1 ACTUALITY AND ILLUSION
ACTUALITY
The Earliest Filmmakers
Louis Daguerre developed the Daguerreotype photographic process, the first mechanical process that created sustainable photographs using silver plated copper and mercury vapor in 1839.
In 1874, the French Astronomer, Jules Janssen wanted to record of the transit of the planet Venus passing across the sun. He developed a tool he called the revolver photographique. It was a cylander shaped camera with a revolving photographic plate. He set it up to automatically take a series of shots of the astronomical event. This was one of the first steps in the evolution of the movie camera. Janssen wasn’t interested in making movies, he needed a way to record this historical event and he designed a tool to do it, and he became the first filmmaker.
Across the Atlantic and the American Continent, the famous English photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, was hired by the former governor of California, Leland Stanford.
Stanford was breeding racehorses. He wanted to see if all four of a horse’s legs left the ground completely at a gallop. Muybridge set up cameras with trip wires on the track. When the horse tripped the wires, they snapped still images of the horse galloping around the racetrack. When they flipped through the photos, they were not only able to learn how a horse’s legs run at full gallop, they were able to create the illusion of motion. And yes, all four of the horse’s legs leave the ground when it gallops. In Jordan Peele’s 2022 film Nope, the story of the African American jockey riding the galloping horse in this first film is expanded into a back story for his characters.
By 1880, Muybridge was projecting his photographic sequences with a “Magic Lantern” and presenting the galloping horse on a screen. Muybridge saw film as a way for people to see animals and people in motion. He eventually used trip wire techniques to film human athletes. The painter, Thomas Eakins, was fascinated with what a still frame of motion looked like.
The French Physiologist, Étienne Jules Marey, developed the fusil photographique, the photographic rifle, to film birds in flight. Like Janssen he used a glass plate with silver emulsion to record the image, but because of the lightness and quickness of birds and because he needed to aim his film rifle upward, the glass plates were too heavy. He conducted experiments and found that with certain chemicals, paper could serve as a negative, eventually he developed the celluloid strips that we called film.
Celluloid is a tough flammable thermoplastic composed of cellulose nitrate and camphor. Cellulose is the complex polymeric carbohydrate that derives from the cell walls of plants.
Interestingly, when a need for technology was identified, to record a bird in flight, a horse running on a track, or the motion of planets, the equipment was designed. Innovation arises from curiosity, then as it is used, the technology developes to become faster, lighter, better, more portable,