Early Film Pioneers Who Helped Cinema Along
These early film pioneers all had a role in helping cinema become what it is today, Griffith being especially significant.
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Pierre Jules César Janssen was a French astronomer born in Paris into a cultivated family. He studied mathematics and physics at the faculty of sciences, then taught at the Lycée Charlemagne in 1853, and in the school of architecture from 1865-1871, but his energies were mainly devoted to various scientific missions entrusted to him. In 1868, he discovered the gaseous nature of the solar chromosphere and, along with English scientist Joseph Norman Lockyer, the element helium. In 1874, in order to capture a series of photographs of transit of Venus, Janssen invented the Revolver of Janssen or Photographic Revolver, an instrument that originated the chronophotography (a branch of photography based on capturing movement from a sequence of images). This was a large camera based on the Maltese cross mechanism, which is an important milestone in the development of cameras used to film movies. The revolver could take several dozens of exposures at regulated intervals on a daguerreotype disc. Later this invention was of great use for researchers like Étienne-Jules Marey to carry out exhibitions and inventions. Janssen's series of photographs covering the transit of planet Venus captured in Passage de Venus (1874) was a pioneering and historic register that survived the test of time and is considered by many as the oldest film ever created, possibly the very first where moving images were used.The man who "filmed" the transit of Venus across the sun in 1874, making him possibly the first to try to create photographic moving images.- Director
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Eadweard Muybridge was born in Kingston upon Thames, England, to John and Susanna Muggeridge. At the age of 20 he immigrated to the United States as a bookseller, first to New York City, then to San Francisco. In 1860, he planned a return trip to Europe, but suffered serious head injuries en route in a stagecoach crash in Texas. He spent the next few years recuperating in Kingston upon Thames, where he took up professional photography, learned the wet-plate collodion process, and secured at least two British patents for his inventions. He returned to San Francisco in 1867, a man with a markedly changed personality. In 1868, he exhibited large photographs of Yosemite Valley, and began selling popular stereographs of his work. His great breakthrough came in 1872 when he was hired by wealthy American businessman and former California governor Leland Stanford, who later founded Stanford University. Stanford was interested in whether horses lifted all legs off the ground at once during trotting, and Muybridge was engaged to take photographs to settle the point. Although the experiment proved inconclusive at the time, Muybridge was re-engaged for further photographic studies in 1878. Using a battery of 12 cameras set side by side and a specially marked fence along the racetrack to pinpoint the horse's precise movements, Muybridge effectively created the first true study of motion. By January 1880 he invented zoopraxiscope to project his famous chronophotographic pictures in motion and thus prove that these were authentic. The projector used glass disks onto which Muybridge had an unidentified artist paint the sequences as silhouettes. Later, his more-detailed images were hand-coloured and marketed commercially. A device he developed was later regarded as an early movie projector, and the process was an intermediate stage toward motion pictures or cinematography. From 1883 to 1886, he entered a very productive period at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, producing over 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion. In his later years, Muybridge gave many public lectures and demonstrations of his photography and early motion picture sequences, travelling frequently in England and Europe to publicise his work in cities such as London and Paris. He also edited and published compilations of his work (some of which are still in print today), which greatly influenced visual artists and the developing fields of scientific and industrial photography. He retired to his native England permanently in 1894. In 1904, the year of his death, the Kingston Museum opened in his hometown, and continues to house a substantial collection of his works in a dedicated gallery.Experimented with motion photography.- Director
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Le Prince was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion picture camera born in Metz, France. His father was a major of artillery in the French Army and an officer of the Légion d'honneur. When growing up, he reportedly spent time in the studio of his father's friend, the pioneer of photography Louis Daguerre, from whom he may have received some lessons on photography and chemistry before he was 10 years old. His education went on to include the study of painting in Paris and post-graduate chemistry at Leipzig University. He then moved to Leeds, England in 1866, after being invited to join John Whitley, a friend from college, in Whitley Partners of Hunslet, a firm of brass founders making valves and components. In 1869, he married Elizabeth Whitley, John's sister and a talented artist, and the two of them started a school of applied art, the Leeds Technical School of Art, and became well renowned for their work in fixing coloured photographs on to metal and pottery. In 1881, Le Prince went to the United States with his family where he began experiments relating to the production of 'moving' photographs, designing a camera that utilised sixteen lenses, which was the first invention he patented. After his return to Leeds in May 1887, he built a single-lens camera in mid-late 1888 used to shoot his motion-picture films. It was first used on 14 October 1888 to shoot what would become known as Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) and Accordion Player (1888). He later used it to film Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888). In September 1890, he was preparing for a trip to the United States, supposedly to publicly premiere his work and join his wife and children. Before this journey, he decided to return to France to visit his brother in Dijon. Then, on 16 September, he took a train to Paris but, having taken a later train than planned, his friends missed him in Paris. He was never seen again by his family or friends. The last person to see Le Prince at the Dijon station was his brother. The French police, Scotland Yard and the family undertook exhaustive searches, but never found him. Le Prince was officially declared dead on 16 September 1897.The man who made the first celluloid film, "Roundhay Garden Scene."- Director
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Étienne-Jules Marey was a French scientist, physiologist, and chronophotagrapher. Marley started out by studying blood circulation in the human body. He then shifted to analyzing heart beats, respiration, muscles, and movement of the body. In 1869, Marey constructed a very delicate artificial insect to show how an insect flies and to demonstrate the figure-8 shape it produced during movement of its wings. Then he became fascinated by movements of air and started to study bigger flying animals, like birds. He adopted and further developed animated photography into a separate field of chronophotography in the 1880s. Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, with all the frames recorded on the same picture. Using these pictures he studied horses, birds, dogs, sheep, donkeys, elephants, fish, microscopic creatures, molluscs, insects, reptiles, etc. Some call it Marey's "animated zoo". Marey also conducted the famous study about cats always landing on their feet. He conducted very similar studies with a chicken and a dog and found that they could do almost the same. In 1890 he published a substantial volume entitled Le Vol des Oiseaux (The Flight of Birds), richly illustrated with photographs, drawings, and diagrams. He also created stunningly precise sculptures of various flying birds. Marey also made movies. They were at a high speed (60 images per second) and of excellent image quality. His research on how to capture and display moving images helped the emerging field of cinematography. Towards the end of his life he returned to studying the movement of quite abstract forms, like a falling ball. His last great work was the observation and photography of smoke trails. Also, in 1901 he was able to build a smoke machine with 58 smoke trails. It became one of the first aerodynamic wind tunnels. Marey died on May 15th, 1904.Experimented with chronophotography, and thus one of the earliest to shoot motion pictures on a filmstrip, making some of the first true films.- Producer
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Thomas A. Edison was born on February 11, 1847 in Milan, Ohio, USA as Thomas Alva Edison. He was a producer and director, known for silent movies such as, The Trick Cyclist (1901), The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) and Bicycle Trick Riding, No. 2 (1899). He also produced the first American film version of Frankenstein in 1910. That was of course, twenty years before Universal Studios introduced the monster with Boris Karloff. This paved the way for modern day horror as we now know it. Edison is however, perhaps better known as an inventor of many conveniences like the light bulb. He of course produced many other inventions like, among others, the phonograph, power stations, the carbon switch microphone, and motion picture cameras. These advancements gave him a firm place in the history of American Greatness as well as American film production.
He was married to Mina Miller and Mary Stilwell. He died on October 18, 1931 in West Orange, New Jersey, USA.The innovator of the Kinetograph, who also was the first to begin to commercialize film.- Producer
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Louis Lumière was a French engineer and industrialist who played a key role in the development of photography and cinema. His parents were Antoine Lumière, a photographer and painter, and Jeanne Joséphine Costille Lumière, who were married in 1861 and moved to Besançon, setting up a small photographic portrait studio. Here were born Auguste Lumière, Louis and their daughter Jeanne. They moved to Lyon in 1870, where their two other daughters were born: Mélina and Francine. Auguste and Louis both attended La Martiniere, the largest technical school in Lyon. At age 17, Louis invented a new process for film development using a dry plate. This process was significantly successful for the family business, permitting the opening of a new factory with an eventual production of 15 million plates per year. In 1894, his father, Antoine Lumière, attended an exhibition of Edison's Kinetoscope in Paris. Upon his return to Lyon, he showed his sons a length of film he had received from one of Edison's concessionaires; he also told them they should try to develop a cheaper alternative to the peephole film-viewing device and its bulky camera counterpart, the Kinetograph. This inspired brothers Auguste and Louis to work on a way to project film onto a screen, where many people could view it at the same time. By early 1895 they invented a device which they called the Cinématographe, a three-in-one device that could record, develop, and project motion pictures, and patented it on 13 February 1895. Their screening of a single film, Leaving the Factory (1895), on 22 March 1895 for around 200 members of the Society for the Development of the National Industry in Paris was probably the first presentation of projected film. Their first commercial public screening at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895 for around 40 paying visitors and invited relations has traditionally been regarded as the birth of cinema. The cinematographe was an immediate hit, and its influence was colossal. Within just two years, the Lumière catalogue included well over a thousand films, all of them single-shot efforts running under a minute, and many photographed by cameramen sent to various exotic locations. The Lumière brothers saw film as a novelty and had withdrawn from the film business by 1905. The Lumière freres' cinematographer was not their only invention. Mainly Louis is also credited with the birth of color photograph, the Autochromes, using a single exposure trichromic basis (instead of a long three-step exposure): a glass plaque is varnished and embedded with potato starch tinted in the three basic colors (rouge-orange, green and violet-blue), vegetal coal dust to fill the interstices and a black-and-white photographic emulsion layer to capture light. They were the main and more successful procedure for obtaining color photographs from 1903 to 1935, when Kodachrome, then Agfacolor and other less fragile film based procedures took over. An Autochrome is positivated from the same plaque, so they are unique images with a soft toned palette. As the Institut Lumière describes them, they are a middle point between photography and painting (akin specially to pointillism technique), because of their pastel shades and easy but still static pose looks.He and his brother Auguste invented the Cinematograph, which they used to shoot and project films in public - the first time this had ever been done.- Director
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Georges Méliès was a French illusionist and film director famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest days of cinema.
Méliès was an especially prolific innovator in the use of special effects, popularizing such techniques as substitution splices, multiple exposures, time-lapse photography, dissolves, and hand-painted color.
His films include A Trip to the Moon (1902) and An Impossible Voyage (1904), both involving strange, surreal journeys somewhat in the style of Jules Verne, and are considered among the most important early science fiction films.
Méliès died of cancer on 21 January 1938 at the age of 76.
In 2016, a Méliès film long thought lost, A Wager Between Two Magicians, or, Jealous of Myself (1904), was discovered in a Czechoslovak film archive.The man who innovated trick photography.- Producer
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Robert Paul was an English scientific instrument maker, pioneer of film, and foremost pioneer of the British film industry in its formative years. He was born in Liverpool Road, Highbury, North London and was educated at the City & Guilds Technical College, Finsbury. He began his career working in the electrical instrument shop of Elliott Brothers, where he obtained a practical knowledge of instrument making. In 1891, he established the Robert W. Paul Instrument Company, and established a workshop at 44 Hatton Garden, London, which later became his office. His involvement with cinematography came about by chance. In 1894, he was approached by two Greek businessmen, Georgiades and Tragides, who wanted him to make copies of an Edison Kinetoscope that they had purchased. He initially refused until learning that Thomas A. Edison had not patented the invention in Britain. Having agreed to manufacture the machines for his clients, he decided to make others for himself. The only films available were controlled by the Edison company and so in order for Paul's Kinetoscope business to succeed, it was essential that he make his own films. As Edison had patented his camera, Paul resolved to solve this bottleneck by creating his own camera. Via a mutual friend, Henry Short, Paul was introduced to Birt Acres, a photographic expert, and with his assistance designed and manufactured a cinematograph camera, now known as the Paul-Acres Camera. It was the first camera made in England, capable of shooting film in Edison's 35mm format. By 29 March 1895, the first successful English film had been shot - Clovelly Cottage, Barnet (1895), and Acres went on to shoot more films. Paul obtained a concession to operate a kinetoscope parlour at the Earls Court Exhibition Centre, and the success of this venture inspired him to attempt surpassing Edison by projecting moving images onto a screen. While Paul and Birt Acres shared innovator status for creating Britain's first 35mm camera, they quickly dissolved the partnership to operate as competitors in the film camera and projector markets. Paul presented his Theatrograph on 20 February 1896 at Finsbury Park College. This was the first commercially produced 35 mm film projector to be produced in Great Britain. He also pioneered a system of projecting motion pictures onto a screen using a double Maltese cross system (modern-type sprockets that prevented wear on the film). The projection of films in London by Paul, Acres and the Lumieres happened around the same time. After some demonstrations before scientific groups, he was asked to supply a projector and staff to the Alhambra Music Hall in Leicester Square, and he presented his first theatrical programme on 25 March 1896. The use of his Theatrograph in music halls across England helped popularize cinema among the British population. To support the many showmen interested in making films of local interest, Paul established a separate manufacturing department focused on cameras, projectors, and cinema equipment with a dedicated office and showroom. Continuing his innovations with portable cameras, he built the 'Cinematograph Camera No. 1' in April 1896, the first camera to feature reverse-cranking. This mechanism allowed for the same film footage to be exposed several times. Paul was one of the first English producers to realise the possibilities of cinema as a means of presenting short comic and dramatic stories and to this end he built the first studio in England in 1989, with an adjacent laboratory capable of processing up to 8,000 feet of film per day. By the turn of the century his film projectors were being exported to the Continent, as well as to Australia and other British Dependencies. He entirely dominated the home market and earned the title 'Father of the British Film Industry'. Paul continued to make his own films that pioneered techniques such as close-up framing and cut transitions, selling them either directly or through newer new distribution companies. While Paul exited the film industry by early 1910, his importance was recognized among contemporaries through the moniker 'Daddy Paul'.The first person to make a film in two scenes.- Cinematographer
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American-born English inventor and technician, a pioneer of early cinema design, photography, development, and patents. He was born to English parents in Richmond, Virginia, on July 23, 1854. His parents moved with young Birt to North Carolina and started a plantation there. However, the U.S. Civil War erupted and both parents died defending the plantation. Young Acres, orphaned at 10, went to live with his aunt in Virginia. She recognized his artistic and inventive talents and sent him to Paris to study at the Sorbonne Art Studios. He became enthralled with photography and began to study the science of cameras and the potential for moving pictures. Upon his return from France, he set out on a long journey through the American West. He worked as a lumberjack and studied and traded with Native American tribes. Eventually, his love of photography led him to move to England, where he opened a photography and painting studio in Ilfracombe, Devon. He applied himself to the study and development of photographic chemistry. He wrote scholarly articles on photography and chemical development and became rather well-known in the photographic community. He was invited to join the Royal Meteorological and Photographic Societies. In 1891, he was invited to take over the running of Elliott & Sons, the leading British maker of photographic plates and paper. He moved to London with his relatively new family. He was especially fond of nature photography and developed a slide projector which could crudely replicate, by shuffling rapidly through images, the motion of waves, clouds, and wind-blown trees, a precursor using the persistence of vision effect that would make motion pictures possible. In 1894, Acres met Robert W. Paul, who was interested in creating films that could be shown on Thomas A. Edison's new kinetoscope. Together they invented a camera that would make 35 mm films compatible with Edison's machine. Acres used it to create the first film to be shot in England, Clovelly Cottage, Barnet (1895) or "lncident in Clovelly Cottage," filmed at Acres's home. Acres and Paul began making films of various sporting events as well as human interest and comedy pieces. But the two men were incompatible partners and split up angrily in 1895. Each went his own way, and they became competitors in the business of projector manufacture and sales. Acres in January, 1896, presented the first public projection of motion picture film in Britain with screenings at the Lyonsdown Photographic Club and the Royal Photographic Society. He presented his films at a Royal Command Performance at Marlborough House that summer and was invited to photograph the Prince and Princess of Wales at the Cardiff Exhibition. With a prescient concept of a home-movie market, he invented a 17.5 mm camera called the Birtac that used half the normal amount of film and was small enough to be used by non-professional individuals. His original projector, the Kineopticon, or Kinetic Lantern, he continued to develop and improve. He founded a company, The Northern Photographic Works (later Whetstone Photographic Works), in London. He continued to invent and develop products for motion picture photography, but was reluctant to take part in the increasing entertainment market for films. Thus his business began to suffer, since he preferred to promote (and lecture about) scientific and nature-oriented cinema. He was twice bankrupted and by 1900 had abandoned the film business. He died from peritonitis following appendicitis on December 27, 1918, at 64, survived by his wife of 27 years, Annie, and their two children. He is buried in Walthamstow Cemetery in Greater London.Birt Acres was once a collaborator for Robert Paul, and filmed actualities for Paul's copies of the Kinetoscope. This really isn't very important at all but I guess I'll have to keep him on the list until I can find a better person to replace him with.- Director
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Along with his better-known French counterpart Georges Méliès George Albert Smith was one of the first filmmakers to explore fictional and fantastic themes, often using surprisingly sophisticated special effects. His background was ideal--an established portrait photographer, he also had a long-standing interest in show business, running a tourist attraction in his native Brighton featuring a fortune teller. His films were among the first to feature such innovations as superimposition (Smith patented a double-exposure system in 1897), close-ups and scene transitions involving wipes and focus pulls. He also patented Kinemacolor--the world's first commercial cinema color system--in 1906, which was extremely successful for a time, despite the special equipment required to project itInnovator of the POV shot, and also the first to break down scenes into a variety of different types of shots.- James Bamforth was born in Kirkburton, West Yorkshire, England, UK. James is known for The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), The Biter Bit (1899) and Ladies' Skirts Nailed to a Fence (1899).Bamforth mainly copied other filmmaker's ideas in other ways, creating elaborations and showing different ways of going about crafting a film.
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Often called F. S. Armitage, Frederick S. Armitage was an early motion picture cinematographer/director who began his career with short subjects for American Mutoscope & Biograph at a time when the film company was still using hand-cranked machines to display their work. Armitage was important for his work with time-lapse photography, as can be observed in his "Building Up and Demolishing the Star Theater" which uses this technique to show the Star Theater being built up and then destroyed.
Armitage, born in Seneca Falls, in New York, has little information known about his personal life. His oldest credits date in 1898. In 1899 he directed 188 actualities, sometimes subjects having to do with the Spanish-American War. Armitage was also one of three Biograph cameramen to film Tom Sharkey and Jim Jeffries' s championship bout.
From 1900 Armitage began making a number of films that mainly used special trick effects such as the aforementioned Time-lapse experiments, such as his "A Terrible Night" and "The Prince of Darkness" which both use reversing the film as a main effect. To create "Nymph of the Waves" Armitage combined prints to show a woman dressed as a nymph dancing on the falls. Armitage finished his career as a cinematographer at American Mutoscope & Biograph with Wallace McCutcheon's "The Nihilists" and "Wanted: A Dog" both from 1905. Armitage later returned to American Mutoscope & Biograph in 1907, but stayed with the Edison Manufacturing Company until 1910. His last known works are from 1916-1917. Afterwords he vanished from the cinematographic record completely.
Armitage died on January 3, 1933 at Ecorse, MI.The maker of the first time-lapse film.- Director
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James Williamson was born on 8 November 1855 in Kirkaldy, Scotland, UK. He was a director and cinematographer, known for Attack on a China Mission (1900), Stop Thief! (1901) and Spring Cleaning (1903). He died on 18 August 1933 in Richmond, Surrey, England, UK.Williamson was popular for his chase films/dramas, and as such he became important for his early work in narrative filmmaking.- Producer
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Born in London, England, in 1874, Cecil Hepworth was one of the founders of the British film industry, directing and producing many films from 1898 into the late 1920s. Developing an early interest in films from following his father on lecture tours about the magic-lantern, he patented several photographic inventions and wrote possibly the earliest handbook on the film medium. Directing, producing, and occasionally, acting in his films, Hepworth was instrumental in developing the British film industry through his use of cutting to produce a coherent film narrative. After a lull in film-making while attending more to his film studio business, he began making films again in 1914 and continued into the 1920s where he began falling behind the times in his techniques, thereby contributing to his bankruptcy in 1924, ending his career as a director of trailers and advertisements. He died in 1953.A British filmmaker who created the first subtitling in a film.- Director
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David Wark Griffith was born in rural Kentucky to Jacob "Roaring Jake" Griffith, a former Confederate Army colonel and Civil War veteran. Young Griffith grew up with his father's romantic war stories and melodramatic nineteenth-century literature that were to eventually shape his movies. In 1897 Griffith set out to pursue a career both acting and writing for the theater, but for the most part was unsuccessful. Reluctantly, he agreed to act in the new motion picture medium for Edwin S. Porter at the Edison Company. Griffith was eventually offered a job at the financially struggling American Mutoscope & Biograph Co., where he directed over four hundred and fifty short films, experimenting with the story-telling techniques he would later perfect in his epic The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Griffith and his personal cinematographer G.W. Bitzer collaborated to create and perfect such cinematic devices as the flashback, the iris shot, the mask and cross-cutting. In the years following "Birth", Griffith never again saw the same monumental success as his signature film and, in 1931, his increasing failures forced his retirement. Though hailed for his vision in narrative film-making, he was similarly criticized for his blatant racism. Griffith died in Los Angeles in 1948, one of the most dichotomous figures in film history.Griffith was popular for his dramas and also became even more so for his scandalous "Birth of a Nation." Although he began similar to other filmmakers in the years 1908-1910, he later expanded on G.A. Smith's ideas of breaking a scene into multiple shots and incorporated this even further into narrative film, which is how we have it today.