Mohammad Zaidan Rizieq

Kelas 1A, Film & Televisi 2022

Fakultas Pendidikan Seni dan Desain

Book Review: A Short History of Film by Wheeler Winston Dixon & Gwendolyn
Audrey Foster
One: The Invention of The Movies

Motion Pictures don’t really move. “Persistence of vision” is why there’s the illusion
of movement on the cinema screen. Persistence of vision happens when the brain is getting
too much information to process, so it still remembers an image for a fraction of a second
after it is removed from the screen and caused an illusion of motion. The “persistence of
vision” concept has described the use and construction as the “magic lantern”. As centuries
goes by, magic lantern and shadow puppet play became popular in China, Java, France, and
other nation of the world. The puppet plays depended upon crude marionettes casting
shadows on a translucent screen before the audience, beside of that the image lantern were
essentially elaborate slide shows, in which a variety of glass plates were illuminated by
candles and mirrors to cast images onto a projection screen. Claudius Ptolemy in 150 C.E
was working on the theory of stringing together still images to create the illusion of
movement. Al Hassan Ibn Al Haitham, a famous Muslim scientist who died in 1038
described the workings of the camera obscura. Perhaps the title of the most famous
progenitor of the cinema was Eadweard Muybridge, who created motion studies of some
animals and humans in 1872. Muybridge used his trip-wire technique to produce a series of
images of galloping horses at a Palo Alto racetrack because he was hired to settle a bet as to
whether or not a horse had all four legs in the air during a race. Another pioneer of cinema,
Etienne-Jules Marey, invented what will be the first moving picture camera in 1882. There
are many other pioneers of cinema, such as Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince, that called the
most mysterious figure of the era, and William Fries-Greene, who was claimed by the british
as the inventor of the motion picture because he invented an early version of motion picture
camera Birt Acres, Robert W. Paul are the other cinema pioneer from British. In Germany,
there is Max and Emil Skladanowsky invented their own cinema camera and projection
system. In France, there is Henry Joly invented the competing photozootrope. From America,
there is Woodville Latham and his sons, Gray and Otway who created the Panopticon.
Thomas Armat and C. Francis, Thomas Alva Edison, and many more.
 Many cinemas around the world that also advancing cinema both as a commercial
medium or an art form at the same time that The Great Train Robbery was making its mark in
cinema history. Rescued by Rover is often called as the first film that paid his actors. In
Germany, Oskar Messter supervised the creation of more than 300 films from 1896 until
1924 and became the father of the German film industry. The first legal battle happened
between Thomas Edison against K.L Dickson and Edwin S. Porter which the two were
Edison’s most gifted film technicians, who had dared to separate from their mentor.
In the late 1890s and early 1900s, the cinema started to experiment with synchronized
sound in the film Alice Guy for Gaumont’s Chronophone. The Story of the Kelly Gang has
become one of the first narrative films that had 70 minutes duration, which has the same
standard we have grown accustomed to today.
Cinema growing up rapidly nowadays, creating many ins and outs in the industry. But
yet film still had not acquired a detailed grammar of shots and editorial practices.