India Scene The Pioneers The Beauteous Stars Early Technology Events(1918-1980)

The seeds that were sown by the art of shadow play and the camera obscura of Renaissance Italy bore delicious fruit in an invention - cinema - that had been dismissed as ''It has no commercial future ever.'' This, by the father of the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere!

Past experiments by Louis Daguerre, Edweard Muybridge, and Etienne-Jules Marey had led to photographic recordings of animals and humans that were able to suggest movement. Further, the Thaumatrope, Phenakistiscope, Stroboscope, Zoetrope, Edison's Kinetoscope were all on the scene, but it was the Cinematographe that proved a winner. The size, weight (only ten pounds) and compact shape made the Cinematographe a convenient, commercially viable invention that caught the imagination of people worldwide.

The Paris opening on December 25 1895 consisted of 1 or 2 minute films, the most sensational being of a train pulling into a station.

In 1896, viewers witnessed the coronation of Czar Nicholas II!

 

SOURCE

So Many Cinemas.
Author - B.D. Garga
Publishers - Eminence Designs Private Limited.

Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema.
Author -Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willemen
Publishers -Oxford University Press.

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