Inventions & Innovation: Cameras & Film

The original concept of the camera dates from Grecian times, when Aristotle referred to the principle of the camera obscura [Lat.,=dark chamber] which was literally a dark box—sometimes large enough for the viewer to stand inside—with a small hole, or aperture, in one side. (A lens was not employed for focusing until the Middle Ages.) An inverted image of a scene was formed on an interior screen; it could then be traced by an artist. The first diagram of a camera obscura appeared in a manuscript by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, but he did not claim its invention. The recording of a negative image on a light-sensitive material was first achieved by the Frenchman Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826; he coated a piece of paper with asphalt and exposed it inside the camera obscura for eight hours.

Thomas Edison and William Dickson pioneered the Kinetoscope in the early 1890s, showing short films such as The Sneeze (1894); in 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumière patented the Cinematograph, which they demonstrated in public with such short films as Arrival of Train at Station.

This program is about how people reflect their own reality, both in the formal photographs for which they pose and those which they themselves take. The amateur documentary tradition is seen through the eyes of two photographers from northern Britain, Jack Hulme and Jimmy Forsyth. Other collections featured are: The Kodak Collection; National Museum of Television, Film and Photography, Bradford; and the Documentary Photographic Archive, Manchester. (26 minutes)

The Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison would definitely be impressed if they could see how far the medium created with the invention of the movie camera has evolved. This program examines the history of film, from its beginnings in the late 19th century to the invention of VCRs. Filmmaking’s roots as an entertainment and storytelling medium are examined, along with the emergence of Hollywood, the studio star system, and birth of the talkies. Film industry regulation, including censorship, is also discussed, along with the blacklist and competition from cable and broadcast television. (28 minutes)

The wonderful invention of Daguerre and Fox Talbot fascinated the Victorians as a new art form and a new way of looking at the world. This program follows the technical and esthetic strides made by the early, often amateur, practitioners. Material is drawn from the British Royal Archives at Windsor Castle; The Royal Institution of South Wales, Swansea; from the early photographlc societies; The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, Bath; Norwich Photographic Society; and from the first museum to embrace the new medium, The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. (26 minutes)

The mid-19th century saw the rise of analog communications, where film and electric currents were used as substitutes for an object or message. Meet the inventors of the first information age - among them, Louis Daguerre, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison - and learn how they made information and knowledge widely available to millions.

To borrow Anita Loos's famous comment about fate, film history keeps on happening. But it does so in odd and inconsistent ways, and the very notion of what constitutes film history changes periodically. At the moment of the archival turn—or, really, during the very long shift in that direction—film scholars developed a new understanding of a film history in which the films themselves may not have been quite so important and in which an archive might be reimagined as not just a movie repository. As the film text came to be decentered, other materials took on greater importance, and so scholars developed histories of what we might call film culture rather than histories of films.

The article discusses the results of the research project “Data-Driven Film History: A Demonstrator of EYE's Jean Desmet Collection” (2014–15). With a team of media scholars, archivists, and software developers, we conducted data-driven research to explore the affordances and pitfalls of digital methods for mining the resources of film archives and researching (early) cinema history. Working with the collection of cinema owner and distributor Jean Desmet, preserved at the EYE Filmmuseum, we used digital tools for the specific purpose of visualizing distribution networks and color patterns in film programs in the Netherlands during silent cinema's transitional years.

Inconspicuous, neglected, even expunged: this sense of disregard has profoundly affected the contours of histories concerned with women's participation in film culture. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight's highly commendable edited collection, Doing Women's Film History: reframing cinemas, past and future, seeks primarily to confront these concerns of historical reticence and locate new approaches to film history, from the pioneering days to the latest initiatives in live HD transmissions (with Kay Armatage's analysis of Barbara Willis's Sweete). It presents readers with new evidence and fresh perspectives on women's engagement with movie culture rehearsed across different geopolitical contexts, from Europe and the United States to Chile, Turkey, Russia, India and Australia. Not only does it offer case studies detailing different cultural regions, epochs and practices, but in the very act of retrieval the book addresses 'a range of conceptual and methodological questions about how to research women's film history—how, for example, to identify women's often uncredited and undocumented participation in their respective cinema cultures; where, in the absence of formal archives, to locate previously unimagined sources of evidence; and how to reconceptualise film history in order to locate the impact of women in that history' (pp. 1–2). This epistemological enterprise includes seventeen original essays, an introduction and prologue and is divided into three broadly themed parts—the quest for evidence, feminist approaches to historiography and the varied spaces which shaped women's encounter with film culture.