Early Cinema and the Variety of Moving Images

Abstract

For decades people knew what movies were: huge, illuminated moving images projected on a screen before a seated audience, attractions shown in movie theaters. The screen had a standard shape (slightly wider than a square), and moviegoing involved fairly standard rituals—entering through lobbies into auditoriums with rows of upholstered seats (usually red), the opening of a curtain (again usually red) that concealed the screen, lowered lights during projection, and, in the U.S.A. at least, the consumption of popcorn. While these elements still signify the “movies” to most of us, increasingly they appear as figures of nostalgia, knowingly employed to reference a nearly vanished movie culture (families now microwave popcorn before they gather around a television set to watch a DVD, or revival theaters raise velvet curtains to open their programs). The introduction of commercial television soon after World War II and then the VCR in the 1970s changed a predominantly public act of visual entertainment and consumption into a domestic, intimate event. Curiously, competition with smaller television screens at home also prompted a transformation of screen shape in theaters, stretched to new proportions and a range of shapes, from nearly twice as wide (the standard shape adopted in the mid-1950s) to the more-than-twiceas-wide ratio of the various anamorphic forms of Cinemascope and Panavision. Thus film in the 1950s became simultaneously larger and smaller, more spectacular and more intimate, offering a range of cinematic experiences. But if recent transformations in viewing seem radically different from the classical Hollywood film era, they should also remind us that it took some time for the movies to emerge even after motion pictures were invented. Furthermore, during most of film history ways of viewing and displaying motion pictures other than the “movie theater” also existed. Pictures that moved first became commercialized in the nineteenth century as educational toys for curious children, and the earliest photographic motion pictures on celluloid resembled these toys more than theatrical movies. Thomas Edison’s first commercial motion pictures were displayed through the Kinetoscope (“the viewer of motion”), a peepshow device into which a single viewer peered to see short films of dancers, acrobats, or May Irwin and John Rice’s famous stage kiss. Edison had been working on the Kinetoscope since 1888, and it appeared commercially in urban centers in 1894 as rows of coin-operated machines that offered viewers a brief dose of visual pleasure and technical novelty, one by one. The Kinetoscope provided a glimpse into a miniature world, recalling the noncinematic peepshows of eighteenthand nineteenth-century fairgrounds and the stereoscope viewer found in Tom Gunning