The Story of Film: An Odyssey

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (Mark Cousins)

Episode 1: Birth of the Cinema (1895-1918)

 The episode was about the start of film. It started with how the actual film roll was used which was light shining through the film and many images moving fast to create an illusion that the objects or people in the images were moving. Most films at this point up until 1910s were only short ones which featured very few actions. However, in the 1910s the first set of feature films started to release. Editing was introduced when a man shooting a film in a streets camera jammed and the film cut so that the carriages in the street seemingly and magically disappeared from the scene, and people suddenly appeared. This is what we know now as cutting.

I learned a lot about the start of the industry, and I was pleasantly surprised with how many people who wrote and directed the films were women. I was shocked as I didn't know that the start of the film industry was run by people who weren't accepted by most of society in normal jobs, and then at the end of the 1910s it was seen to be a great way of making money from the consumers. I learnt that over 15,000 cinemas were built in the USA during this period which I think is insane considering there is only 35,000 cinemas in the USA as of December 2014.