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The first public film show by the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere on 28 December 1895 in the Grand Cafe on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris is considered as the date of birth of the cinema. The first program consisted of short one-minute subject taken by Louis Lumiere credited as inventor as well as cameraman. A short scrutiny of existing literature raises a number of questions about the uprightness of this common conception. We are confronted with two real problems.

Some of the movie cameras used in the past

How to find out what really happened in 1895? How reliable are the historians of established reputation?

The history of the cinema was mainly recorded by reporters and historians who were principally concerned in the final product of this venture: the actual films, the actors, directors and producers. The history of the development of technology, photo-chemistry and industry had escaped from their attention.

These film reporters and historians who recorded what happened more than hundred years ago including the technological inventions and the rise of the industry deceiving as the Lumiere myth is, it conceals that before the 28th of December 1895 there had already been dozens of public film shows.

In February 1895 technical co-worker of Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince conducted movie shows for a paying public in Clinton, New Jersey. In August 1895 the British inventor Birt Acres presented public film performances in Barnet, North of London. From 1st November 1895 Max Skandanowski demonstrated with his brother 'Das Bioskop' films in Berlin. Acres' assistant Arthur Melbourne-Cooper presented his first show for an audience on 18th December 1895 in North Mymms in Hertfordshire, Great Britain. Just to name a few! Film historians have sought to solve this problem by posing that the genesis of cinematography has been a gradual development.

Motion

Augustin Le Prince (1842-1900) along with Edison who produced movies in 1888 in his studios was able to show motion pictures by projection in the garden of the house of his in-laws in Leeds in 1892.

Prince's camera is now on exhibit in the Science Museum, London. For many years Edison claimed to be the inventor of the cinema. His contribution was demythologised in a number of studies of American film historian Gordon Hendricks. From 1892 Birt Acres (1854-1918) was working on an better version of his 'kinetic camera', resulting in the 'Kineopticon'. In 1892 the young engineer Leon Bouly designed a successful 'Cinematograph'. In 1893 he was granted a patent on an improved version, the 'Cinematographe Bouly'. The apparatus still exists and are on exhibit in le Musee des Arts et Metiers, Paris.

Alas, Bouly couldn't come up with the yearly patent fees. Antoine Lumiere, proprietor of an international enterprise in photographic materials, had his works manager, Carpentier, take Edison's kinetoscope apart. He now picked up the expired patent and obtained one on the Cinematographe Lumiere in the name of his sons Auguste and Louis. Lumiere even borrowed the name 'cinematographe'. Little mercy in business! The French reporter Leo Sauvage, who was the manager of the foreign department for years of the French daily Le Figaro in New York, wrote a grim book L'affaire Lumiere, in which he untangles one of the biggest publicity stunts in film history.

However, Lumiere came just at the right moment. The interest of the public had been aroused. That public could now be reached large-scale. So a basis was established for the financial-economical development of a new business enterprise.

The second problem is referred to by British film historian Rachael Low, who writes in the second part of her 'The history of the British Film' many strange and unsuccessful experiments were tried.

Such an instance is the firm in 1908 which advertised itself as producers for the wholesale trade only', with equipment and staff of its own to make films to order.' This shows that the author has little insight in the economic prerequisites for the development of a new branch of industry. Its success hinges on the first product life cycle (a cyclical period of 6 to 8 years) : specialization in production, distribution and marketing.

The same happened in photography half a century before and for that matter in the computer industry in recent times.

Export

Arthur Melbourne-Co-oper (1874 - 1961) produced hundreds of films per year and exported them to all parts of the world. Amongst them were forerunners of the Keystone Cop comedies and very early puppet animation films. In that same period the big studios emerged such as Pathe, Gaumont, Biograph and Edison.

To classify said problems I should like to split the birth of the cinema in two parts. First of all the technical-economical history and secondly the history of the 'motion picture' as the final product. We can determine the moment of birth of the technology of cinematography with great certainty. It was the year 1888. What was being recorded and projected had more resemblance to the domain of photography or Victorian optical toys such as zoetrope and praxinoscopes than to the cinema.

In 1888 professor of physiology Etienne-Jules Marey of the Academie de Medicines at Parc des Princes demonstrated his 'Chronophotographe', an apparatus which he needed to record movements for his research into heart and blood circulation. In the same year Parisian Emile Reynaud was granted a patent for the use of perforations on visual strips with drawn animated pictures, which were shown with great success in Musee Grevin, Paris.

In 1888 Le Prince made his first successful experiments and went in pursuit after further finance capital to develop his invention, for he was eager to come first with a cinematographic diorama. He did not succeed.

To save his family from the disgrace of bankruptcy he disappeared without trace in France. Probably he enlisted himself in the Foreign Legion.

Le Prince's in-laws Whitley and son Adolphe Le Prince made their appearance in the garden of their house in Leeds in 1888. This may be considered the first successfully photographed and projected motion picture in the world. The images were so distinct that one can see the smoke spiralling out of the chimney of father-in-law Whitley.

Success

Marey was strongly stimulated by the demonstrations by Eadweard Muybridge in French salons of his trotting horses and walking nude models around 1878. These performances had also inspired Augustin Le Prince. Probably also the Englishman Birt Acres who studied at the art academy of Paris. Muybridge, however, was not the inventor of the animated photographic images.

That was his patron Leland Stanford, governor of Californie, and later founder of the Stanford University. Stanford wished to determine scientifically whether all four legs of a galloping horse got off the ground . He looked for a knowledgeable photographer to assist him in his research. Stanford was inspired by earlier experiments of Marey with his so-called Janssen-rifle, an apparatus that makes repetitive photographic exposures on a glass disc covered with a photographic emulsion.

1889 Thomas Alva Edison visited the Exposition International in Paris. Every evening he telegraphed from his hotel room to his workshops his famous 'caveats' - ideas for possible patents based on all what he saw there. Edison not only saw the work of Reynaud, but visited also professor Marey in his institute, who felt very honoured. From Hendricks we learn how in Edison's workshops with ups and downs kinetoscopes were being developed by W.K.L. Dickson

Change

Mechanism of a kinetoscope with shortened (probably repaired) film strip. When one compares the patent drawings of the 'chronophotography' and the 'kinetoscope' one discovers only one elementary difference. Whereas Marey made the basic change to short lengths of finite film strips, a breach in the tradition of the zoetropes, in Edison's workshops an endless loop of film was reverted to. Besides that there are technically few differences (apart from the size of both of the apparatus, which is not essential in itself).

Probably Antoine Lumiere and Carpentier had already found this out in 1894. Public interest in the moving image was aroused from the time kinetoscopes were introduced. The Lumiere company took advantage of a growing success, a practice not unusual in business. A good example is the introduction of the personal computer by IBM. The company can hardly be called the inventor.

The first life cycle of the movie is actually one of moving photographic images: living, or animated pictures, moving photographs. In the archives of Arthur Melbourne-Cooper, which his daughter Audrey assembled in years of research, is a tape-recorded interview with the residents of the Hamlet Ridge Hill (nearby the later Elstree Studios in Borehamwood), where Cooper began his Alpha Trading Company.

The interviewed, now at an advanced age, still remembered with enthusiasm the first film shows they had attended sixty years ago:

'You saw them moving. The leaves on the trees moved. You saw someone really waving his hand. It was unbelievable.' Around 1900 Edison, Lumiere, as well as the Englishman Robert W. Paul announced their intention to invest in the motion picture industry.

They were aware of a decreased public interest. Films were now shown during intermissions, when the audience changed, as 'patron chasers'. Some film producers did not give up and pondered about something new. Georges Melies in France, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper in England en Edwin S. Porter in America are those who succeeded in combining a series of moving picture scenes to a cinematographic story.

Bertha M. Cooper and Bert Massey in Arthur Melbourne-Cooper's 'Grandma's Reading Glasss' (1900), the first movie with clear purposeful editing of close-ups within a half total shot, attributed to G.A. Smith of Brighton.

With the short movie 'Grandma's Reading Glasss' of July 1900 the history of the cinema begins. For the first time shots are being interposed with a clear purpose in between a half total scene. The birth of film editing. This short film was attributed to George Albert Smith mistakenly by author Georges Sadoul. Actually it was produced by the aforementioned Cooper, who was so put down by British film historian Low for his 'strange and unsuccessful experiments'!

Editing

Two children play grandmother and grandson. Little grandmother comes in frame and picks up her knitting. The 'grandson' appears, takes his grandmother's reading glass and looks through it in a newspaper.

At the very moment the boy studies the newspaper, a close-up of what he sees appears. A miracle happens: first being objective onlookers, now we are 'carried away' by the sequence of pictures and become, whether we like it or not, a subjective audience. We watch now through the eyes of the little boy.

This is no coincidence for the boy directs his glass to a canary in a bird cage, at grandmother's eye, and at other objects.

Again and again we change from objective onlooker to a subjective view. Film language was born with this short version.

A language, which is capable of carrying us from the confinement of the film screen to a world populated by wonderful gods and goddesses. Not long after Melies 'Le voyage dans la lune' (1902) became a success and Porter with his 'The great train robbery' (1903).

Conclusions

We can now draw some preliminary conclusions. In the technical evolution of motion pictures we can distinguish certain lines. However, just like the music CD emerged out of a flop by Philips of a premature launched laser-disc system, so not many of all the 'inventors' involved were out to discover cinematography.

Le Prince had the cinematographic diorama in mind. Antoine Lumiere was probably keen to expand the market of his main activity: the manufacture of photographic materials. Edison wanted to create living pictures that ran in sync with his sound apparatus. Marey and Acres wanted to develop apparatus for scientific research.

George Eastman (left) and Edison in the twenties when the media credited them with the invention of motion pictures.

The question as to who invented the cinema has intrigued the public, reporters and all those concerned from the very beginning. As far back as 1896 it was a topic in 'The Amateur Photographer' (at that period of time 'amateur' meant 'professional').

Birt Acres writes on October 6th of that year at this branch of photography, it is really difficult to assign to any one individual the title of origination.'

Acres refers to the inventor of the zoetrope or 'wheel of life' and then names Muybridge, Fraus-Greene, Anschutz, Marie and Demeny. Then he enters at length into the Edison's kinetoscope and his own work, 'without claiming to be the originator of animated photography I do claim to have been the first to have made a portable apparatus which successfully took photographs of ordinary scenes of everyday life.' Mechanism of Birt Acres' "Kineopticon" of 1895, now displayed in the Science Museum, London.

Development

He acknowledges the success of the first Lumiere shows, but: since their successful exhibition a host of others have come forward with similar shows, but as Lumiere's would not sell their apparatus or films, imitators had depended on Edison films, or such of mine that could be obtained, I having ceased to supply mine for some time.'

Acres right in arguing that the apparatus of Lumiere in itself contributed little to the rapid development of cinematography. Antoine Lumiere behaved like the Apple company. Their Macintosh proved to be no match for the easily cloneable IBM-pc with its open architecture. Darling Duplex camera around 1900 could be ordered from Alfred Darling in Brighton.

It was the since forgotten engineer, Alfred Darling, who studied the patent drawings of the Cinematography Lumiere and manufactured an improved model for film perforated according to the Edison norm. Like Cooper he supplied to 'the wholesale trade only'. His technically superior and reliable cameras, projectors and printers were sold the world over under trade names as Prestwich, Williamson, Moy, Wrench and Urban.

When after 1900 the film story developed, it was accompanied by an efficient publicity machinery. That meant publications and books that repeated the myth of the great inventors Edison and Lumiere, instead of questioning into the matter.

Mythology

The detrimental side of such mythology is clear now. First of all the contribution of the creative film producers and inventors of the new technology is underestimated, forgotten, or even denied. The latter is the case with English pioneer Arthur Melbourne-Cooper. Although for 20 years he has been an independent, stimulating and influential director-producer, his work is now forgotten and most of his films are ascribed to the distributors he sold to.

Beach scenes taken in Dover by Acres in 1892-93 with his kinetic 70mm camera By the narrow perspective of those who written about film history there exists an indirect but nevertheless great danger.

Movies are very much subject to trends, also because of producer controlled publicity . What is now being stored in vaults the entire world over is perishable nitrate films which contain a precious view of our time and that of our parents and grandparents for coming generations. It is also an outthought-of treasure for other disciplines and branches of science: sociology, cultural anthropology, photography, fashion, art, etc.

- Courtesy: Photo historical Magazine of the Photographic Society of the Netherlands

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