What was the
world like in the late ninetieth century, just before the movies began? It was
very different from today. The USA was still expanding. The Ottoman and austro –Hungarian
empires still existed. European empires governed three quarts of the globe,
with India as Britain’s most important colony. The state of Irael did not exist,
nor had Iraq gained independence. The creation of the Soviet Union was thirty
years in the future.
The Industrial
revolution had transformed the way of life for Western city dwellers. Urban
populations clustered together, yet people became more detached from what they consumed.
Life became more kinetic. The steam train made travel faster. Rollercoasters,
to which the cinema experience would be compared in the late twentieth centyry,
had been around since 1884.
Automobiles had
just been invented and would evolve with cinema in fascinating tandem. While
there was more visual stimulation in the West culture or human perception had
not changed fundamentally, despite arguments to the latter. Photography had
existed since 1827.People had painted
for 150 centuries and would continue to do so .Scribes, poets and authors had
written for at least fifty centuries .
Then ,between
them ,a few French ,British and American men took the lead in inventing what
the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy called pointedly
“the clicking machine ….like a human hurricane”.
This was black box through which a
ribbon moves, recording what it saw.
later light was shone through this ribbon and the action was projected and
repeated on a distant white wall ,as if no time had passed.
In 1884 New York
manufacture George Eastman invented film on a roll rather then on individual slides.
In the same decade New Jersey inventor Thomas Edison son of a timber merchant
and his assistant W.K.L Dickson discovered a way of spinning a series of still
images in box that gave the illusion of movement and invented the Kinetoscope”
