the complex interaction between the movies—as a
social institution—and other social institutions,
including government, religion, and labor. Land-
mark studies include Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made
America: A Cultural History of American Movies, rev.
and updated ed. (New York: Vintage, 1994), and
Richard Abel’s Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-
Mad” Audiences, 1910–1914(Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2006).
Although some areas in the study of film history
may require experience and analytic skills beyond
those possessed by most introductory students, you
can use your familiarity with film history in writing
even the most basic analysis for a class assignment.
Which approach—aesthetic, technological, eco-
nomic, or social—will we take in this chapter?
Where relevant, we will consider them all.
A Short Overview of Film History
Precinema
Before we discuss the major milestones of film his-
tory, let’s look at some of the key technological inno-
vations that made movies possible.^5 First among
these is photography.
Photography In one sense, movies are simply a
natural progression in the history of photography.
The word photographymeans, literally, “writing
with light” and technically, the static representation
or reproduction of light. The concept has its begin-
nings in ancient Greece. In the fourth century BCE,
the Greek philosopher Aristotle theorized about a
device that later would be known as the camera
obscura(Latin for “dark chamber”; Fig. 10.1). In the
late fifteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci’s draw-
ings gave tangible form to the idea. Both simple and
ingenious, the camera obscura may be a box or it
may be a room large enough for a viewer to stand
inside. Light entering through a tiny hole (later a
lens) on one side of the box or room projects an
image from the outside onto the opposite side or
wall. An artist might then trace the image onto a
piece of paper.
Photography was developed during the first four
decades of the nineteenth century by Thomas
Wedgwood, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Sir John
Herschel in England; Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce and
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in France; and
George Eastman in the United States. In 1802,
Wedgwood made the first recorded attempt to pro-
duce photographs. However, these were not camera
images as we know them, but basically silhouettes
of objects placed on paper or leather sensitized
with chemicals and exposed to light. These images
faded quickly, for Wedgwood did not know how to
fix (stabilize) them. Unaware of Wedgwood’s work,
Talbot devised a chemical method for recording
the images he observed in his camera obscura.
More important was the significant progress he
made toward fixing the image, and he invented the
negative, or negative photographic image on trans-
parent material, which makes possible the repro-
duction of the image.
Niépce experimented with sunlight and the cam-
era obscura to make photographic copies of engrav-
ings as well as actual photographs from nature. The
results of this heliographic (that is, sun-drawn)
process—crude paper prints—were not particularly
successful, but Niépce’s discoveries influenced
Daguerre, who by 1837 was able to create a detailed
image on a copper plate treated with chemicals—
an image remarkable for its fidelity and detail. In
1839, Herschel perfected hypo (short for hyposul-
fite thiosulfate—that is, sodium thiosulfate), a com-
pound that fixed the image on paper and thus
arrested the effect of light on it. Herschel first used
the word photographyin 1839 in a lecture at the
Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natu-
ral Knowledge. What followed were primarily tech-
nological improvements on Herschel’s discovery.
In 1851, glass-plate negatives replaced the paper
plates. More durable but heavy, glass was replaced
by gelatin-covered paper in 1881. The new gelatin
process reduced, from 15 minutes to .001 second, the
time necessary to make a photographic exposure,(^5) This discussion of early film technologies is necessarily brief.
For more on key filmmaking technologies, see Chapter 11,
“Filmmaking Technologies and Production Systems.”
A SHORT OVERVIEW OF FILM HISTORY 435