Film Technologies Intl history

Invented in 1834, it gave the impression of continuous motion when the viewer watched a rapidly changing series of still images.

Colour photography was usually included in these ambitions and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings.

Patent caveat for the "kinetoscope". Caveat 110, 8 October 1888 (Thomas A. Edison Papers Microfilm Edition, reel 113, frame 236)

In 1892 Edison and Dickson built a practical viewing device.

In 1894 a Kinetoscope parlor opened in New York City.

In the United States, Edison purchased rights to a movie projector, renamed it the Vitascope and demonstrated it in New York City in 1896.

In the years around 1900 the basic technology of camera and projector was developed and refined.

1902 — With the invention of portable filming and projection technology, filmmakers such as Georges Méliès were able to produce popular films like Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon), the first film to achieve international distribution.

In about 1905, nickelodeons, where film was projected on a screen, began appearing in cities.

In the United States in 1910, there were about 10,000 nickelodeons serving some 20 million viewers per week.

Recent popular movies such as “Birdman,” “Gravity,” and “1917” have almost no visible cuts at all.

In 1924 Western Electric demonstrated a sound-on-disk system, which used the same electric motor to drive the projector and the phonograph so that it was easier to maintain synchronization.

1927, Successful showing of the sound movie The Jazz Singer

His first sound film, Blackmail (1929), marked the effective beginning of sound production in England.

The dispute was finally resolved at the 1930 German-American Film Conference in Paris, where Tobis, ERPI, and RCA agreed to pool their patents and divide the world market among themselves.

By the end of 1931, however, the technique of dubbing had been sufficiently perfected to replace multilingual production, and Joinville was converted into a dubbing centre for all of Europe.

Dubbing began in 1932 and helped the Hollywood studios regain overseas audiences they had lost with the coming of sound movies.

1935) to acquire smaller companies and form vertical monopolies controlling production, distribution, and exhibition.

In 1939 the average weekly movie attendance in the United States was 85 million, equal to two-thirds of the nation's population.

There was better sound recording and mixing, and in 1940 Disney's Fantasia introduced stereo sound for movies.

On November 24, 1947, a group of eight screenwriters and two directors, later known as the Hollywood Ten, were sentenced to serve up to a year in prison for refusing to testify.

1953, Introduction of the wide-screen technology CinemaScope with The Robe

In the United States, concern about the increase in sex, violence, and profanity in movies, however, led to the adoption of movie ratings in 1968.

In 1970 a new format, IMAX, offered a screen size ten times that of conventional films.

The Turner Broadcasting System made use of computer technology in another way when, in 1987, it began offering colorized versions of black-and-white movies.

The first computer-generated 3-D character appeared in the 1989 movie The Abyss.

In this book, films are dated according to the year of release in the country of origin (thus Daughters of the Dust is dated 1992); occasionally production dates are added to note a gap of years between production and release.

1995, Release of the first full-length movie created entirely on a computer, Toy Story

Winner of a prestigious Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Book Award in 1996, Film: An International History of the Medium, now in its second edition, presents the entire history of motion pictures, from pre-cinema to the present.