The American Film Industry

1. The Machine

Prehistory IA. R. FULTON The Machine Although the attempt to represent the illusion ofmotion by pictures is older than civilization, the art ofthe motion pictures was not created until the twentieth century. From that prehistoric day when an artist drew a many-legged boar on the wall of a cave in Altamira, Spain, down through the ages, during which time various other devices were originated to depict motion, man had to wait until modem times before the motion pictures could be born. This waiting was necessary because the motion pictures depend, to a greater extent than any other art, upon machinery. The motion pictures, the newest ofthe arts, the only art to originate in the twentieth century, are a product ofthe Machine Age. The motion pictures did not originate as art but as a machine. They were invented. That is, the machinery that makes the pictures, and that makes them motion pictures, was invented. Thus the term motion pictures means the device as well as the art. If one were to hold a piece of motion picture film up to the light, he would see that it is a series of little pictures arranged crosswise to the length of the film. Each picture, or frame, is approximately fourfifths of an inch wide and three-fifths of an inch high. Examining the frames in relation to one another, one notices that, although each frame may be a picture ofthe same scene, the position ofthe objects in each frame is slightly different. When the film, which contains sixteen frames From Motion Pictures: The Development of an Art, rev. ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980), pp. 3-13. 27 28 Part I / A Novelty Spawns Small Businesses, 1894-1908 to each foot of film, is run through the motion picture projector at the rate of twenty-four frames per second, enlarged images of the frames are cast in corresponding succession onto the screen. The projector operates on the principle of that old toy the magic lantern (and of its modern counterpart, the slide projector). When a glass slide was inserted in the lantern, an image of the slide was cast upon the screen by means of a light directed through the slide and, to enlarge the image, through a magnifying lens. The frames in the film are comparable to the slides in the magic lantern. The images of the frames as they are cast upon the screen do not move any more than the images ofthe magic lantern slides moved. The term motion pictures is therefore misleading. The pictures do not move but only seem to. The illusion of motion is caused partly by what has been called persistence of vision, that is, the fact that the eye retains an observed image a fraction of a second after the image has disappeared. Accordingly the motion picture projector includes a mechanism which draws the film between the light and the lens in a stop-and-go motion, the film pausing a fraction of a second at each frame for the eye to take in the image; then a shutter closes and remains closed, also for a fraction ofa second, while the eye retains the image and the mechanism propels the film ahead to the next frame. 1 The perforations along the edge of the film enable the teeth of the driving mechanism to engage the film and not only to move it along from one frame to the next but also to hold it steady. The stop-andgo motion gives the illusion of a continuous picture. If the film did not pause at each frame, the impression that the eye receives would be blurred. The illusion that motion pictures move depends also on the imagination of the spectator. Watching a succession of pictures, each one representing a change in the position of the image from that of the preceding one, the spectator imagines that the image is moving because he associates it with a corresponding object that he has seen actually moving. Furthermore, he imagines that he sees more than the camera has photographed. The film moves through the camera at the rate of twenty-four frames a second. Every second, then, the camera takes 1. Michael Chanan contends that persistence of vision does not account for the perceived motion in a film, that the gaps caused by the closed shutter do not impinge on attention because of the brevity oftheir duration. His contention does not alter the fact that motion pictures seem...