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Film

Visual art consisting of moving images

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Films are produced by recording people and objects with cameras or by creating them using animation techniques and special effects. They comprise a series of individual frames, but when these images are shown rapidly in succession, the illusion of motion is seen by the viewer. Flickering between frames is not noticeable due to an effect traditionally known as persistence of vision, and now more specifically known as flicker fusion, whereby the visual system processes a sufficiently fast succession of pictures and interruptions into a steady image of averaged brightness.

Films are widely considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten, and inspire audiences. The visual elements of cinema need no translation, giving the motion picture a universal power of communication. Any film can become a worldwide attraction, especially with the addition of dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue. Films are also artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them.

History

Precursors

The art of film has drawn on several earlier traditions in fields such as oral storytelling, literature, theatre, and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving or projected images include shadowgraphy, camera obscura, shadow puppetry, and magic lantern.

1830s–1880s: Before celluloid

The stroboscopic animation principle was introduced in 1833 with the stroboscopic disc (better known as the phénakisticope) and later applied in the zoetrope (since 1866), the flip book (since 1868), and the praxinoscope (since 1877), before it became the basic principle for cinematography.

Experiments with early phénakisticope-based animation projectors were made at least as early as 1843 and publicly screened in 1847. Jules Duboscq introduced phénakisticope projection systems in France in the 1870s.

Photography was introduced in 1839, but initially photographic emulsions needed such long exposures that the recording of moving subjects seemed impossible. At least as early as 1844, photographic series of subjects posed in different positions were created to either suggest a motion sequence or document a range of different viewing angles. The advent of stereoscopic photography, with early experiments in the 1840s and commercial success since the early 1850s, raised interest in completing the photographic medium with the addition of means to capture color and motion. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published the idea to combine his invention of the phénakisticope with the stereoscope, as suggested to him by stereoscope inventor Charles Wheatstone, and to use photographs of plaster sculptures in different positions to be animated in the combined device. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented such an instrument as the "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope", but he only marketed it very briefly, without success. One Bïoscope disc with stereoscopic photographs of a machine is in the Plateau collection of Ghent University, but no instruments or other discs have yet been found.

In the late 1840s, the first examples of instantaneous photography came about. This provided hope that motion photography would soon be possible, but it took a few decades before it was successfully combined with a method to record series of sequential images in real-time. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge managed to take a series of photographs of a running horse with a battery of cameras in a line along the track and published the results as The Horse in Motion on cabinet cards. Muybridge, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschütz, and others, would create many more chronophotography studies. Muybridge had the contours of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with his zoopraxiscope in his lectures from 1880 to 1895.

Anschütz made his first instantaneous photographs in the early 1880s, developing a portable camera that allowed shutter speeds as short as 1/1000 of a second. The quality of his pictures was generally regarded as much higher than that of the chronophotography works of Muybridge and Marey. In 1886, Anschütz developed the Electrotachyscope, an early device that displayed short motion picture loops with 24 glass plate photographs on a 1.5 meter wide rotating wheel that was hand-cranked to a speed of circa 30 frames per second. Different versions were shown at many international exhibitions, fairs, conventions, and arcades from 1887 until at least 1894. Starting in 1891, some 152 examples of a coin-operated peep-box Electrotachyscope model were manufactured by Siemens & Halske in Berlin and sold internationally. Nearly 34,000 people paid to see it at the Berlin Exhibition Park in the summer of 1892. Others saw it in London or at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. On 25 November 1894, Anschütz introduced a Electrotachyscope projector with a 6x8 meter screening in Berlin. Between 22 February and 30 March 1895, a total of circa 7,000 paying customers came to view a 1.5-hour show of some 40 scenes at a 300-seat hall in the old Reichstag building in Berlin.

French inventor Émile Reynaud had already mentioned the possibility of projecting images of the Praxinoscope in his 1877 patent application. He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société française de photographie in 1880, but did not commercially produce his praxinoscope a projection before 1882. It received an Honourable Mention at the Paris Exposition of 1878. He then further developed the device into the Théâtre Optique, which could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, patented in 1888. He created several movies for the machine by painting images on gelatin plates that were mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. From 1892 to 1900, Reynaud presented animated shows, called Pantomimes Lumineuses, to visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris.

1880s–1890s: First motion pictures

By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph a rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film.

Movies were initially shown publicly to one person at a time through "peep show" devices such as the Electrotachyscope, Kinetoscope, and the Mutoscope. In the late 1890s, exhibitors managed to project films on large screens for theatre audiences.

The first public screenings of films where admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons (using films produced by their Eidoloscope company), by German brothers Emile and Max Skladanowsky, and by French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, best known for L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (1896), with 10 of their own productions. Private screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the others'.

1910s: Early evolution

The earliest films were very short, typically a few minutes or less. Generally, they were a simple, singular, static shot that showed an event or action with no editing or other cinematic techniques. Examples of early films include Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory (1895) and its alternate versions, in which a still camera shows employees leaving their workplace through a gateway, and A Trip Down Market Street (1906), which had some sense of movement because it was shot from a cable car.

Around the turn of the 20th century, films started stringing several scenes together to tell a story. (The filmmakers who first put several shots or scenes discovered that, when one shot follows another, that act establishes a relationship between the content in the separate shots in the minds of the viewer. It is this relationship that makes all film storytelling possible. In a simple example, if a person is shown looking out a window, whatever the next shot shows, it will be regarded as the view the person was seeing.) Each scene was a single stationary shot with the action occurring before it. The scenes were later broken up into multiple shots photographed from different distances and angles.

Other techniques such as camera movement were developed as effective ways to tell a story with film. Until sound film became commercially practical in the late 1920s, motion pictures were a purely visual art, but these innovative silent films gained a hold on the public imagination. Rather than leave audiences with only the noise of the projector as an accompaniment, theater owners hired a pianist or organist or, in large urban theaters, a full orchestra to play music that fit the mood of the film at any given moment. By the early 1920s, most films came with a prepared list of sheet music to be used for this purpose, and complete film scores were composed for major productions.

The rise of European cinema was interrupted by the outbreak of World War I (1914–1918), while the film industry in the U.S. flourished with the rise of Hollywood, typified most prominently by the innovative work of D. W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). However, in the 1920s, European filmmakers such as Sergei Eisenstein, F. W. Murnau, and Fritz Lang, in many ways inspired by the meteoric wartime progress of film through Griffith, along with the contributions of actors like Charles "Charlie" Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and others, quickly caught up with American film-making and continued to further advance the medium.

1920s–1960s: Evolution in sound

In the late 1920s, the development of electronic sound recording technologies made it practical to incorporate a soundtrack of speech, music, and sound effects synchronized with the action on the screen. The resulting sound films were initially distinguished from the usual silent "moving pictures" or "movies" by calling them "talking pictures" or "talkies." The revolution they brought was swift. By 1931, silent film was practically extinct in the U.S. and already being referred to as "the old medium." As of 2013, only 14% of America's silent feature films from 1912 to 1929 existed in their original format.

The evolution of sound in cinema began with the idea of combining moving images with existing phonograph sound technology. Early sound-film systems, such as Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope and the Vitaphone used by Warner Bros., laid the groundwork for synchronized sound in film. The Vitaphone system, produced alongside Bell Telephone Company and Western Electric, faced initial resistance due to expensive equipping costs, but sound in cinema gained acceptance with movies like Don Juan (1926) and The Jazz Singer (1927).

Meanwhile, Europe standardized on Tobis-Klangfilm and Tri-Ergon systems. This new technology allowed for greater fluidity in film, giving rise to more complex and epic movies like King Kong (1933).

As the threat of television emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, the film industry needed to innovate to attract audiences. In terms of sound technology, this meant the development of surround sound and more sophisticated audio systems, such as Cinerama's seven-channel system. However, these advances required a large number of personnel to operate the equipment and maintain the sound experience in theaters. As an extra step, major film studios also started buying interests in TV stations, gaining a majority control of television studios by 1948.

In 1966, Dolby Laboratories introduced the Dolby A noise reduction system, which became a standard in the recording industry and eliminated the hissing sound associated with earlier standardization efforts. Dolby Stereo, a revolutionary surround sound system that was introduced audiences by 1977, followed and allowed cinema designers to take acoustics into consideration when designing theaters. This innovation enabled audiences in smaller venues to enjoy comparable audio experiences to those in larger city theaters.

Today, the future of sound in film remains uncertain, with potential influences from artificial intelligence (AI), remastered audio, and personal viewing experiences shaping its development. However, the evolution of sound in cinema has been marked by continuous innovation and a desire to create more immersive and engaging experiences for audiences.

1930s: Evolution in color

A significant technological advancement in film was the introduction of "natural color," where color was captured directly from nature through photography, as opposed to being manually added to black-and-white prints using techniques like hand-coloring or stencil-coloring. Early color processes often produced colors that appeared far from "natural". Unlike the rapid transition from silent films to sound films, color's replacement of black-and-white happened more gradually.

A crucial innovation was the three-strip version of the Technicolor process, first used in animated cartoons in 1932. The process was later applied to live-action short films, specific sequences in feature films, and finally, for an entire feature film, Becky Sharp, in 1935. Although the process was expensive, the positive public response, as evidenced by increased box office revenue, generally justified the additional cost. Consequently, the number of films made in color gradually increased year after year. One of the first mainstream films to use color was The Wizard of Oz (1939).

1950s: Growing influence of television

In the early 1950s, black-and-white television started receiving criticism, with many believing that TV failed to reach the lofty intellectual and cultural expectations that accompanied its introduction. In an attempt to lure audiences back to theaters, bigger screens, widescreen processes, polarized 3D projection, and stereophonic sound were introduced, and more films were made in color—which soon became the rule, rather than the exception. Some important mainstream Hollywood films were still being made in black-and-white as late as the mid-1960s, but they marked the end of an era. Color television receivers had been available in the U.S. since the mid-1950s, but initially, they were very expensive and few broadcasts were in color.

During the 1960s, prices gradually came down, color broadcasts became common, and sales boomed. The overwhelming public verdict in favor of color was clear. After the final flurry of black-and-white films had been released in mid-decade, all Hollywood studio productions were filmed in color, with the usual exceptions made only at the insistence of "star" filmmakers such as Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, and Alfred Hitchcock with his film Psycho (1960).

1960s–present: Modern cinema

The decades following the decline of the studio system in the 1960s saw changes in the production and style of film. Various "New Wave" movements (including the French New Wave, New German Cinema wave, Indian New Wave, Japanese New Wave, New Hollywood, and Egyptian New Wave) and the rise of film-school-educated independent filmmakers, known as the "Film School Generation" of the 1960s and 1970s, contributed to the changes the medium experienced in the latter half of the 20th century.

Digital technology has been the driving force for change throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s. Digital 3D projection largely replaced earlier problem-prone 3D film systems of the 1950s and 1980s and became briefly popular in the early 2010s with films like Avatar (2009). Large-screen cinemas systems using 35mm and 70mm film were developed in the late 2010s, with companies like the IMAX corporation. By the mid-2010s, theatres were also trying a 4D approach to movies, in which audiences could experience smells, wind, smoke/fog, vibrations, and other sensations. By the mid-2020s, an even more "immersive" 4DX film format was gaining popularity.

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Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “Film” (this version, 2026-09-30) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.