I am sure that you have already seen many movies and maybe sometimes you enjoy going to the cinema. But have you ever questioned about how is it possible to capture moving pictures and show them on the screen? Probably not, because cinema has always existed for you and it has always been part of the many ordinary things of life. However, every human invention has its own start and its own history and I am here to tell you more about this in particular: please take a seat and let’s play start!

In case you have never noticed, some words can really tell us a lot about their object. That is exactly the case of the word “cinema”, which comes from the ancient Greek word “κίνημα”, that is to say “movement”, and “γραφή”, or rather, “writing”. Basically the role of cinema is to capture and record forever a certain movement or action, so that many people can see it whenever and wherever they want. Before the birth of cinema, another kind of “writing” had been discovered: photography. Anyway, unlike photography, which present us still and separated images, cinema is able to show us moving pictures in continuous action, as if what we are looking at were really happening in front of us.

Auguste and Louise Lumiere, otherwise known as Lumière Brothers, are considered to be the fathers of Cinema. Actually/In fact, they invented in 1895 the first cinématographe, that is to say, the device able to record motion pictures. However, the two brothers were not the first ones thinking of a way to capture movement, but many famous inventors of their time were finding their way to do it.

Thomas Edison, for example, had already created four years earlier, in collaboration with W.K.L. Dickson, a system of devices called Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, which worked very similarly to the future cinématographe.
The kinegratoph was a special camera used to capture picture in motion. And how that ? Simply by taking photographs very fast and record them on a long film: the kinegratoph was able to take 40 pictures per second !
Once ready, the film was shown using the kinetoscope, a machine able to run the film with the recorded images very rapidly, creating the illusion that the pictures were moving.
Unfortunately, Edison and Dickson’s invention presented a few limitations. First of all their machines were very heavy and it was impossible to move them out of Edison’s studio, the Black Maria, which, by the way, represents the first motion-picture studio of all times. This involved that if they wanted to record something, they had to bring it in their studio. The second drawback regarded the kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was not able to project the movie on a big screen, but the audience had to enter one by one a cabinet and look through a peephole cut into the top of the machine. It was more like watching a video on your phone rather than go to the cinema and it was an individual experience.
The reason why the Lumière Brothers gained more success and are now considered the fathers of Cinema is that they managed to fix and enhance Edison and Dick’s invention by creating a single and portable machine capable of recording and project on a big screen the motion picture.

The first movie of the Lumière Brothers was filmed outside their own factory and it is called La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon – Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. It consists in a short movie of 46 seconds and it is the first movie ever to be shown. It took around 800 photos recorded on a 17 meters long film to realize it! Despite that, Lumière’s most famous movie is definitely L’Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat – The arrival of a train at Ciotat station. The reason of it is that the first time this movie was shown, the audience ran away, thinking that the train was real and would have hit them! This event demonstrates how amazing and astonishing the invention of cinema has been for mankind.
If you are interested in the Lumière movies you can take a look on the Internet and search for this titles: you will easily find many videos showing their work.

But now it’s time for a challenge!
Would you be able to create your own “experimental movie”?
Here are the instructions:
1- take a notebook or sketchbook.
2- think of a very simple story and its characters: it could be a dog running behind a ball, or a kid walking in the city.
3- draw in the bottom corner of each page of the notebook/sketchbook a scene from your story, but be careful! Every scene must be very similar to the previous one. Remember that the Lumière Brothers had to take 800 pictures to make a 46 seconds-long movie, so maybe you can draw 30 little pictures to make a shorter one.
4- And now it’s time to press play! You have just to slide the pages very fast under your fingers and you will witness the magic of Cinema!

Good luck dear filmmaker!

SOURCES: https://www.britannica.com/technology/Kinetograph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_and_Louis_Lumi%C3%A8re