On August 1, 2022 Mithibai Film Society had its first event.

The featured guest speaker was ad

filmmaker and industry professional Rohan Chavan who gave an extremely intriguing workshop on
film history and the evolution of the invention of cinema. The movie he chose for all to see, A Trip to
the Moon, is one of the first narrative films in the history of Cinema. For what better way to kick off a
film society than at the very beginning.

In the beginning there was darkness. In a room full of people facing a big screen—behind them a
peculiar device—there was darkness. And then the Lumiere Brothers said “Let there be light” and
there was light. And the people saw the image move for the first time. They saw a train coming right
at them in full speed and they ducked. Such was the power of the moving picture upon the people
when it was first introduced to them 127 years ago. In 2022, when we no longer need light to pass
through celluloid to create the illusion of the moving image, movies still exert that power upon us.

The invention of Cinema was a series of happy accidents. It all started with a bet. California Governor
Leland Stanford in 1872 bet a friend that all four hooves of a horse leave the ground at the peak of a
gallop. However, the naked eye is not qualified to register the speed of the hooves of a horse in
motion. So to prove his proposition, he hired Eadweard Muybridge, a well-known British
photographer working in America whose landscape photography quite impressed Stanford. This was
quite an ordeal for even someone as innovative as Muybridge but he was up for the challenge.
Muybridge set up 12 cameras along the edge of the track whose shutters would be triggered by a
string as the horse passed along. There was still the issue of adequate light required to prevent the
blurring of motion. For this he utilised a spring-activated high speed shutter system. However, the
first images captured were “shadowy and indistinct” and did not prove sufficient evidence for
Stanford’s hypothesis. When it was evident that the problem was still that of inadequate light,
Muybridge laid down the track with cloth sheets to reflect as much light as possible. He also made a
faster shutter. His handmade shutter was reduced to the speed of 1/500 th of a second, which was
incidentally the time period a horse has all its hooves in the air, the time it takes to switch from
“pulling” with its front legs to “pushing” with its back legs.

Finally, Muybridge had the image that proved Stanford right and the horse, Sallie Gardner, became
the first star of cinema ever, to star in the first ever movie, made before the invention of the moving-
image camera, viewed the tradition of primitive motion-picture viewing devices like the Zoetrope or
the Zoopraxiscope or the thaumatrope which became forerunners of the motion picture projector
and even actual motion picture display technologies, but perhaps they become topics of discussion
for another time.

Muybridge went on to study the motion of other animals and even humans using similar
methodology and screening his movies through the Zoopraxiscope for small audiences. He even
reached the offices of a certain Thomas Edison which had invented the Phonograph to collaborate
with him. However, at the time Edison turned him down since he did not think the Zoopraxiscope a
suitable device for viewing moving images. Intrigued by the idea, he resolved to invent a motion
picture camera and to protect his inventions filed a Caveat with the Patents Office describing his idea
as “inventing a machine that does for the eye what the Phonograph does for the ear”. The
consequent result, the Kinetoscope, which could capture successive images in a single camera, was
the first breakthrough in the motion-picture-viewing world. It was based on Edison’s conception of
the cylindrical working of the Phonograph. Film was threaded on rollers as a continuous ribbon when
rolled would produce a rapid movement of still images but the lack of film rolls of adequate length
and durability delayed the process. This problem was gotten around by John Carbutt who came up
with celluloid coated in light-sensitive photographic emulsion and voila! There became available
large quantities of durable film. It was soon mass-produced by the Eastman Company and bought in
bulk by the Edison team for their experimentations. The bulk of the innovation was done by Edison’s
assistant and master photographer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and by 1890, Dickson and his
new assistant William Heise, developed the Kinetoscope, a device used for both capturing AND
viewing moving images. In it, film passed continuously between two cylindrical spinning wheels
while the viewer had to look through the peephole to see the “movie”. The peephole was used as a
rapidly moving shutter which gave intermittent exposure while being used as a camera. The viewer
would look through the same lens used for shooting at the top to watch a film.

*image of kinetoscope*

This was how moving images were entertaining people, images on a disc (zoopraxiscope) projected
on a wall or images in a box with slits for light to pass (zoetrope) or the enclosed Edison Kinetoscope
which required the viewer to look through a peephole (one could call it the very first instance of
Voyeurism in Cinema) until 1895 when the Lumiere Brothers invented the Cinematographe. It was
almost 20 years since Muybridge’s invention was rejected by Edison as not being the ideal device for
viewing moving images, when the Lumiere Brothers in turn did the same to Edison. They declared
that peeping into a box was no way to watch moving images and wanted to take the experience out
on the big screen and a wider audience.

The Brothers Lumiere