1. FLM-4200 Concepts and History
Welcome to C&H. Please make sure you have two pieces of paper: a module guide, and a 1-page handout.
An image of Eugene Sandow ( ), who featured in a series of three Edison’s actuality shorts (directed by William K. L. Dickson).
The films are “muscle display performances”– a display of what we will later call “the cinema of attractions.”

2. Contact details (also on module outline): a.pick@qmul.ac.uk
(Dr) Anat Pick
Contact details (also on module outline):
Office hours: Wed. 2-4; Fri. 3-4 (by appointment).
Teaching Associates: Lisa Duffy, Adrian Garvey, and Tashi Petter (contact details on module outline).
For matters relating to seminars, you can contact your seminar tutor. But I am always available to address any issues you might have concerning the module.

3. QMUL Film Society Monday 2nd of October, 18:00 in Arts One Foyer / Hitchcock Cinema
At our welcome session, someone inquired about film societies. Please note the details of the first screening of the QMUL film society.
Which film is this? … Harmony Korine’s masterpiece pop fairy-tale Spring Breakers!

4. Announcements
Today’s session will (1) provide information on the module, (2) begin to discuss early cinema with a focus on the cinema of attractions.
Please refer to your module guides.
Structure of module: a few words on the set up of the course – screenings in the morning, lecture, seminars in the afternoon… (subject to ALT getting fixed; I’ll update you).
I teach in Sem 1, and Guy Westwell will take over in Sem 2.
Reading packs will be distributed to you at our next session. The Readers are free and include most of your essential readings, except for the essential readings in the main book, Looking at Movies. Additional readings and resources are on QM+, and you’re encouraged to purchase Looking at Movies.
Apologies to English students who should attend their Shakespeare class in the morning and watch the film in their own time – multiple copies in the library. Any problems accessing the film please contact me.
Seminars. You should have information about seminars via QM+; if not, I’m circulating a handout with times/rooms. Please make a note of where you need to be as it comes round. I will also show a slide at the end with each group’s room allocation. So you’ll need to look up and see which group you belong to (A-F).
NOTE on attendance: touch in at lecture; we will take attendance for seminars. Miss four classes in the year and you can be deregistered. In case of problems, please contact me (or your personal advisor) and let me know before things get out of hand so we can help.
If you are not on the list or you can’t attend your allotted seminar due to a timetable clash DO NOT add your name. Wait behind and see me and I will appoint you a seminar group.
Course rep elections!

5. Module outline Film history and key concepts…
Essential reading/viewing
QM+/on-line reading list
Seminar ‘Prezis’
Qreview
The general idea of the course is to alternate between film history classes charting the history of American film up to the late 1970s, and more general lectures looking at important key concepts in Film Studies.
The seminars will be a forum for discussing key moments in film history (and key films) through the lens of the key concepts. You’ll be building up a tool kit of critical terms in FS, and refining your analytical skills in writing and thinking about films. This will become clear as we proceed.
The rationale behind introducing you to these key concepts is that a clear understanding of each is a necessary precondition for good textual analysis (i.e. understanding what is seen and heard on screen). In this respect C&H (formerly known as Intro to Film) is designed to enable you, by the end of the year, to make sharp, informed, cogent readings of films and film sequences. This will make you a better film thinker and (if it’s your thing) filmmaker.
I will let you digest the module outline over the next week or so, and take questions next time we meet. However, a quick word about reading/viewing… You MUST do the set essential reading/viewing before each class (so, before next week you should do the reading advised for week one AND week two).
As I already mentioned, we recommend you buy Looking At Movies, as well as Oxford Dictionary of Film Studies (co-authored by Guy). All other essential reading is in your module reading pack that we will have for you next week.
Go to QM+ and demonstrate TALIS ASPIRE reading list and explain about seminar Prezi!! Also, point them in the direction of QREVIEW!

6. From Prehistoric man to Thomas Edison in a few “moves”
When does cinema begin? This is not a matter that is easy to settle decisively.
In a sense, cinema precedes the invention of cinema. We do not have enough time to discuss the various technologies in detail (for those interested in more information, the lecture slides will be available on QM+), but I’ll briefly indicate to you how different kinds of “proto-cinema” foreshadowed the arrival of what today we call cinema.

7. 1 - Shadow-play
Arguably, from the moment some prehistoric child cast hand-shadows on a wall by the light of the sun the cinema has existed! An image thrown on a screen and enjoyed by an audience. There are records of shadow puppets being used in performances in China and India more than two thousand years ago.

8. Shadow play was particularly popular in the 19th Century, when many books were produced illustrating ways of making animals and people appear on a wall.
Invite someone to make a shadow puppet in the projector image!!

9. Lotte Reiniger ( )
This approach and this sensibility finds its way into cinema proper, most beautifully in the pioneering animation films of Lotte Reiniger from the 1920s.
Charlotte "Lotte" Reiniger (2 June 1899 – 19 June 1981) was a German film director and pioneer of silhouette animation. Reiniger made more than 40 films over her career, all using her invention. Her best known films are The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) – the oldest surviving feature-length animated film.
One of our teaching team members, Tashi, is a Reiniger researcher, so can tell you more about her work in the seminar.

10. Camera Obscura 2 – The desire for photography and the Camera Obscura
The camera obscura predates photography. Although there’s no recording/capturing of the image on an emulsion, the image of the camera obscura is projected.
Camera = Latin for ‘room’ and Obscura = Latin for ‘dark’
The earliest mention of this type of device was by the Chinese philosopher Mo-Ti (5th century BC). He formally recorded the creation of an inverted image formed by light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened room. He called this darkened room a ‘collecting place’ or the ‘locked treasure room’.
The Greek philosopher Aristotle ( BC) understood the optical principle of the camera obscura, and the tenth century Arabian scholar Alhazen of Basra had a portable tent room for solar observation and gave a full account of the principle.
In 1490 Leonardo Da Vinci gave two clear descriptions of the camera obscura in his notebooks (of course, western histories usually start here approximately 2000 years after it was first ‘invented’ in China!)
The camera obscura, literally "dark room", makes use of an optical phenomenon in which light rays reverse themselves when they pass through a small aperture. At its most basic, light rays pass through a tiny hole and recreate themselves upside down on a screen that is placed parallel to the hole.
There are lots of youtube videos on this little device, so check them out (

11. The image quality was improved with the addition of a convex lens into the aperture in the 16th century and the later addition of a mirror to reflect the image down onto a viewing surface.
By the 17th and 18th century many artists were aided by the use of the camera obscura. Jan Vermeer ( ) is representative of this group.
By the beginning of the 19th century the camera obscura was ready with little or no modification to accept a sheet of light sensitive material to become the photographic camera.
** It is fascinating that the desire for photo-realist representation precedes the technological possibility of it! It is almost as if, as French film theorist Andre Bazin would say, humankind willed or wished the technology into existence according to some deep-seated desire to record the world as they saw it.

12. Magic lantern (precursor to PowerPoint!) 3 - The Magic Lantern
The Magic Lantern – essentially the same instrument as the modern slide projector – was basically a primitive slide-show using hand-painted glass slides. Still images were shown in a sequence often with a unifying guided tour, or ‘remonstration’.
The precursor to this Powerpoint presentation!
In its modern form it appears to date from the mid-17th century and lantern shows were increasingly popular as public entertainment throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
Magic lantern shows provided a collective experience of watching moving-pictures, as well as pioneering narrative story-telling as a way of knitting together the individual slides/images.
Travelogues- especially of colonial exploration and adventure – were a particularly popular form.
Once again, a collective experience of images on a screen unified by a story structure…
See David Robinson, Magic Images: Iconography of the Magic Lantern, (London: The Magic Lantern Society, 1993).

13. Nineteenth century animated toys: Zoetrope
4 - Nineteenth Century toys (click for animation)
Toys featuring animated (moving) images began to appear at the beginning of the nineteenth century. E.g. the Zoetrope (also known as the ‘wheel of life’); nice collection of these toys in the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green, well worth a visit.
You spin it around, and look through the slits to see the images move.
These toys exploited the discoveries of several scientists who realised that a series of still images can be used to create the effect of a moving image, if the conditions are right.
Put simply, there are two conditions: the first is that the images must be presented to the eye at the rate of at least 10 per second (the standard quickly became 20-24fps). The second condition is that a period of blackness must be set between each image, so that the images do not blur into each other, and the lines or gaps between them are not detected. The reason that the viewer perceives a moving image, is that the brain forms a mental bridge between the two images, giving rise to the idea that the static images are actually moving.
This is often referred to as persistence of vision (although scientists have problematised this recently, insisting on also taking into account the beta and phi-phenomenon).
Note – something I read claimed that cats are to youtube what horses were to the Zoetrope & early cinema!
See this exhilarating Ted talk by Eric Dyer:

14. Photography 5 –Photography
A sun tan, or the sun bleaching wood, with light leaving its mark on the material is a kind of photography. Early photography followed this naturally occurring phenomenon, replacing wood and bodies first with oil, and then with more reactive composites of different chemicals.

15. Here is a similar effect of light leaving its mark on skin (achieved by means of a fake tan…).

16. In the 1820s, a Frenchman called Joseph Nicéphore Niepce was experimenting with ways of making a permanent record of the image seen in a camera obscura. He coated metal plates with bitumen (an oil-based derivative) which when left for a long time captured an image on the oily coating. This is an early experiment from 1826.

17. Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre heard of Niepce's work, and spent two years collaborating with him. Daguerre used silver iodide to coat his plates, rather than bitumen. When the exposed plates were treated with mercury vapour, an image appeared, which was made permanent by removing the excess silver iodide. The photographs produced by this process were called, somewhat egotistically, 'daguerrotypes’.
Daguerre's early photographs had to be exposed for a very long time, which made portraiture almost impossible. They could also only produce one copy, since the glass plate that took the photograph was also the final image. These photographs are as unique as a painting but even more fragile.

18. British inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot was an amateur artist who began experimenting with recording images from a camera obscura in much the same way as Niepce and Daguerre. Using thin layers of silver nitrate on sheets of paper (instead of glass) he was able to achieve a quite short exposure time, and take pictures of leaves and lace as early as 1834 (like this example, photogenic drawing of a leaf, c ).
** However, his real breakthrough came the following year, when he realised that a transparent image (now known as a 'negative' because it produces a mirror image of the subject) could be re-photographed to produce a positive print, and that this process could be repeated as many times as the photographer required.

19. Skip due to time….
After these early experiments the history of photography developed rapidly. Plates were made available ready-prepared, so that photographers did not have to paint the sensitized compound on themselves. The new plates used a gelatin-based coating, which stayed usable for longer, and was able to capture images within a fraction of a second. By the mid- to late- nineteenth century this led to widespread use of photographs for producing portraits, images of buildings and of natural landmarks. Many different people set themselves up as portrait photographers, and amateur picture-takers became a common sight.
The slide shows a Matthew Brady photograph made sometime between 1844 and Brady is a famous American photographer who made his name during the American Civil War.

20. Don’t click – clip will start automatically…
The culmination of the improvements in photography and the increasing speed of photographic technology can be seen in the work of Eadweard Muybridge (April 9, 1830 – May 8, 1904), a British-born photographer, known primarily for his early use of multiple cameras to capture motion.
In 1872, businessman and former California governor Leland Stanford hired Muybridge to settle a question: Stanford claimed, contrary to popular belief, that there was a point in a horse's full gallop when all four hooves were off the ground.
By 1878, Muybridge successfully photographed a horse in fast motion using a series of fifty cameras. Each of the cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horse's, and each of the camera shutters were controlled by trip wires which were triggered by the horse's legs. This series of photos is called The Horse in Motion, and shows that, indeed, the hooves all leave the ground.
Hoping to capitalize upon the considerable public attention those pictures drew, Muybridge invented the Zoopraxiscope, a machine similar to the Zoetrope. He also worked on a powerful version of the magic lantern that allowed these images to be projected. The system was, in many ways, a precursor to the development of the motion picture camera, projector and screen.
Skip? In 1874, still living in the San Francisco Bay Area, Muybridge discovered that his wife had a lover, a Major Harry Larkyns. Thinking his son had been fathered by Larkyns (although, as an adult, the young man had a remarkable resemblance to Muybridge), on October 17, 1874, Muybridge sought out Larkyns; said, "Good evening, Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you sent my wife"; and shot and killed him. He was put on trial for the killing, but acquitted of the killing on the grounds that it was "justifiable homicide.” See Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003).

21. The horse in full gallop with all legs off the ground.

22. Celluloid
6 – Celluloid
In the 1880s a young American called George Eastman began to experiment with ways of making photography simpler. His first design was a roll-holder, which could be placed on the back of a camera in order to carry a roll of sensitized paper capable of taking up to 48 photographs. The popularity of the holder encouraged Eastman to work on a new camera design, with the holder built into the inside of the box. This camera appeared in 1888 and was marketed as the 'Kodak' camera.
The following year, 1889, Eastman replaced his paper roll with a roll of transparent celluloid film. Celluloid (a type of plastic produced from an oil-base) had been used for all manner of applications from broaches to billiard balls. This was the material which allowed the development of moving pictures: its flexibility, strength, suppleness and stability as a base for chemical emulsions made it the perfect tool for those scientists/inventors attempting to produce moving images: crucially, it was robust enough to operate at speed…

23. 7 - Stop/start mechanics
From this point on the elements required for the movie camera as we know it (and, indeed the cinema) are all available and it became a race to find a way of moving the film through a camera at the required speed – approx fps. The main problem to solve was the stop-start motion required to take serial photographs and to project them. This technology had already been developed in the late 1860s in relation to type-writing and sewing machines, as well as machine-guns!

24. Thomas Edison’s Kinetograph (1892) 8 - The Kinetograph (1892)
The French and British claim the invention of the first movie camera (and there’s some credibility in each of their claims). However, for the sake of simplicity it is now generally attributed to an American, Thomas Edison. Edison is best known for his development of the electric light bulb and the phonograph (the predecessor of the record player). One of Edison’s greatest achievements was probably hiring a young Scotsman, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who by 1892 had produced the first working prototype of the Kinetograph (seen on this slide). The Kinetograph used rolls of film about 35mm wide with (Dickson’s crucial innovation) a series of holes down the sides to allow the film to be pulled through the camera at an even rate.
Dickson wrote at the time: ‘What is the future of the Kinetograph? Ask rather, from what conceivable phase of the future can it be debarred. In the promotion of business interests, in the advancement of science, in the revelation of unguessed worlds, in its educational and re- creative powers, and in its ability to immortalise our fleeting but beloved associations, the Kinetograph stands foremost among the creations of the modern inventive genius.’ P.52
This is prophetic, and yet, finding a role for the movie camera was not altogether straightforward… and, of course, we do not yet have the cinema!
Skip?
The first man to experiment with Eastman's celluloid film was a Frenchman called Louis-Aimé-Augustin Le Prince. He lived in Leeds towards the end of the nineteenth century and was interested in various different kinds of visual arts (including panorama shows and magic lanterns). He designed a camera which could expose a rapid sequence of pictures and shot a brief film on Leeds bridge in However, whether he would have been able to develop his camera further is unknown, because he disappeared from a train between Dijon and Paris on 16 September 1890, and was never seen again. The next person on the scene was the English photographer William Friese Greene. He patented a camera in 1889, which could be used to produce short picture sequences, but he never seems to have worked with celluloid film. He was claimed as the 'father of the motion picture' by British film-makers, and a film was even made about his life (The Magic Box in 1951). However, there seems to be no evidence that he had produced any films before the late 1890s was also the year when Wordsworth Donisthorpe and W.C. Crofts patented a camera which used 'a sensitive film carried by a roll of paper or other material'. With this camera Donisthorpe took a very brief film of Trafalgar Square in Unfortunately, he failed to get the financial backing he needed to take his inventions further.

25. Kinetoscope
Edison searched for a business model which could utilitse the new technology to make a profit. He committed to the Kinetoscope. You can see from the picture that it could only be used by one person at a time, looking through the viewing piece at the top of the box. The film ran backwards and forwards round a series of pulleys, and was held as a continuous loop, so that it could be watched over and over again without rewinding. The first public demonstration, including Blacksmith Scene, took place at the Brooklyn Institute in New York on 9 May 1893 and a contract for the manufacture of twenty-five machines was signed in June of that same year.
Note the use of headphones, evidence of Edison’s experiments in synching together the Kinetoscope and the Phonograph (note - use of the words silent cinema are from here on in to be used with care).
David Bordwell has written about the similarities between the Kinetoscope and the viewing of YouTube films on the iPod or iPhone.

26. The Kinetoscope required a regular and regularly updated supply of product and this meant getting involved in film production. Already, by December, 1892, Dickson had supervised construction of a special building to facilitate efficient production of subjects for the new system. This revolving structure, made of tarred paper and with a moveable shutter to control the entry of light, was soon known informally as the Black Maria - the world's first film studio.

27. Skip…
Kinetoscope parlours spread quickly throughout the United States and Europe in Edison's earliest films lasted for about 20 seconds, and were incredibly varied. They included such vaudeville acts as the dancers Annabelle and Carmencita, the strong man Eugene Sandow (something of a mascot for Intro to Film), miniature dramas, pornography, autopsy films, comedy acts, actualities, films of freaks (Siamese twins were a popular subject), civic rituals, news events etc. etc.
Skip
Anecdote about electrocution of the Topsy the Elephant, demonstrating Edison’s archly capitalist mind at work. Designed to show how his electric power supply unit was better than his rivals (Topsy was killed with DC current which Edison claimed was dangerous, but which did eventually become the standard), and make a saleable film to boot. See the web for the film itself, which is too controversial to show!

28. Edison Kinetoscope films, 1894-1899
The Kiss
Serpentine Dances
Sandow the Strongman (title image)
Glenroy Bros. (Comic Boxing)
Screen early Edison films from Landmarks of Early Film.
The Big Swallow (1901):

30. The Cinematograph (1895) 9 - The Cinematograph (1895)
Auguste and Louis Lumière came from Lyon in France, where they worked in their father's photographic factory. In 1894, they saw Edison's Kinetoscope in Paris, and decided to design a camera of their own. By February of the next year they had produced a working model of their camera, which they called a Cinématographe. The machine was in fact not only a camera but could be used, together with a magic lantern device, to project films. This is the final piece of the puzzle - the projection of a film to an audience, photographic moving images projected onto a screen - the cinema!
The films produced by the Lumières' camera were usually about 50 seconds long. They were taken in one shot, with the camera fixed on a tripod. The first public screening of one of the Lumières' films was given on 28 December 1895 in Paris. One showed workers leaving the Lumiere’s factory in Lyon and another, perhaps the most famous, showed a train arriving at a station. Russian writer, Maxim Gorky wrote – 'suddenly there is a click, everything vanishes and a railway train appears on the screen. It darts like an arrow straight towards you – watch out! It seems as though it is about to rush into the darkness where you are sitting and reduce you to a sack of mangled skin… destroy this hall and this building, so full of wine, music and vice, and turn it into fragments of dust.’ The date of this screening is often taken to mark the birth of the cinema proper.
After the screening, the brothers began commercial production of their camera, which was soon in demand across the world. The age of the cinema had begun.

31. Lumière films, 1895-1897 Workers Leaving the Factory
Arrival of a train at La Ciotat
Baby’s Lunch
Boat Leaving the Harbour
Demolition of a Wall
Point them towards Lumière et Compagne on Youtube, or blog this.

33. The cinema of attractions
See handout
The culmination of all this is the early period of cinema at the turn of the century. Film historian, Tom Gunning calls this the cinema of attractions which puts the filmmaking process on display and celebrates in a self-conscious way the technical possibilities of the medium.
The cinema of attractions is more various and open (in relation to race, class, gender and so on) than the Hollywood cinema that followed it.
The cinema of attractions also demands an active spectator who takes pleasure from the clever presentation of action and spectacle. As Gunning puts it “the attraction invokes an exhibitionist rather than voyeuristic regime. The attraction directly addresses the spectator, acknowledging the viewer’s presence and seeking to quickly satisfy a curiosity. This encounter can even take on an aggressive aspect, as the attraction confronts audiences and even tries to shock them” (Gunning, p.44).
Rewriting the history of film: non-narrative is the origin of film, not a “primitive” foundation for it.
The avant-garde precedes story-telling cinema and is independent of it. (Narrative, in a way, involves a kind of disciplining of the spectator, and coincides with the transformation of the cinema from a working class to a middle class pursuit).
Please do try keep an open mind as we traverse the early development of the American film industry. The question of editing, narrative and the development of the multi-reel/story film will be the focus of next week’s class.

34. Arts One, 1.36 (3-4pm)
Bancroft, (3-4pm)

35. Bancroft, 1.09 (3-4pm)
Arts One, 1.36 (4-5pm)

36. Bancroft, (4-5pm)
Bancroft, 1.09 (4-5pm)