Film and Popular Cinema

The first continuous film motion picture was invented between 1888 and 1892 (Sayre 2010, pg. 254) using the Kintescope. Early film was in black and white and had not sound. Audiences were intrigued by this new artistic medium. Fernand Leger’s 1924 film Ballet Mecanique was one of the first to show this type of film by repeating the same images again and again in separate points in the film. He created this by editing the pictures to show in a sequence that would draw interest to the audience. One of the great masters of editing was D.W. Griffith in The Birth of a Nation. Mr. Griffith used varying techniques to create variety, and he introduced the differing shots used still today: a full shot shows the actor from head to toe, the medium shot shows from the waist up, the close-up shows the head and shoulders, and the extreme close-up shows a portion of the face. Other camera tricks used by cinematographers are panning the shot to show a panoramic view, flashback which will flash to something that happened in the past and cross-cutting which crosses between two or more events.

The way film is shot today has changed some from the early days of film. Sound was introduced in 1926 and then color in 1939. William Cameron Menzies, the art director for Gone With the Wind, introduced the storyboard. Storyboards were rough sketches that outlined the shot sequences of the movie. The storyboard would give instructions for lighting, camera angels and editing in advance of shooting the movie. Animation was introduced by Walt Disney in 1937 with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Animation was a way to bring to life a series of still drawings, and they were “executed up to 24 per second of film time” (Sayre, 2010, pg. 274).