Silent Cinema

If the invention of cinema was to be compared to one of the many genres which later came to dominate the art form, it might be regarded as a whodunnit. Given the claims and counterclaims for the sole right to be known as the inventor of cinema, perhaps the specific whodunit in question is JB Priestly’s An Inspector Calls, in which everyone has some degree of culpability. Among the ‘suspects’ were American Thomas Alva Edison; the French Lumière brothers, Louis and Auguste; British-based Frenchman Augustin Louis Le Prince; and the British William Friese-Greene. Like movies themselves, however, the hunt for the sole inventor of cinema is an illusion.

Bizarrely, essentially the same multiple still camera set-up used by Muybridge in cinema’s pre-history would be used to create the ‘bullet time’ effect in The Matrix (1999) and its sequels over 100 years later, well into the digital age of cinema

It was the investigations into motion studies by photographer Eadweard J. Muybridge in 1877 that would lead directly to moving pictures. Muybridge was a British photographer who had made his name marketing photographic views of America in the 1860s. His initial creation of a series of photographs of a horse taken milliseconds apart was the result of a bet. Leland Stanford, the former Governor of California, hoped to prove that during a gallop all four hooves of a horse were off the ground simultaneously. Stanford hired Muybridge to prove his contention. The problem of achieving the technical requirements was only solved with the involvement of John D. Isaacs, chief engineer for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He knew nothing about photography but was able to apply his knowledge of mechanics, creating a system of magnetic releases to trigger the cameras photographing the horse in action. Muybridge shot a series of still photographs as a horse cantered past a row of twelve cameras. He then checked the images to see if any showed all four hooves off the ground. Stanford won his bet, though his expenditure to achieve his proof hugely exceeded the amount he eventually won.

A series of scandals in the 1920s – from the Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle murder trial to the unexplained death of starlet Olive Thomas – would bring censure and censorship down upon the movies. It seemed that the new entertainment format of film also had a dark side.