“When talking about film history, you have to begin to think about what cinema is at its core. Cinema or motion pictures is an image that moves,” Alrick Brown explains.”
“As soon as man could see, he started interpreting stories, looking at the stars, differentiating shapes of objects, naming constellations. As soon as a kid could, they probably were drawing images with sticks and dirt.”
Early cave dwellers used image paintings in caves to communicate. Later, the Egyptians used hieroglyphics to tell their stories and preserve histories.
Those symbols and images were a prelude to film’s beginnings.
Over a century ago, the Lumiere brothers and Thomas Edison’s company, experimented and found ways to make images move, creating motion pictures.
Gomez-Rejon’s film tells how film history and Edison, others are joined by history
“I made a film recently called The Current War: The Director’s Cut. I wanted to show how filmmaking and electricity were invented at the same time,” comments Alfonso Gomez-Rejon.
It started in the 1870s with beautiful studies in film motion by Eadweard Muybridge. They were done, I think, with twelve cameras. That evolved into William Dixon and Edison working together on the kinetograph and kinetoscope.
Next came, the Black Maria, Edison’s film production, considered to be the first film company. Remember, at this time in history film was still a novelty. But then we see it progress. The Lumiere brothers (Auguste and Louis Lumière) have the first kind of commercial film screening.
Georges Méliès starts doing narrative storytelling, but it’s still very theatrical with a fixed camera.
“Everything evolves again with Edwin S. Porter’s, The Great Train Robbery. This film, with its illusion of uninterrupted time caused by innovative (for the time) camera cuts and pans, is like the beginning of modern film language, or film vocabulary,” states Gomez-Rejon.
It’s fascinating to see their work and how it’s been interpreted by film industry types throughout the ages. Certainly, these films spoke to me.
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