So you want to learn about the history of film? It's a daunting task, covering well over a hundred years of a massive, global industry. The beginning seems like a natural place to start, but what was the beginning of film? If we consider the history of film to be the history of the global film industry, we can start with the first commercial film screening of the Lumiere Brothers’ work in 1895. But the art of shooting movies predates this. The oldest surviving film is often cited as the Roundhay Garden Scene in 1888. Many start with the Horse in Motion, a miracle of sequence photography shot in 1878. This article will start a little earlier.
The Neolithic Period to be precise. It's in prehistory that humans began to develop an understanding of optics, the study of light. This knowledge was a prerequisite for the invention of photography, and thus film. Some researchers speculate that Neolithic peoples knew about pinhole images.
Pinhole cameras consist of a lightproof enclosure and a tiny aperture (or pinhole). Light from outside passes through the pinhole causing an image of the outside to be cast onto the opposing side of the camera, which is called the image plane. The projected image will actually be upside down, our pupils are so small that they can be thought of as pinholes. This is why people sometimes say that we “see upside down.” For me this was a bit confusing to imagine in the abstract, so I'd recommend studying the diagram above, watching this video, or even making a pinhole camera and seeing it yourself!
Advancement on these basic ideas of pinholes and projection lead to the ancient camera obscura. The camera obscura was a dark room, with a small pinhole and lens, which projected an image of the outside onto the wall of the chamber. This was used as an artistic aid, since it allowed for very accurate tracing, and was also used for studying eclipses which couldn't be observed directly.
The same principles were eventually used to do the opposite, projecting an image out of a box instead of into one. Take a lightproof box with an aperture and lens on one side, put a light in the box, and a painted slide depicting the image you want to project. If you've been paying attention you might also recognize that these slides would, again, have to be upside down, since they get flipped as light passes through the pinhole. Congratulations! You’ve just invented the Magic Lantern.
Magic lantern shows were a popular entertainment by the 17th century and the experience was, in many ways not unlike going to the movies today. You paid for a ticket and entered a darkened theater with other guests. The projector came to life, and a narrative would unfold through the images displayed. If we wanted to be cynical, we could dismiss these as glorified slideshows, however such an attitude doesn't capture their vintage spectacle.
Much like how modern theaters occasionally have gimmicks such as moving seats, or 3D, the magic lantern shows were full of gimmicks, arguably exceeding the work of William Castle. Presenters would use live music, scents, or electric shocks to enhance the sensory experience. Audiences would sometimes even take drugs to make things more exciting or immersive. That's to say nothing of the presenters who were expert performers. Confidence men would even trick people into believing that the images were spirits from beyond the grave, and used magic lantern shows to perform seances. If any of this piques your interest a great introductory video to the topic can be found below. WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE
What about photography? Well, it was known for centuries that some chemicals were photosensitive, that is, they reacted to light. However, a theoretical process to use photosensitive chemicals to create lasting impressions of the world was not made practical until the early 19th century. Our oldest surviving photograph is the View from the Window at Le Gras, taken in 1826 by Nicéphore Niépce.
The View was shot with a camera obscura which projected and focused the view from outside the window onto a photosensitive material. Photo film did not exist at the time, Niépce had instead coated a pewter plate with a solution of lavender oil and bitumen of judea, a kind of naturally occurring photosensitive asphalt. He called his process “heliography,” a neo-Greek word that can be loosely translated as “sun writing.” Closely observing the View you may notice that the shadows are odd in the image, as if the sun is in multiple positions at once. This is because the exposure time, the time the pewter plate was exposed to light, was somewhere between eight hours and several days. So light conditions from multiple times of day all blur together in the final image.
Louis Daguerre, after viewing Niépce's work on Heliography, developed the Daguerreotype. Also known as the Daguerreian Process, it became the first popular photographic process following its announcement in 1839. Throughout the 19th century various techniques came and went, though celluloid film was still a long way off and these techniques generally involved coating glass, copper, silver, or other materials in various photosensitive chemical compounds. We also lacked a device capable of taking multiple photos in succession. Pierre Janssen developed such a device in 1874.
Janssen was a scientist, partially responsible for discovering helium, whose main field of study was astronomy. He was interested in capturing a peculiar astronomical event: The transit of Venus. This event can be thought of like an eclipse, though it is not one, where Venus passes between an observer on Earth and the Sun in the sky. Venus is very far away, of course, and appears only as a small dot on the solar surface. Curiously, these transits happen in pairs. Once a transit occurs, you can expect another one in eight years. But after that transit you have to wait either 105 or 121 years for the next pair. There was a transit in 1874 and 1882, then 2004 and 2012, the next will occur in 2117 and 2125. All this to say that they don't occur very frequently and are thus excitedly observed by astronomers when they do come around. At the time such observations were important as the transit was used as a reference to judge the distance of an astronomical unit (AU), the distance between Earth and the Sun.
It was for the observation of the Transit of Venus that Janssen devised his revolver. I found most of the information regarding the Janssen Revolver in the Journal for the History of Astronomy. In particular: “Jules Janssen's "Revolver photographique" and its British derivative, "The Janssen slide" written by Peter Hingley and Francoise Launay.
To help observe the transit of Venus, Janssen wished to construct a kind of camera which could capture multiple images at regular intervals. In so doing, it could partially capture movement with a series of snapshots. Janssen was inspired by the general design of the Colt revolver and believed the same principles could be used to design a camera chambered with many photographic plates which would be rotated before the aperture as bullets are rotated behind the barrel of a revolver. It should be noted that the size of said device was in no way comparable to a revolver, as can be seen below.
It's also worth noting that Janssen’s idea was not particularly original and that similar devices had been made previously. A Mr. Thompson developed a smaller device known as Thompson's revolver camera which took four photos in succession. It would be purchased and manufactured by A. Briois in 1862, though it was a commercial failure, it's speculated that less than a hundred units were made. There was also the pistolgraph designed by Thomas Skaife.
I say all this not to discredit Janssen, but instead to acknowledge the work of his more obscure contemporaries. As for Janssen's work, the following quote from the Journal for the History of Astronomy summarizes: “The instrument he (Janssen) imagined was intended to take a series of images at short, regular, and adjustable intervals during the periods surrounding the four contacts. Janssen suggested a device that would accommodate 180 images. The disk would turn by means of a system driven by an electric current interrupted each second by a clock pendulum. A rotating disk shutter with adjustable slit width would allow the exposure time to be adjusted.” The camera took photos using the daguerreotype process, which was already outdated by the 1870s, however Janssen believed this method would be best for capturing the transit of Venus specifically. The Janssen Revolver, or “revolver photographique,” was powered originally by a clockwork mechanism developed by Eugene Deschiens in 1873. This mechanism caused far too much internal vibration, according to Janssen, and so a new one was developed by Eugene Deschiens the following year. This revolving motion was driven by a maltese cross system, more commonly known as a Geneva drive. It’s much easier to understand visually, so please study the animation below.
Essentially, there is a drive wheel with a pin which catches the driven wheel at a point in its rotation, thus moving the driven wheel. This is how the Janssen Revolver… revolves. The basic idea of the Geneva drive predates the Janssen Revolver and has a diverse range of applications, including the operation of film projectors, funnily enough. The Revolver had two discs, one with the photosensitive daguerreotype plates, and another that functioned as a shutter. The two discs could be adjusted independently to change exposure times and the intervals between exposures. To test his invention before the big event, Pierre Janssen recorded smaller scale simulations of the Venus transit on practice discs. Janssen and his team managed to put together this camera in time to record the 1874 transit in December of that year.
His team took a long voyage across the ocean to Japan to observe the transit and nearly sunk in the infamous 1874 Hong Kong Typhoon as they crossed the South China Sea. After arriving in Japan, the team split into two groups, hoping to have a backup in case one group found their view blocked by inclement weather. One group under Janssen went to Nagasaki, while the second went to Kobe. It’s worth noting that the man actually operating the camera in Nagasaki was not Janssen, but was rather a Brazilian named Francisco Antônio de Almeida. His, and thus, Brazil’s involvement in the expedition was actually a subject of public ridicule back then, viewed as a needless public expense. In any case, despite the naysayers, the arduous journey, and the mechanical issues in its development, the Transit of Venus was finally recorded, and can be seen below.
While this is listed in many places as the first “movie,” it’s worth noting that it really wasn’t. Calling this a movie is an act of imposing our own viewpoints on the past, and I can’t seem to find any evidence that Janssen or his contemporaries thought to replay the photos as a “movie” as we do. Janssen was a contributor to film in only a distant sense, and the true contribution of this recording was to the field of chronophotography, the use of instant photography for the study of motion. This field is related to film, as both capture motion using similar, or even the same technologies. However, they work towards almost opposite purposes. Film strives to recreate an impression of motion through illusion for the purpose of art and entertainment. Chronophotography strives to break motion into a series of still images for the purpose of academic study.
Unfortunately, the results of the 1874 transit recording were deemed scientifically insignificant. In fact, astronomers globally struggled to make meaningful observations of the 1874 transit. Also, somewhere between now and then Janssen’s recording of the 1874 Venus transit was lost to time. That last sentence might have confused some of you, seeing as I led you to believe that the clip above was the December 9th, 1874 Venus transit. Rest assured, this minor deception was only done to make my honest attempt at education a bit more entertaining.
The recording you just viewed comes from a donation to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers by Janssen’s daughter Antoinette in 1921. Francoise Launay, who in my research turned out to be a recurring expert on Janssen, got ahold of these photographic plates and compared them to photos of known practice discs. Launay’s conclusion, was that these revolutionary images were also just practice discs. What you just watched was not the actual recording of the Transit of Venus. It was instead a recording of an even older simulation of the event conducted by Jannsen for the purposes of testing his device.
So where does all that leave us?
Well, it left Pierre Janssen with a unique experimental camera, and he would display his invention over the years to participants in the growing field of chronophotography. Through the 1880s and 1890s we didn’t have film, but there was an interest in capturing motion through instant photography, and capturing short sequences of motion through a variety of devices, such as the Janssen revolver, and my favorite: The chronophotographic gun. This field was not primarily an artistic medium, but was rather the hobby horse of naturalists and engineers who wanted to capture sequences of motion for the purposes of scientific research. Film is fundamentally tied to the progress of technology, in a way that many artistic mediums simply aren’t.
I bring all this up to say that the prehistory of film has its roots in movements that were, at the time, seen to be fields of study all their own and that we should try to look on these events and early inventions from an outside perspective. Janssen had no notion of cinema, and seemingly no professional involvement in the arts. He was an astronomer who developed an interest in chronophotography to further his study of astronomy. Many pioneers of early “movie cameras” came from similar backgrounds, or from the world of photography, and might chafe at our lumping them in with cinema.
So, did we find the beginning of film today? Not really, but Janssen's invention is certainly a sign of the technological advancements that would eventually spawn it, and cinema would burst into the public consciousness within Janssen's lifetime.
Next time we’ll talk about something a little more artsy, a man who used his own spin on the magic lantern to tell stories with animation. Not quite a film, but an early example of someone using the illusion of motion for popular entertainment. Please check out my sources below for more reading on Janssen and his Janssen Revolver.
Pinhole images
https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar/virtual-cameras/virtual-cameras-1/v/optics1-final
https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/books/article/pinhole-camera
Writings on Janssen from Astronomical Journals
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2006JAHH....9..167D
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005JHA....36...57L
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/2005tvnv.conf..154R
Biography on Janssen written by Françoise Launay
https://www.amazon.com/Astronomer-Jules-Janssen-Globetrotter-Astrophysics/dp/146140696X