Cinema
circular design opposite a mirror, worked the
same little miracle. Th e zoetrope or ‘wheel of
life’, invented by Englishman W.G. Horner (1834),
off ered a revolving drum with strip sequences
inside, enabling fi gures to jump, gallop or even
do cartwheels. Emile Renauld’s Praxinoscope of
1877 improved on the Zoetrope by removing the
slots of the drum and using mirrors to refl ect the
images, thus avoiding the dizziness to viewers
caused by the Zoetrope; and the wonder of this
device was extended with the Projecting Prax-
inoscope using a revolving disc-blade shutter to
project animated images on to a screen.
Th e main impetus in the development of cine-
matography came, however, from another direc-
tion. Working in the US, English photographer
Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) in the 1870s
took multiple photographs of animals, birds
and humans in movement. His most famous
experiment was one in which a line of cameras,
using exposures of less than one-thousandth of
a second, ‘fi lmed’ a galloping horse. Th e horse
triggered each camera as it passed – and proved,
incidentally, that there are moments in a horse’s
movement when all its hooves are clear of the
ground.
The next step was the projection of these
in-sequence pictures. In 1890 William Friese-
Green (1855–1921) revealed the potential
of moving film when he set up a small slide
projector in which the usual slide carrier had
been replaced by a glass disc bearing a ring of
pictures. Friese-Green’s revolving disc was later
demonstrated, to eager crowds, in the window of
his studio in Piccadilly.
In France meanwhile Étienne-Jules Marey
(1830–1904) had invented a photographic ‘gun’
(1882) to take pictures of birds in fl ight; he soon
followed this with a camera capable of snapping
sixty pictures a second on a paper-based fi lm.
In the US, Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931)
produced his Kinetograph to take moving
pictures and his Kinetoscope to show them.
Th e viewer looked through a peephole in the
foot-high box. Th e 50 feet of fi lm ran for about
13 seconds. ‘Kinetoscope parlours’ were set up in
which people could view fi lms by putting a coin
in the slot.
Th e most important year in the development
of cinematography was 1895, with the invention
of projectors in the US by Th omas Armat and
Woodville Latham, in France by the Lumière
brothers – Auguste (1862–1954) and Louis
(1864–1948) – and in the UK by Robert Paul.
With the arrival of the Lumières on the scene,
the cinema was truly born.films as well as watched them, concentrating
on fi lming the hunger marches and other mass
protests of the time. Among their creations was a
Workers’ Newsreel, which the League persuaded
some commercial cinemas to screen.
Cinema See cinematography, origins; film.
Cinema legislation Th e fi rst legislation in the
UK relating to cinema use was the Cinemato-
graph Act of 1909. It concerned the licensing of
exhibition premises and the safety of audiences.
In 1922, the Celluloid and Cinematograph Film
Act drew up safety rules for premises where
raw celluloid or cinematograph fi lm was stored
and used. The Cinematograph Film Produc-
tion (Special Loans) Act, 1949 established the
National Film Finance Corporation and in the
same year came the British Film Institute Act.
Th e Cinematograph Films Act, 1957 provided
a statutory levy on exhibitors and exhibitions to
be collected by Customs and Excise and paid to
the British Film Fund Agency, which would use
the monies to support fi lm production in the
UK and the work of the Children’s Film Foun-
dation. Th is made the formerly voluntary levy,
the British Film Production Fund, compulsory.
Th e Cinematograph (Amendment) Acts of 1982
extended provision of the 1909 Act to include ‘all
exhibitions of moving pictures for private gain’,
bringing under regulation pornographic cinema
and video ‘clubs’. Th e Acts exclude from regula-
tion bona fi de fi lm societies.
Th e Films Act, 1985 abolished the Cinemato-
graph Films Council and the Eady Levy, and
dissolved the National Film Finance Corpo-
ration, replacing it with the British Screen
Finance Consortium. Th e government provided
a ‘starter’ of 1.5m for five years to the loan
fund of the BSFC, whose function would be to
raise funds independently of state support. See
broadcasting legislation.
CinemaScope Wide-screen process copyrighted
by 20th Century Fox in 1953 but invented much
earlier by Henri Chrétien.
Cinématographie Wo rd fi rst used by G. Bouly
in 1892 in a French patent specification for a
movie camera.
Cinematography, origins Among the earliest
moving-picture inventions was the Thaumat-
ropical Amusement of Englishman Henry Fitton
(1826). Exploiting the phenomenon of persis-
tence of vision the Th aumatrope consisted of
a round box inside of which were a number of
discs, each with a design on it. When the discs
were twirled round, the images merged and gave
the impression of a single movement.
Joseph Plateau’s Phenakistoscope (1833), a