PROFILE
“There has been a tendency in the past for film scholars to think that everything before Thomas Edison’s camera and the Lumières’ Cinématographe is prehistory. But I didn’t view it that way. The real start of what today we consider to be movies occurred on 1659 with [Dutch physicist] Christiaan Huygens’ invention of the magic lantern. Very rapidly people learned how to produce movies and do shows.” —Lenny Lipton, Author of The Cinema in Flux
TOP TO BOTTOM: By using his trolley camera for locomotion studies Étienne-Jules Marey pioneered the technique of performance capture. Even the Lumière brothers were experimenting with 3D by creating viewing eyewear for their 35mm horizontal-traveling stereo format. A Magic Lantern created by Ernest Plank circa 1990.
lantern. Very rapidly people learned how to produce movies and do shows. I would define movies as the projection of moving images on a screen.” The origin of the book occurred during the week of Christmas in 2009. “I got invited to do a talk on stereoscopic cinema at La Cinémathèque française in Paris and was lucky enough to arrive at a moment where they were having an exhibit in their museum about the magic lantern and had demonstrations of the technology. At that time, I didn’t know I was going to write about it. “I had no idea what the outcome would be,” admits Lipton. “The text is about 400,000 words and the book is 800 pages. I didn’t have an outline. I just headed down the road.” The historical narrative is divided into three eras: Glass Cinema, Celluloid Cinema, and Television and the Digital Cinema. “It didn’t occur to me to use that classification system until I had been working on the book for five years. I had a single Word file that was gigantic. It became a good way to write a book like this because I was able to easily search the whole file to avoid redundancies and put things in a proper order. I had one slim notebook with notes in it. I bought about 400 books. I can’t say that I understood the subject well. I needed time to digest it. I had to keep making mistakes and correcting them. I went to the Margaret Herrick Library, which is part of the Academy of
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