The history of the moving image

German cinema. On November 1st 1895 Max Skladanowsky and his brother Emil demonstrated their self- invented projector named the bioscop at the wintergarten music hall in berlin, it showed a 15-minutes series of 8 short film it was the first film shown to a paying audience. At the time there were some other German film makers including Oskar Messter and Max Gliewe, two of a few people who first used a device called a Geneva drive in 1896. In the early years cinema was seen as a luxury only for the upper-class but it did not last long, soon simple short films were being shown as fairground attractions meant for the working class and lower- middle class.

French cinema. In Paris on the 28th 1895 Antoine lumiere realized the first projection with the cinema, in the late 19th century and early 20th century the French film industry was one of the most important, many believe this to be the birth of cinema. The first film to be shown was La Sortie de l’usine Lumiere a Lyon and was shown at the meeting of Societe d’encouragement Pour L’industrie nationale in Paris on 22nd of march 1895. 4 firms were established Pathé Frères,the Gaumont Film Company, the Georges Méliès company, and the Lumières, they dominated the cinema scene from 1896 to 1902. Méliès invented many of the techniques of cinematic grammar he was also the creater of the film A Trip to the Moon.

American cinema There is a myth that the first Hollywood film was Cecil B DeMille’s The Squaw Man in 1914 but there was actually a film made 4 years before made by DW Griffith called Old California. By 1919 Hollywood had been changed in the icon of American cinema. The 1920’s were when the film industry began to flourish, along the birth of the movie star wit hundreds of films being made each year.

British cinema The first motion picture camera patented in the world was done in the UK by Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince in 1888. In the early years of the twentieth century there were more than 30 film studios were established in and around London. By 1925 British film production had slowed down to a point where less than 40 feature films a year, where in 1920 over 150 were being made.

Indian cinema The history of Indian cinema goes back to the nineteenth century. In 1896 the first films done by the Lumiere Brothers were shown in Mumbai. But history actually started when Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatavdekar a known still photography was so influenced by the Lumiere Brothers films that he ordered a camera from England. His first film was done in the Hanging Gardens in Mumbai, known as The Wrestlers it was a simple recording of a wrestling match was shown in 1899 and is considered as the first motion picture in the Indian film industry