Who Invented Film?

As the 20th century was about to dawn, the vision of two French brothers from Lyon would shape the entertainment industry for hundreds of years to come. Louis Lumiere and Auguste Lumiere had been tinkering with various ideas in the early 1890s that would lead to their Cinematographe, a monolithic concoction that included a projector, materials for film processing and a camera apparatus.

Time Frame

The Lumiere brothers created the Cinematographe in 1895. The brothers are typically credited with making the first successful mechanism with which to show moving pictures. Prior to 1895, William Dickson of Edison Laboratories had worked on a similar device called the Kinetoscope, but its primary flaw was that it allowed only one person at a time to watch the moving images being put on display. In contrast, the Cinematographe achieved the very modern practice of having multiple people pay to see the same motion picture.

Effects

Even from its conception, film has incited fierce competition among those wishing to claim a stake in it. After the Lumiere brothers' ascendancy into the limelight, Edison Laboratories retaliated with the Vitascope, a film projector of greater clarity. Other offshoots of the projection concept occurred from 1895 to 1900, including a device called the Eidoloscope that was made by an American named Eugene Lauste.

Significance

Everyone, on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, could see that film had the potential to be a fairly profitable industry and took necessary measures to make advancements that would excite people to pay more money to see these "actualities." Elongating scenes and employing multiple shots and angles were some of the first rudimentary methods toward shaping what film would later become.

Function

There are two sides to the argument over how film should be classified: A moneymaking venture or an artistic avenue. This dispute existed from the very beginning and few are of the belief that the two opposing views can coincide. The Lumiere brothers never could have known that the coarse scenes they showed of workers leaving their factory would evolve into projects so diverse, from "Ziegfeld Follies" to "Sixteen Candles." What they did know was that it was a source of entertainment, a means to take them out of their own lives for a few minutes and focus on something else.

Considerations

Louis Lumiere falsely said, "The cinema is an invention without a future." Far from being such, film has entertained and inspired masses of people since its conception. It has provided an outlet from the mundaneness of day to day living, and without its invention, there is no telling how the global society may have shifted. Some say that movies are the cause of our degeneration, but considering that films merely reflect back to us who and what we are, it is an improbable accusation.