental without embedded titles — the distributor received only the text that he could print and insert into the film at his discretion (for example, translate the titles into another language), in this case, the beginning of the title was indicated on the film by an oblique cross with the title number.
In Russia at the beginning of the XX century, there were titration workshops that performed the production of installation fragments with intertitles for distributors.
Over time, the credits were understood as an aesthetically important part of the film, they were specially designed and organized with the rest of the material.
In addition, the titles were often tinted with color.
With the expansion of the artistic means of silent cinema, it also became possible to create full length films without intertitles; this was especially characteristic of the German "chamber drama", the most important example of which is Murnau's film "The Last Man".
The visual and artistic possibilities of silent films were extremely high.
A very special and unique style of communication with the viewer with the help of facial expressions and gestures has been developed.
The expressiveness of the movements of some silent film actors can hardly be surpassed even in modern sound cinema.
In addition, film screenings at the beginning of the XX century were not completely silent — usually the cinema screening had musical accompaniment on the piano.
The profession of a pianist in the cinema was called "taper".
Many melodies from the repertoire of the tapers of that time have come down to us.
However, there is a common misconception that silent films were primitive.
The reason for the spread of this misconception in the middle of the XX century is that silent films were often shown at an increased speed (for example, films shot at a speed of 16 frames per second were shown at a speed of 24 frames per second), and that most of the surviving silent films were in technically poor condition.
"Silent cinema is the purest form of cinema.
He, of course, lacks the sound of a human voice and noises.
But their addition did not atone for the irreversible consequences that it entailed.
If previously there was not enough
with the introduction of sound alone, we have lost all the achievements won by pure cinema."
Alfred Hitchcock
Famous personalities of the era of silent cinema
Charlie Chaplin
Georges Méliès
Ruan Lingyu
The appearance of sound
Even before the beginning of the XX century, Thomas Edison tried to synchronize the "kinetoscope" with the phonograph, but failed.
However, later William Dixon, Edison's co author, claimed that he had already managed to create a cinema in 1889 — a device that reproduced sound and image simultaneously.
However, there is no evidence to support his words.
In the early period of cinema, sound cinema was tried to be created in many countries, but they faced two main problems: the difficulty in synchronizing the image and sound and the insufficient volume of the latter.
The first problem was solved by recording both sound and image on the same medium, but to solve the second problem, the invention of a low frequency amplifier was required, which happened only in 1912, when the film language developed so much that the absence of sound was no longer perceived as a serious drawback.
As a result, a patent for the sound cinema system, which subsequently made the sound revolution, was obtained in 1919, but film companies did not pay any attention to the possibility of cinema to speak, wanting to avoid increasing the cost of production and rental of films and the loss of foreign language markets.
Nevertheless, on September 17, 1922, a sound film was shown in Berlin for the first time in the world.
Cinema of the twentieth century
The development of cinema has equalized the rights to cultural leisure of the rich and the poor, a resident of the capital's center and a remote outback.
So it is not by chance that cinema is called the most democratic of all types of arts.
Movies became a school of morality, the initiators of fashion; they made millions of people laugh and cry, thanks to the directors who filled the animated picture with meaning.
It is impossible to cover all the significant works of cinema of the twentieth century.
Let us consider only some milestones of its rapid development in European artistic culture.
The most striking creative results were achieved by such filmmakers as Rene Claire, Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, Federico Fellini.
Presentation " Cinema and theater"
Subpages (7):
Georges Méliès
Ruan Lingyu
Ingmar Bergman
Renee Claire
Roberto Rossellini
Federico Fellini
Charlie Chaplin
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