Show description

To which public response was to break all previous attendance records (Gronemayer 20). The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, were fascinated by the idea of capturing reality on film. To pursue their aim, they assembled a light-weight, hand-held motion picture camera, which they named cinématographe. caught? reality onto filmstrips, which then projected filmed reality to a large canvas. This launched the method of projecting moving images to large screens that enabled not only small group projections but also mass viewing first across Europe and then throughout the whole world.

Basic Concepts? 174). One of the drawbacks of their filmic activity was that they never thought of moving the camera. Their filming device had always been fixed and movements were filmed from a static place. It was only during the first decade of the twentieth century when director David L. W. Billy? Blitzer restructured filmmaking by introducing camera movements and special effects. The Lumières were primarily inventors and manufacturers of cameras and films, their organized screenings were only additional activities.

Despite his ingenuity and artistic inventiveness, Méliès conceived the film viewer as theater spectator, and movies as filmed theater, accordingly. He produced a great number of féeries, a type of melodrama that combined music and acrobatics with the thrills of magic shows and fairy tales, and filmed theatrical performances. Despite his active involvement in the early cinema business he went bankrupt and left the field of filmmaking and marketing to Charles Pathé (Kracauer 177). s movies were identified as examples of the formative tendency in film.