The Movies

SOME SAY THE 2OTH CENTURY was actually born in 1914, when the guns of August blew away the covenants of the 19th century. But there's a strong case to be made for Dec. 28, 1895, when the first paid public showing of motion pictures took place in Paris, presented by Louis and Auguste Lumiere. (Check out that incredibly fortuitous name, the Light Brothers, creating the movies, the art of light!) Although Thomas Edison had invented the Kinetoscope in 1889, his device could be seen by only one viewer at a time. Oddly, the Wizard of Menlo Park didn't see much future in projecting the pictures.

There has always been a mad hassle over who should be credited with inventing movies. The history of this debate can be summed up by the roster of devices turned out by inventors in America and Europe: the phasmatrope, the phenakistoscope, the stroboscopic disk, the phantoscope, the daedalum, the zoetrope, the zoopraxiscope, the bioscope, the pantoptikon, the tachyscope and many more. But it was the Lumieres who brought the movies as we know them into being, when they assembled 33 people in their 100-seat theater to be shocked and amazed by a series of one-minute epics that showed workers leaving the Lumiere factory, a train arriving at a station, a baby having lunch and the first comedy smash, in which a man watering a garden gets the water smack in the kisser. The Lumieres' cinematographe was an advance on Edison, being both a camera and a projector.

It's doubtful if the human race will ever be as astounded by a new form of entertainment as it was by the advent of the movies. With this new art, wrote one observer, "the great potentialities of life ... shall overflow to the nethermost portions of the earth at the command of the humblest heir of the divine intelligence." There's an important point in that earliest of all movie blurbs. Movies, it was instantly seen, are something that appeals to everyone anywhere in the world. Of course this was especially true in the first quarter century of cinema, before sound. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton needed no words to communicate with people from New Jersey to New Guinea. In fact, the introduction of sound was seen as an artistic catastrophe by many of the great silent-film directors.

Their concerns were blown aside in 1927 by the explosive success of Warner Brothers' "The Jazz Singer" with Al Jolson. The Warner studio, in dire financial straits, gambled everything on the Vitaphone system, in which sound on records was synchronized with the film. When Jolson, then at the peak of his reputation as an entertainer, sang numbers like "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye" and uttered the immortal line "You ain't heard nothin' yet, folks!" the audience leaped up and cheered. This was the essence of the great populist art form of the movies: who ever rose to her feet while reading a Tolstoy novel?

Making images seem to move is an atavistic impulse that goes back to the Paleolithic cave artists. Jump--cut to 1906, when an American, J. Stuart Blackton, used stop-motion photography to make what is credited as the first animated cartoon, "Humorous Phases of Funny Faces." Three years later the great comic-strip artist Winsor McCay anticipated Steven Spielberg with "Gertie the Dinosaur," the first animated cartoon shown on a regular theatrical program. McCay gets credit for making the first full-length animated feature in 1918. No funny faces here; his unlikely theme was "The Sinking of the Lusitania." But comedy was the natural brother of animation, driving the great comic animators from Walt Disney, whose early cartoons like "The Three Little Pigs" were sensations, to Warner Brothers with its repertory group of sterling thespians like Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, all voiced by the immortal Mel Blanc.

While animation evolved, live-action-film makers struggled with adding color to their black-and-white universe. Many lamented the inevitable incursion of color, which they thought would mar the expressive power and beauty that had been developed by great cameramen like D. W. Griffith's Billy Bitzer, who brought the sweep of history to Films like "The Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance," and William Daniels, whose brilliant photography of Greta Garbo was a crucial factor in making her the biggest female star of her age. The master of spectacle, Cecil B. DeMille, predicted that no one would endure straining his eyes watching movies in bright color.