Post 1: The Moving Image




     Just like the Lumiere brothers, American inventors wanted to explore the idea of the moving image.  One of the first instances of capturing movement occurred in 1872 in Palo Alto, California when Eadweard Mubridge took a series of photographs of a trotting horse.  He had been commissioned by the governor of California at the time, Leland Standford, to complete photographic studies about racing horses. Standford wanted to conclude the debate of whether all four hooves of horses left the ground when they ran.  These photographs, which were combined to form a video, showed that horses did in fact leave the ground completely.
     The Lumiere brothers shot their films in a very similar way to Mubridge.  With only the early advancements of film, all of their experiments show a straight, eye level angle onscreen.  It is interesting to see the similar cross over between both inventors in their attempt to create motion pictures.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

François Truffaut on Vigo's L’Atalante

This week in class, we watched the beginning of Jean Vigo's L'Atalante (1934). In this movie, following in the style of Poetic Realism, the audience is privy to an unconventional way of life, along with all the grit that can accompany such a life. Jean Vigo's films often animated a feeling of anti-establishment in an urban city/realist background, and favored the side of the weak/powerless; in class, we discussed this along with a brief discussion on Vigo's use of depth of field and in-camera editing, with such, decisions of focus are made by the camera. For this week's blog, I have found an interview, from 1968, between Eric Rohmer and François Truffaut on Jean Vigo's L'Atalante . This interview is interesting as it shows the impact Vigo had on Truffaut as a film maker. In the interview, Truffaut communicates how he saw  L'Atalante at a young age and it deeply resonated with him as a child with a keen sense of reality; Truffaut goes on to say how Vig...
Read more

The Panopticon--A look at the United States

Image
On April 21st 1895, Woodville Latham, and his two sons Otway and Gray, first demonstrated their "Panopticon" (later renamed Eidoloscope) film projector; this was the first ever film projector in the United States. Up until this time, the U.S. populous had only ever been exposed to Edison's Kinetoscope; with the Kinetoscope, films could only be viewed one-viewer-at-a-time through "peep-show" style boxes. The Latham's are also credited with the invention of the Latham Loop; a loop placed in the film strip that enabled the film to gently wind over from back to front; allowing for longer sequences of film to be projected smoothly. As we learned in class last week, the Lumière Brothers also first debuted their first film projector to audiences in France in 1895; this film projector was named the "Cinematographe". I find the close proximity of these two innovations very intriguing and wonder what these two film engineering contemporary families ...
Read more

Truffaut's Last Interview

For this week's blog post I have chosen to contribute the last known interview of François Truffaut, conducted in May of 1984; I have chosen this interview as Truffaut speaks a great deal on his first film of the New Wave period, "The 400 Blows", and, moreover, the beginning of the French New Wave--which was the focus of our class this week. An excerpt from the interview that best relates to what we talked about in class this week, and which also coincidentally happens to be my favorite part of the interview, is when Truffaut is asked about the success of the French New Wave, to which he replies the following: At the start of the New Wave, people opposed to the young filmmakers’ new films said, “All in all, what they’re doing is not very different from what was done before.” I don’t know if there was actually a plan behind the New Wave, but as far as I was concerned, it never occurred to me to revolutionize the cinema or to express myself differently from previous fil...
Read more