MOVIES |
ACTION! AT JUST 2.1 SECONDS LONG, THE ROUNDHAY GARDEN SCENE IS CONSIDERED THE FIRST “MOVIE” EVER FILMED. IT WAS BY FRENCH INVENTOR LOUIS LE PRINCE. BUT IT WAS THE PUBLIC SCREENING OF A NUMBER OF THE LUMIÈRE BROTHERS’ SHORT FILMS IN PARIS IN DECEMBER 1895 THAT IS BELIEVED TO BE THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN MOTION PICTURE INDUSTRY. GREG LANDMAN REPORTS ON ITS DEVELOPMENT.
56 w w w .t o p s a t s p a r. c o . z a
T
echnology is constantly changing the world around us. Consider if you will the changes that have happened in the last 50 years. Just in movies, the news reels preceding the main event are no more, the video industry came and went, superceded by the compact disc and also the Blu-ray disc. High-definition and even 3D have made the movie watching experience almost unimaginably lush and rich in detail – even celluloid film no longer exists. Almost everything is shot digitally. And that’s before considering how George Lucas and Star Wars with its special effects created its own world, one in which CGI – or computer generated imagery – has altered the entire business of movie making. And it’s only been a little over 100 years that the world has been able to watch moving pictures! Wikipedia reports that in the 1890s, films were acts in vaudeville programmes or travelling exhibitions. Extremely brief – literally a minute or two long – they portrayed something from everyday life; a horse pulling a cart, a busy street in New York or London, a ship being unloaded, nothing of any great import but the novelty of watching a moving image was startling to those fortunate enough to view it.
But early adopters of this new technology grew the motion picture industry to where it is today, a multi-billion dollar worldwide industry. There’s the original Hollywood, and since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, India has Bollywood and Nigeria Nollywood! When the limitations of the filmic medium were restricted to black and white, that’s what the audiences got – black and white. And then along came sound in the late 1920s. By 1930 talking pictures saw a number of the smaller producers fall by the wayside because of the cost attached to this new medium. Colour made its debut in 1932 but the first technicolour film was 1935’s The Vanities Fair. 85 years later and anyone with the right app and software on their mobile phone can make a movie! So why, with all this technology available, do some moviemakers and directors still choose the medium of black and white? Possibly because this world we live in is one of light and shade and man has always been intrigued by the infinite varieties of colour – so stripping out all that visual stimulation is the challenge to directors. Strangely enough, the modern use of black and white is more expensive as labs
