Week 1 - A Little Bit of Film History

Why is it important to know about film history? Especially as a filmmaking student? These are some questions you will be asked to consider at the end of this topic. First, we are going to look at a few different ways film intersects with history.

Broadly, film and history come together in the following ways:

• Film as a historical document or technological record

• Film as a social or political history

• Film as an evolutionary language

Let’s expand on these further with examples.

Film as a historical document or technological record

Film can show us aspects of our lives. For example, early film exhibition included newsreels or ‘topicals’ that would show audiences places they have never been, across the world or the country. They would give the audience information or stories about the people who lived in those places. Today, we can look back on those films (if they still exist) and gain an understanding in what life was like ‘back in the day’.

Before the ‘birth of cinema’ discussed below, the science of moving images was experimented with in early technologies, such as the magic lantern and zoetrope. As early as the 1600s, magic lanterns were used to project hand painted glass slides on to a backdrop of smoke.

As the smoke dissipated, the images, usually of death (skeletons, graves, grim reapers) or religious (Jesus, monks), looked like they were moving until they finally disappeared.

The zoetrope is also an early form of animation. As you can see from the clip below, when looking through the slits in the side and giving it a spin, it gives the illusion that the images are moving. You can think of magic lanterns and zoetropes as kinds of "pre-cinema" or "proto-cinema". They weren't "films", but they were ways of making moving images for entertainment.

The Birth of Cinema

We can also look back at the early films of the Lumière Brothers from France or the Thomas Edison Studios in America and see how far film technology and language has come. The birth of cinema is said to have taken place in 1895 in a café in France when the Lumière Brothers projected the first moving images on their invention, the cinematographe, to an audience. Edison’s inventions during the 1880s-90s were the kinetograph, which recorded images on a 35mm reel of celluloid, and the kinetoscope, a box used to exhibit the films viewed through a peephole viewer at the top.

From these images, we can see the progression from a cumbersome box that can’t project images to a more mobile camera, closer to a celluloid film camera we would use more recently (before the coming of digital film).

Although synchronised sound in film came around 30 years later, Edison did experiment with syncing sound to image as early as 1892. The following clip is a recording of this experiment with one of his employees, W.K.L.Dickinson. This is the earliest film that we know of that has synchronised sound and image.

Before moving on, have a think about how far film technology has come. Quite far! However, we can look back at these cameras and films and see how and where these technologies have evolved from.

Film as social and political history

Films depict social conditions and political ideologies/values as they were in the past. This is true of both fiction and non-fiction films. For example, the Italian Neorealist movement saw a group of filmmakers produce films that directly engaged with the war-ravaged conditions in Italy post-Second World War. Italy was decimated both physically and economically, making life incredibly difficult for the general population of working class people. Italian Neorealist films, therefore, aim to show these hardships as a way to reveal the disastrous legacies of their Fascist past (under Mussolini). In the clip below, New York Times film critic, A.O. Scott, discusses Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948), one of the more well known of the Italian Neorealist works. This film depicts the desperation of a man to work in order to feed his family, however, his bike has been stolen…the one thing he needs to earn some money.

A History of Film Style

We can chart the emergence and evolution of the visual and narrative elements of film from the beginnings of cinema right through to contemporary filmmaking. Throughout this history, many filmmakers have experimented with film style and language, which has been influential on later writers, directors and other key creatives. For example, the French filmmakers of the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) in the 1950s and 1960s — Jean Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer — played with a number of visual or formal elements in their work and have been highly influential on people like Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Quentin Tarantino.

We will look closely at the French New Wave directors in a later topic in relation to the concept of the auteur, however, their style has been characterised as self-referential and modernist. This means that they make a point of referencing the language of cinema through their stylistic choices and make them visible to the audience.

Take a look at the clip below from Jean Lub Godard’s Breathless (1960). It’s the opening sequence and is an excellent example of this kind of stylistic experimentation. Pay particular attention to the use of editing and sound. What do you notice?

As part of the first week’s topics, think about the following questions. There may be some discussion in class about them.

• Why is it important for filmmakers and filmmaking students to study film history?

• Why is it important to have the skills to analyse and deconstruct film?