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Essay on Compare Two Decades Of Film History
In the early 19th century scientists took note of a visual event: A progression of individual still pictures, when set in movement, can give the misapprehension of movement. These scientists attributed this experience to what they called persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after the source has been removed. The eye's retention of a visual image, now known as positive afterimage, has long been considered a founding principle of motion pictures, even though its relationship to the perception of motion is still not well understood.
The persistence of vision concept stimulated experimentation with motion-picture devices throughout the 19th century. Among the first such devices was a slotted disk with a sequence of drawings around its perimeter. When a person spun the disk in front of a mirror and looked through the slots, the drawings appeared to move. The zoetrope, a device developed in the 1830s, was a hollow drum with a strip of pictures around its inner surface.
When spun, it produced the same effect. In the 1870s French inventor Émile Reynaud improved on this idea by placing mirrors at the center of the drum. A few years later he developed a projecting version, using a reflector and a lens to enlarge the moving images. In 1892 he began holding public screenings in Paris at his Theater Optique, with hundreds of drawings on a reel that he wound through his apparatus to construct moving images that continued for 15 minutes. (Cleveland, Les)
Throughout the decade following the beginning of predictable motion pictures, films were exposed as part of variety show or assortment programs, at carnivals and fairgrounds, in lecture halls and churches, and slowly but surely in spaces transformed for the fashionable exposition of movies. Nearly all films ran no longer than 10 to 12 minutes, which reflected the amount of film that could be wound on a standard reel for projection....
