History of Cinema

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Historical dates, movies, directors, and innovative ideas throughout the history of cinema.

The main American inventor of cinema was?

Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is infamous for making this comment...

Cinema was merely a passing novelty with no discernible future.

The earliest filmmakers were not considered artists but?

they were thought of as inventors, mechanics, and entrepreneurs experimenting with the novel medium of moving pictures.

three distinct aesthetic modes

documentary, narrative, and avant-garde

What is a documentary?

documentary can be defined as a fact-based (rather than story-based) film whose intention is to instruct or inform.

The earliest documentaries from the 1890s were referred to as?

The term originates from the French actualité, which refers to a current event.

Actualities can be subdivided into

scenics and topicals

Edison's early kinetoscope films represented a variety of

actualities—both scenics and topicals

The Kiss

One of Edison's Early Kinetoscope Films re-enacted a kiss from a popular theatre production.

Serpentine Dance

featured a popular dancer of the day. Edison

Sandow (The Strong Man)

depicted a muscular celebrity. By Edison

Who are the "fathers of documentary?"

The Lumière brothers in France

The phenakistoscope and the Zoetrope was made during what century?

The 19th

The biological phenomenon that describes the human eye's capacity to perceive movement in a series of quickly successive images, is called what?

"persistence of vision"

The Zoetrope was invented in_________ and later became a popular novelty in well-to-do Victorian homes.


Edward Muybridge in France developed what he called

"series photography," which refers to a series of photographs taken and then projected in quick succession

The birth of cinema is usually dated to______ , when the Lumière brothers in Paris projected a 25-minute program of 10 films to a paying audience.

December 28, 1895

The Lumière brothers invented their own

camera, the Cinématographe.
lightweight camera was uniquely suited to their "on location" filming

Thomas Edison invented the....

Vitascope. He purchased rights to a machine that had been developed by Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat, largely taking credit for it, and naming it the Vitascope.

This early cinema has been referred to by critic Tom Gunning as the

cinema of attractions

What is the cinema of attractions

is an exhibitionistic (rather than voyeuristic) mode that presents a visual attraction that is of interest in itself, requiring no narrative context.

Who is most famous for developing the technique of stop-motion editing


In general, pre-1904 films used what type of shot?

Long shot

Méliès dominated French cinema from 1898 to


Pathé Frères

formed in 1896

Gaumont Pictures

1897 founded by Léon Gaumont

Historian Georges Sadoul labeled Charles Pathé the _____

"the Napoleon of the cinema," referring to his near-monopolistic control of the international film market until the advent of World War I.

Léon Gaumont introduced the first female filmmaker.......

Alice Guy

Robert W. Paul, in collaboration with his partner Birt Acres, initiated the first films made in England after they

copied Edison's Kinetoscope in 1895

How It Feels to Be Run Over (1900)

Cecil Hepworth places the camera/viewer in the middle of the road, and depicts an approaching motor car running over the camera/viewer. The film also depicts the first known use of intertitles that were likely hand-scratched onto the film.

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