MOVING PICTURES
Photographing Motion--Edison's Kinetoscope--Lumiere's
Cinematographe--Before the Camera--The Mission of the Moving
Picture.
Few can realize the extent of the field covered by moving pictures.
In the dual capacity of entertainment and instruction there is not a
rival in sight. As an instructor, science is daily widening the sphere
of the motion picture for the purpose of illustration. Films are rapidly
superseding text books in many branches. Every department capable of
photographic demonstration is being covered by moving pictures.
Negatives are now being made of the most intricate surgical operations
and these are teaching the students better than the witnessing of the
real operations, for at the critical moment of the operation the picture
machine can be stopped to let the student view over again the way it
is accomplished, whereas at the operating table the surgeon must go
on with his work to try to save life and cannot explain every step in
the process of the operation. There is no doubt that the moving picture
machine will perform a very important part in the future teaching of
surgery.
In the naturalist's domain of science it is already playing a very
important part. A device for micro-photography has now been perfected
in connection with motion machines whereby things are magnified to a
great degree. By this means the analysis of a substance can be better
illustrated than any way else. For instance a drop of water looks like
a veritable Zoo with terrible looking creatures wiggling and wriggling
through it, and makes one feel as if he never wanted to drink water
again.
The moving picture in its general phase is entertainment and instruction
rolled into one and as such it has superseded the theatre. It is
estimated that at the present time in America there are upwards of
20,000 moving picture shows patronized daily by almost ten million
people. It is doubtful if the theatre attendance at the best day of
the winter season reaches five millions.
The moving picture in importance is far beyond the puny functions of
comedy and tragedy. The grotesque farce of vaudeville and the tawdry
show which only appeals to sentiment at highest and often to the base
passions at lowest.
Despite prurient opposition it is making rapid headway. It is entering
very largely into the instructive and the entertaining departments of
the world's curriculum. Millions of dollars are annually expended in
the production of films. Companies of trained and practiced actors are
brought together to enact pantomimes which will concentrate within the
space of a few minutes the most entertaining and instructive incidents
of history and the leading happenings of the world.
At all great events, no matter where transpiring, the different moving
picture companies have trained men at the front ready with their cameras
to "catch" every incident, every movement even to the wink of an
eyelash, so that the "stay-at-homes" can see the _show_ as well, and
with a great deal more comfort than if they had traveled hundreds,
or even thousands, of miles to be present in _propria persona_.
How did moving pictures originate? What and when were the beginning?
It is popularly believed that animated pictures had their inception
with Edison who projected the biograph in 1887, having based it on
that wonderful and ingenious toy, the Zoetrope. Long before 1887,
however, several men of inventive faculties had turned their attention
to a means of giving apparent animation to pictures. The first that
met with any degree of success was Edward Muybridge, a photographer
of San Francisco. This was in 1878. A revolution had been brought about
in photography by the introduction of the instantaneous process. By
the use of sensitive films of gelatine bromide of silver emulsion the
time required for the action of ordinary daylight in producing a
photograph had been reduced to a very small fraction of a second.
Muybridge utilized these films for the photographic analysis of animal
motion. Beside a race-track he placed a battery of cameras, each camera
being provided with a spring shutter which was controlled by a thread
stretched across the track. A running horse broke each thread the
moment he passed in front of the camera and thus twenty or thirty
pictures of him were taken in close succession within one or two seconds
of time. From the negatives secured in this way a series of positives
were obtained in proper order on a strip of sensitized paper. The strip
when examined by means of the Zoetrope furnished a reproduction of the
horse's movements.
The Zoetrope was a toy familiar to children; it was sometimes called
the wheel of life. It was a contrivance consisting of a cylinder some
ten inches wide, open at the top, around the lower and interior rim
of which a series of related pictures were placed. The cylinder was
then rapidly rotated and the spectator looking through the vertical
narrow slits on its outer surface, could fancy that the pictures inside
were moving.
Muybridge devised an instrument which he called a Zoopraxiscope for
the optical projection of his zoetrope photographs. The succession of
positives was arranged in proper order upon a glass disk about 18
inches in diameter near its circumference. This disk was mounted
conveniently for rapid revolution so that each picture would pass in
front of the condenser of an optical lantern. The difficulties involved
in the preparation of the disk pictures and in the manipulation of the
zoopraxiscope prevented the instrument from attracting much attention.
However, artistically speaking, it was the forerunner of the numerous
"graphs" and "scopes" and moving picture machines of the present day.
It was in 1887 that Edison conceived an idea of associating with his
phonograph, which had then achieved a marked success, an instrument
which would reproduce to the eye the effect of motion by means of a
swift and graded succession of pictures, so that the reproduction of
articulate sounds as in the phonograph, would be accompanied by the
reproduction of the motion naturally associated with them.
The principle of the instrument was suggested to Edison by the zoetrope,
and of course, he well knew what Muybridge had accomplished in the
line of motion pictures of animals almost ten years previously. Edison,
however, did not employ a battery of cameras as Muybridge had done,
but devised a special form of camera in which a long strip of sensitized
film was moved rapidly behind a lens provided with a shutter, and so
arranged as to alternately admit and cut off the light from the moving
object. He adjusted the mechanism so that there were 46 exposures a
second, the film remaining stationary during the momentary time of
exposure, after which it was carried forward far enough to bring a new
surface into the proper position. The time of the shifting was about
one-tenth of that allowed for exposure, so that the actual time of
exposure was about the one-fiftieth of a second. The film moved,
reckoning shiftings and stoppages for exposures, at an average speed
of a little more than a foot per second, so that a length of film of
about fifty feet received between 700 and 800 impressions in a circuit
of 40 seconds.
Edison named his first instrument the kinetoscope. It came out in 1893.
It was hailed with delight at the time and for a short period was much
in demand, but soon new devices came into the field and the kinetoscope
was superseded by other machines bearing similar names with a like
signification.
A variety of cameras was invented. One consisted of a film-feeding
mechanism which moves the film step by step in the focus of a single
lens, the duration of exposure being from twenty to twenty-five times
as great as that necessary to move an unexposed portion of the film
into position. No shutter was employed. As time passed many other
improvements were made. An ingenious Frenchman named Lumiere, came
forward with his Cinematographe which for a few years gave good
satisfaction, producing very creditable results. Success, however, was
due more to the picture ribbons than to the mechanism employed to feed
them.
Of other moving pictures machines we have had the vitascope, vitagraph,
magniscope, mutoscope, panoramagraph, theatograph and scores of others
all derived from the two Greek roots _grapho_ I write and _scopeo_ I
view.
The vitascope is the principal name now in use for moving picture
machines. In all these instruments in order that the film projection
may be visible to an audience it is necessary to have a very intense
light. A source of such light is found in the electric focusing lamp.
At or near the focal point of the projecting lantern condenser the
film is made to travel across the field as in the kinetoscope. A water
cell in front of the condenser absorbs most of the heat and transmits
most of the light from the arc lamp, and the small picture thus highly
illuminated is protected from injury. A projecting lens of rather short
focus throws a large image of each picture on the screen, and the rapid
succession of these completes the illusion of life-like motion.
Hundreds of patents have been made on cameras, projecting lenses and
machines from the days of the kinetoscope to the present time when
clear-cut moving pictures portray life so closely and so well as almost
to deceive the eye. In fact in many cases the counterfeit is taken for
the reality and audiences as much aroused as if they were looking upon
a scene of actual life. We can well believe the story of the Irishman,
who on seeing the stage villain abduct the young lady, made a rush at
the canvas yelling out,--"Let me at the blackguard and I'll murder
him."
Though but fifteen years old the moving picture industry has sent out
its branches into all civilized lands and is giving employment to an
army of thousands. It would be hard to tell how many mimic actors and
actresses make a living by posing for the camera; their name is legion.
Among them are many professionals who receive as good a salary as on
the stage.
Some of the large concerns both in Europe and America at times employ
from one hundred to two hundred hands and even more to illustrate some
of the productions. They send their photographers and actors all over
the world for settings. Most of the business, however, is done near
home. With trapping and other paraphernalia a stage setting can be
effected to simulate almost any scene.
Almost anything under the sun can be enacted in a moving picture studio,
from the drowning of a cat to the hanging of a man; a horse race or
fire alarm is not outside the possible and the aviator has been depicted
"flying" high in the heavens.
The places where the pictures are prepared must be adapted for the
purpose. They are called studios and have glass roofs and in most of
them a good section of the walls are also glass. The floor space is
divided into sections for the setting or staging of different
productions, therefore several representations can take place at the
same time before the eyes of the cameras. There are "properties" of
all kinds from the ragged garments of the beggar to kingly ermine and
queenly silks. Paste diamonds sparkle in necklaces, crowns and tiaras,
seeming to rival the scintillations of the Kohinoor.
At the first, objections were made to moving pictures on the ground
that in many cases they had a tendency to cater to the lower instincts,
that subjects were illustrated which were repugnant to the finer
feelings and appealed to the gross and the sensual. Burglaries, murders
and wild western scenes in which the villain-heroes triumphed were
often shown and no doubt these had somewhat of a pernicious influence
on susceptible youth. But all such pictures have for the most part
been eliminated and there is a strict taboo on anything with a degrading
influence or partaking of the brutal. Prize fights are often barred.
In many large cities there is a board of censorship to which the
different manufacturing firms must submit duplicates. This board has
to pass on all the films before they are released and if the pictures
are in any way contrary to morals or decency or are in any respect
unfit to be displayed before the public, they cannot be put in
circulation. Thus are the people protected and especially the youth
who should be permitted to see nothing that is not elevating or not
of a nature to inspire them with high and noble thoughts and with
ambitions to make the world better and brighter.
Let us hope that the future mission of the moving picture will be along
educational and moral lines tending to uplift and ennoble our boys and
girls so that they may develop into a manhood and womanhood worthy the
history and best traditions of our country.
* * * * * *
The Wizard of Menlo Park has just succeeded after two years of hard
application to the experiment in giving us the talking picture, a real
genuine talking picture, wholly independent of the old device of having
the actors talk behind the screen when the films were projected. By
a combination of the phonograph and the moving picture machine working
in perfect synchronism the result is obtained. Wires are attached to
the mechanism of both the machines, the one behind the screen and the
one in front, in such a way that the two are operated simultaneously
so that when a film is projected a corresponding record on the
phonograph acts in perfect unison supplying the voice suitable to the
moving action. Men and women pass along the canvas, act, talk, laugh,
cry and "have their being" just as in real life. Of course, they are
immaterial, merely the reflection of films, but the one hundred
thousandth of an inch thick, yet they give forth oral sounds as
creatures of flesh and blood. In fact every sound is produced
harmoniously with the action on the screen. An iron ball is dropped
and you hear its thud upon the floor, a plate is cracked and you can
hear the cracking just the same as if the material plate were broken
in your presence. An immaterial piano appears upon the screen and a
fleshless performer discourses airs as real as those heard on Broadway.
Melba and Tettrazini and Caruso and Bonci appear before you and warble
their nightingale notes, as if behind the footlights with a galaxy of
beauty, wealth and fashion before them for an audience. True it is not
even their astral bodies you are looking at, only their pictured
representations, but the magic of their voices is there all the same
and there is such an atmosphere of realism about the representations
that you can scarcely believe the actors are not present in _propriae
personae_.
Mr. Edison had much study and labor of experiment in bringing his
device to a successful issue. The greatest obstacle he had to overcome
was in getting a phonograph that could "hear" far enough. At the
beginning of the experiments the actor had to talk directly into the
horn, which made the right kind of pictures impossible to get. Bit by
bit, however, a machine was perfected which could "hear" so well that
the actor could move at his pleasure within a radius of twenty feet.
That is the machine that is being used now. This new combination of
the moving picture machine and the phonograph Edison has named the
_kinetophone_. By it he has made possible the bringing of grand
opera into the hamlets of the West, and through it also our leading
statesmen may address audiences on the mining camps and the wilds of
the prairies where their feet have never trodden.