Pre-cinematic Invention: Cinématographe

Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name Date Pre-cinematic Invention: Cinématographe In the documentary, "Film Before Film" by Werner Nekes, he demonstrated different pre-cinematic inventions that served as precursors to the development of modern movie making. In this paper, the Cinématographe was chosen to describe its historical context and significance. In 1894, another invention called the Kinetoscope was introduced in Paris, France where the films played within the device can only be viewed by one individual at a time (Lumiere, 608). Additionally, the Kinetoscope's films can be watched by peeping into an eyepiece, or the “peephole” of the device where the moving images are projected (608). Other than the limitations in the number of people viewing the images, the Kinetoscope lacks sufficient illumination to properly view the images and the continuous motion of the film in the Kinetoscope can only project the images for short periods of time. Also, these problems lead to the decrease in quality sharpness of the projected images since it can only illuminate pictures at a very short time (608). The Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, addressed the problems that comes with the Kinetoscope by making a device that can increase the frequency of the image projected per second and can increase the illumination time of each image for a sharper image, but the most important feature of their invention is that the motion pictures can be projected outside the device and can viewed by multiple people at the same time (Allen, 14; Lumiere, 608). This device is called The Lumière Cinématographe. The Cinématographe changed the worlds culture by creating a new form of art in entertainment. The innovative mechanisms of the multifunctional Cinématographe device includes the recording, developing and projection of motion picture (Allen, 17) into a screen covering 24 meters in height and 30 meters in width (Lumiere, 610). The device made used of a celluloid film strip that has holes where two pins were inserted into the sprocket; the pins moved the celluloid strip based on the way in which a sewing mach...