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Part 1. - Beginnings

The magic lantern is traced back into early theater history as the first form of early cinema. Throughout Europe and America in the 1600s and 1800s, the magic lantern provided early film-like entertainment.

BOB EDWARDS, This is Morning Edition. I'm Bob Edwards.

This coming Thursday marks the 100th anniversary of the first time the paying public got to see movies projected onto a screen. On December 28, 1895, Louis and August Lumiere [sp] set up their new invention in a Paris cafe and an industry was born. They called it the cinematograph [sp] and it was the first modern projector. This week on Morning Edition the experience of watching movies, how cinema technology has developed over the past century, and how going to the movies affects our lives.

Before there were movies, audiences gathered in theaters to watch something called a magic lantern - a box that projected images from glass slides onto a screen. Phyllis Joffe reports on the magic lantern and a company in Connecticut that's trying to revive its forgotten art.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Terry Borten is setting up an antique magic lantern for his annual Christmas show.

TERRY BORTEN, Magic Lantern Artist: There are 151 slides in this show, so that means they are changing about every 30 seconds.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Borten founded the Magic Lantern Theater Company in Ivoryton, Connecticut three years ago. The craft and some of the slides have been passed down in his family for generations.

TERRY BORTEN: My great-grandfather has a magic lantern; that's how I got interested originally. It was no where near as fancy as this one. So I grew up with little magic lantern shows that my father put on for Christmas. It was always a big production and then I did the same for my children when they were little.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Borten presents an average of seven different shows a year here in Ivoryton's turn-of-the-century playhouse. He also takes the shows on the road. He sets up on a table in the middle of the audience. Three hollow mahogany boxes, each about a foot square, are stacked one on top of the other. On the front of each box are what looks like a brass telescope. On the sides are openings to insert large colorful handpainted glass slides. This lantern uses electric light to project the images onto a 30-foot screen, but in the old days it used actual limelight.

TERRY BORTEN: It was originally lit with gases that came through these pipes in the back, squirted on a piece of lime, and the lime turned incandescent inside this chamber here. It made a wonderful light, but it tended to explode a lot.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Borten's lantern and most of the slides are more than a hundred years old. As the show opens, he introduces the audience to the equipment and its techniques.

[Borten is heard explaining how magic lanterns work to the audience].

Historians have traced the magic lantern as far back as 1420. In the 1600s itinerant lanternists traveled the European countryside carrying candle-lit lanterns and slides. The technology hasn't changed much since then. The magic lantern works pretty much like a slide projector, and what you see on the screen are many of the same techniques you see in movies - dissolves, overlays, fades, quick-cuts, close- ups, and even a kind of animation.

TERRY BORTEN: This is what's called a slip-slide, or a slipper. It's a wooden frame with, in this case, three pieces of glass in it. And in this one, one of the pieces of glass has a picture of a dentist with his victim lying back in a chair, his mouth is wide open, and then on another piece of glass there's this arm here, with a pair of pliars and this big, ghastly, bloody tooth. I draw out the slipper here and his arm gradually comes out and you see this bloody tooth for the first time and then there's another slipper on the other side that has his eyes painted on it and as the tooth emerges, then I rattle that one back and forth and his eyes bzz-zt-zt-zt, like that.

DAVID ROBINSON, Author, `From Peep Show to Palace': The most advanced motion picture projector is ultimately a magic lantern.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: David Robinson is a film historian and author of From Peep Show to Palace, a forthcoming book that chronicles the birth of American film.

DAVID ROBINSON: It has exactly the same formation of the light source, the condenser, the lenses and the image in the right place to project on a screen. And when the first cinema devices were invented, they were taken up by magic lanternists.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: By the 1800s, magic lanterns were found in most theaters and middle-class homes throughout Europe and the United States, according to Terry Borten.

TERRY BORTEN: There were local dealers who put out their own specialty catalogs. There were more pages of magic lanterns and magic lantern apparatuses in that sector in the 1890 Sears Catalog than you would find video stuff today.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Today there are several magic lantern theaters operating in Europe, but Borten's is the only professional magic lantern theater in the United States.

TERRY BORTEN: There was a woman in the Lake Champlain [sp] Canal who ran a little B and B there, and in the evening she gave her shows and she would pass the hat afterwards. She put her kids through college. And we heard about it. We went just to visit to see these slides and we got on nicely and one thing led to another and she was looking, as a matter of fact, for somebody who would carry on the performing tradition. She had stopped doing it. She was in her '80s by the time we met her and it's hard work. I mean, the machine is heavy and the slides are heavy.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Traditionally, magic lantern shows require audience participation. At the American Magic Lantern Theater, Borten gives people tambourines and horns to play at dramatic moments. And at matinees he enlists children to warm up the audience by demonstrating toy lanterns as people settle in.

1st CHILD: They have a projector, and this is the kerosene lamp in here and they put kerosene in here and then the smoke would come out here and this is the slide-

2nd CHILD: And the magnifying glass.

1st CHILD: -and this is the magnifying glass. And this is about 100 years old and somebody bought it at an antique store and the children used to put on plays for their parents and friends and it works just as well as a real projector was.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: By the time the show gets rolling the entire audience is shouting, stomping, chanting and singing on cue-

[audience is singing `Jingle Bells']

This Thursday and Friday the American Magic Lantern Theater will celebrate the 100th anniversary of film by performing for the first time in an actual movie house, the Coolidge Theater [sp] in Brookline, Massachusettes. Film historian David Robinson says 20th century films still borrow from the lanternists of old. Ingmar Bergman even called his autobiography The Magic Lantern.

DAVID ROBINSON: My own faith is that people don't ultimately change very much, and whatever the- However elaborate is the technology of the cinema today and however costly is the process of filmmaking and all that, ultimately, the cinema is still telling people stories.

PHYLLIS JOFFE: Stories, Robinson says, of the eternal things people can communicate. For National Public Radio, I'm Phyllis Joffe in Boston.

BOB EDWARDS: Tomorrow, Pat Dowell reports on those early movie pioneers, the projectionists, and their fate in the age of the multiplex.

Part 2. - The Projectionist

The art of the film projectionist has changed dramatically over the years as the former skills needed to run extremely dangerous equipment have been replaced by automation, requiring only a push of a button.

BOB EDWARDS, Host: This is Morning Edition. I'm Bob Edwards.

This week Morning Edition is observing the 100th anniversary of the first time the paying public saw movies projected onto a screen. On December 28th, 1985, the Lumiere brothers showed a collection of short movies in Paris, with the Lumiere's new device, the Cinematograph, and its American counterpart, the bidoscope [sp], projectionists soon took movies around the world. Today there are more movie theaters than ever before but fewer projectionists working in them. Pat Dowell reports.

PAT DOWELL, Reporter: Before there were movie theaters or stars or Hollywood, a movie was single shot a few minutes long, showing an exotic place or a sporting event or a familiar moment, such as a kiss or the arrival of a train. In the beginning, these movies were made to sell movie equipment. The very first projectionists worked for the manufacturers of cameras and projectors. Some went into business for themselves, setting up their machines in churches, lodges, vaudeville theaters and amusement parks where they exhibited movies as novelty acts. Some are both projectionists and cameramen, shooting local footage to lure audiences and assembling the one-shot movies of the day into an evening's entertainment. Charles Musser [sp], author of The Emergence of Cinema, says one of the most successful was Limon Howe [sp].

CHARLES MUSSER, Author, `The Emergence of Cinema': Limon Howe would buy these one-shot films that would show different aspects of a fire in a fire rescue and he would take a film of a fire company racing down the street and another of a fire company putting out a fire and a third of a fire company leaving the firehouse and a fourth of firemen leading some horses out of a burning building, and he would use these to tell a little story about how the fire company leaves the firehouse, races down the street, puts out the fire, rescues the horses and suddenly you have a little story.

PAT DOWELL: In short, projectionists were the film industries first showmen, Musser says, but as the industry began to get organized in its first decade, the projectionist became a narrowly defined employee in the movie theaters that flourished after 1905. It was still a highly skilled technical profession. By 1907 it had a union, primarily because the job was extremely dangerous.

In the projection booth of the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C., projectionist Keith Madden [sp] keeps a reminder of just how dangerous the old days were.

KEITH MADDEN, Projectionist: Here in the booth we still have a `carbon butts-only' trash can, where, you know, you didn't put paper trash or anything in there for fear of setting the thing on fire. You'd have to trim the carbons after every reel and the drippings from the copper coating would drip into the pan. It would be hot, molten metal, basically, and you'd drop that in there.

PAT DOWELL: Carbon butts were the burnt ends of rods used in carbon art projector lamps. The rods produced a brilliant flaming arc that illuminated the film. It burned openly, only inches away from the highly flammable nitrate film stock on which all movies were printed before the 1950s. It was a notoriously combustible combination, requiring extraordinary precautions, including a projection booth that could be completely sealed off.

KEITH MADDEN: The projection booth was way up here, a great big spacious thing compared to today's booth.

PAT DOWELL: The old booth is a floor above the new one and about six times larger. Over the windows that look out onto the thousand- seat auditorium are thick, metal plates, which are shutters held up by cables. All of the cables are connected to one small piece of soft metal, which would melt in a fire.

KEITH MADDEN: All of the cables would drop and all these shutters would block the projection booth off completely. Presumably, I always thought to protect the rest of the theater from fire damage, but I was told later on, no, the main reason was to prevent the audience from panicking when they would look up and see flames. So, the projectionist, of course, would probably go up in a ball of flames, but no one would panic.

PAT DOWELL: Madden says the movie `Cinema Paradiso' hardly did justice to the horror of a nitrate fire. In that popular 1989 Italian film, a little boy befriends a projectionist who's blinded in such a fire.

The spinning film explodes into a shower of fire balls that cling to the projectionist as he frantically tries to put out the flames. Such disasters were common enough in real life that most cities had strict licensing requirements for projectionists says Bill Youngs [sp] who first worked as a projectionist in junior high school in 1929.

BILL YOUNGS, Projectionist: For instance, the District of Columbia required a practical training period of 180 days, a minimum of three hours each under a licensed projectionist, or operator, as they called it, before you could take the examination for the regular professional license.

PAT DOWELL: At that time, Youngs says, the law required one projectionistfor every projector, and there were usually at least two projectors in every booth. Youngs spent some 60 years projecting films in commercial theaters in the White House and at the Motion Picture Association of America. He's seen all of the changes that have come to the American projection booth, including sound, color, wide screen format, automation. The biggest change, he says?

BILL YOUNGS: One man in a no man operation.

PAT DOWELL: The depopulation of the projection booth began when non- flammable safety film replaced nitrate in the 1950s. Licensing, and with it training, was no longer a matter of public safety. The union continued to train projectionists, but when automated equipment began to be installed in the 1970s many theater chains eliminated the position of projectionists, says the Uptown's Keith Madden, who's also the business agent of the union's Washington local.

KEITH MADDEN: We no longer have a complete monopoly on the craft, which is essentially what the union had before. You couldn't just take someone off the street and train them how to do this in a day. Nowadays with automation you can train someone to thread up and push a button.

PAT DOWELL: Patrick Thorpe [sp] threads up film and pushes a button 70 times a day at the Arlington Lee Highway multiplex in Washington' s northern Virginia's suburbs. It has no union representation, but Thorpe has hardly been pulled in off the street. The company that owns the theater sent him to its projection school for two weeks of training, so in addition to pushing those buttons, Patrick Thorpe inspects all the prints, maintains the equipment, and runs all 14 projectors himself.

PATRICK THORPE, Projectionist: Generally, there would be one person up here unless you were having some type of problem with something.

PAT DOWELL: Fourteen projectors are lined up on both sides of one long room. Thorpe runs from one to the next. He can operate them all by himself because of the automated platter system, which is used almost everywhere now. Unlike the old days, when the film was divided into short reels, alternating on two projectors, an entire movie now sits wound like a giant horizontal roll of tape on a four foot wide steel plate - the platter. In the Uptown, which was built in 1936, Keith Madden still does it the old way, with two machines. As a reel of film ends, he intently watches for codes printed on the film to start the next reel so that there's no interruption in the movie.

KEITH MADDEN: You don't get a chance to really watch movies. That' s one of the first questions everyone asks you. `Oh, you must see a lot of films.' I see it, but not from the perspective of the audience which is total escapism. I see it from the technical side - is it in focus? Is there sound? You don't always hear all of the dialogue and you're definitely not swept into the mood of it. If you are then you're not really doing your job.

PAT DOWELL: Madden considers himself a showman in the old tradition, something that he believes is gone from the booth in the multiplex. But talk to two projectionists in very different operations and you' ll get similar answers about why they stay in that noisy, hot and lonely booth. Patrick Thorpe at the multiplex.

PATRICK THORPE: To me, the best thing is to be able to look out the window, like during kiddie shows, and the kids are all looking upstairs if you're there about the time the film is going to start. And they' re all watching you thread. I get a lot of pleasure out of that. You wave down to them and they wave back to you.

PAT DOWELL: And Keith Madden at the Uptown gets a thrill out of the audience too.

KEITH MADDEN: I enjoy watching a crowd when we have a full house here, when there's a thousand people, and you can hear - in a soundproof booth - you can hear people roaring with laughter at a line, or see people motionless, completely enthralled in the film.

PAT DOWELL: He doesn't even mind if they've never noticed who makes it possible.

KEITH MADDEN: That's the goal. If no one knows you're there you' ve done a good job.

PAT DOWELL: For National Public Radio, the is Pat Dowell in Washington.

BOB EDWARDS: Tomorrow Pat Dowell reports on the another changing aspect of the movie-going experience - the rise and fall of repertory and art house theaters.

Part 3. Film as Art

In the hundred years since audiences first paid to see a motion picture, theaters have catered to specific films. Pat Dowell takes a look at art houses and repertory theaters to see how far they've come.

BOB EDWARDS, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Bob Edwards. This week we're marking the centennial of the movies; not of their invention, but of the first time a paying audience watched one. In the hundred years since then, that shared experience has become almost universal. Nearly everyone, nearly everywhere, goes to the movies. Movie theaters have grown from nickelodeons to movie palaces to multiplexes, and, along the way, some have developed specialties. Once there were theaters that showed nothing but newsreels; others catered to America' s new immigrants by featuring foreign movies. After World War II, some theaters began screening foreign language movies for English- speaking audiences. A little later, other theaters specialized in classic American movies.

In part three of our series, `In the First Century of the Motion Picture Business,' Pat Dowell reports on the art house and the repertory theater and what's happened to them in the age of video and cable.

PAT DOWELL, Reporter: European films were often imported to the United States in the silent era, when language was less of a problem, but, between 1929 and 1945, foreign language films with English translations were seldom available to the general public. After World War II there was a surge of imports, helped along by foreign governments pouring money into war-devastated industries.

According to Douglas Gummery [sp], the author of Shared Pleasures - A History of Movie Presentation in the United States, foreign filmmakers found a receptive audience.

DOUGLAS GUMMERY, Author, `Shared Pleasures': A whole culture develops around Saturday Review of Literature and Arthur Knight [sp] and intellectuals discussing movies, and movies having serious comments, and even in 1952 the Supreme Court passes a landmark case, The Miracle case, in which they declare movies have all the rights under free speech that every- that the press and writing have had for- since our country has begun.

PAT DOWELL: The Miracle was an Italian film that, like many foreign films, broke Hollywood's sexual and religious taboos. That, combined with the growth of the new movie intelligentsia, Gummery says, led some big-city theaters to specialize in foreign films. People began to call them art theaters and, like artists, these endeavors often survived on the economic margin. They showed primarily first-run foreign films.

[excerpt of French film]

PAT DOWELL: During the 1960s the movie culture grew again and there was increasing interest, mostly among students, in seeing older American classics.

[excerpt of `Citizen Kane']

PAT DOWELL: A second type of art house opened its doors, the repertory, or revival theater. Allen Rubin [sp] co-founded the Biograph Theater in Washington, D.C., in 1967.

ALLEN RUBIN, Co-Founder, Biograph Theater: There were four friends and myself and we decided to just open a theater, to kind of put on a show in the barn kind of. It just seemed like a fun thing to do, and we were all- we all had other jobs and we worked here at nights selling tickets and popcorn, learning the business. We did that for a number of years.

PAT DOWELL: Rubin and his partners often presented thematic programs, a series devoted to the Marx brothers, or one devoted to Francois Truffaut. Business was good for about 15 years, then-

ALLEN RUBIN: It just started to decline, and we just slowly, maybe not even on a conscious level, we just started putting in other films that never came to Washington, we started putting in American independents, and playing things for a week rather than for a few days, and got off the thematic schedule and just evolved into something else, and around the country everyone seemed to do that. Without ever consulting each other, it just seemed like a natural progression, and the ones that didn't do that are not open anymore.

PAT DOWELL: The older films that the Biograph showed became more conveniently available on video and cable. Repertory theaters were forced to come up with new movies to attract audiences, but, according to Gary Myer [sp], a founder of the Landmark chain of repertory and art house theaters, something was happening to the audience too.

GARY MYER, Founder, Landmark Theaters: During the early '80s, and mid-'80s, people who were our age, people who are now in their mid- '40s and late '40s, started having children, they had waited, and in that process of having kids then they couldn't go out as frequently as they used to. That meant they had to be more selective about what they went to do, and it might be going to a movie, in which case it would be probably a first-run movie, or going to a play, or going to dinner, or we used to go to dinner and a movie, and now suddenly dinner has become an evening's entertainment.

PAT DOWELL: Myer and his partners, like the owners of the Biograph in Washington, gradually changed all but three of their repertory houses in theaters that specialize in first-run foreign films and American independents, and the companies that supplied repertory and art theaters with films have followed suit. One such film distributor, Kino International, built a reputation on its library of silent comedy and European classics, by Fellini and Berman among others.

Founder Don Kremm [sp] says there are still repertory theaters among his customers.

DON KREMM, Founder, Kino International Distributors: About 20, and three-quarters of those are subsidized, so you got about maybe five theaters that are really commercial, and in 1977 there were probably 150.

PAT DOWELL: Most of today's repertory theaters are in museums and on college campuses. To make up for the loss of theater business, Kremm's company has gone into video as well. Today, more than half of Kremm's business is in cassettes of foreign and classic titles. This year Kino was praised for releasing 10 volumes of restored Buster Keaton films.

DON KREMM: What ended up on the video master tapes, from which we make our copies, is a better looking version of The General than probably anybody'd seen in a theater in 70 years once you accept the fact that you're seeing it on a television scream rather than a large movie theater screen.

PAT DOWELL: Kremm also expanded his business to include films by new foreign directors. He still does business, he says, with a core of about 200 art theaters, and though the market seems to be stable, Landmark's Gary Myer worries about the future.

GARY MYER: Today's young people are not coming to see these kinds of films in very large numbers. They're not as adventurous as previous generations might have been. They'd rather go see the newest Hollywood that their friends are going to see, and go see it over and over again.

PAT DOWELL: Even people who are never likely to set foot in a theater showing a foreign or independent film, have reason to care about the fate of such theaters, and such movies, says critic Jim Hoberman [sp] of The Village Voice.

JIM HOBERMAN, Film Critic, `Village Voice': Because, by and large, the Hollywood production system is so moribund, so star-driven, so deeply conservative, endless recycling themes, and even movies, that most of the energy comes from the margin, and that's the independent films. I mean, it would be nice if that was even recognized in a more open manner so that, you know, the Jim Carrey films could help subsidize the exhibition of Adam Agoyan [sp] films, for example.

PAT DOWELL: Big theater chains periodically give films like those of Adam Agoyan a try, usually in the wake of independent film successes. The Piano and Pulp Fiction are two recent examples. The chains can't commit themselves to what it takes to make these films succeed, says Gary Myer of Landmark, and it is a commitment, now more than ever, as Allen Rubin of the Biograph explains.

ALLEN RUBIN: Running repertory was a lot easier. I'd put in a Bogart festival; everyone knew who Bogart was, and, you know, the newspapers would write a little blurb, you know, `The Bogart Festival is opening,' and that would be it, and I'd just spend my time planning the next one. But now I have to screen- for every film I play I screen three or four. I have to decide whether it's a good film, whatever that means, and also whether people will come to see it because it's a commercial theater, and then when I decide on it, we write film notes, we put it in our program, and then I have to get the critics down to look at it, I have to get materials and press books and then promote it. It's a huge amount of work. Every week I'm not only screening for three months down the road, but I'm also promoting for the two weeks down the road, and it's a constant treadmill.

PAT DOWELL: And, he admits, a labor of love. For National Public Radio, this is Pat Dowell in Washington. Tomorrow, Michael Goldfarb visits Paris, where it all began, for a look at the Lumiere brothers and their predecessors.

Part 4. The Lumiere Brothers

The fourth part of NPR's "Centennial of the Cinema" recounts the first pay-to-view motion picture screening at the Grand Cafe in Paris by Louise and Auguste Lumiere on December 28, 1895.

BOB EDWARDS, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Bob Edwards. A hundred years ago today, at a cafe in Paris, two French brothers, for the first time to a paying public, projected moving pictures onto a screen. Since then, movies have become one of the dominant art forms of the 20th century and one of its biggest businesses.

In part four of our series on the centennial of cinema, NPR's Michael Goldfarb reports on the events that led to the development of movies.

[on Parisian streets]

MICHAEL GOLDFARB, Reporter: Paris, on a freezing strike-bound December day. I'm on the Boulevard de Cappucine, one of the city's main cultural arteries. About a hundred yards down the street and just around the corner is the Paris Opera House, the great temple of the 19th century' s high and popular art form. Opera wouldn't maintain that twin status too far into the 20th century because of an event that took place near where I'm standing.

I'm just outside No. 14 Boulevard de Cappucine. Today's it Le Jardine de Muse Restaurant [sp]; a hundred years ago it was the Grand Cafe, and it was here on December 28, 1895, Louis and Auguste Lumiere held the first public showing of what they called the Cinematographe. The program was a double feature with selected shorts; actually, they were all pretty brief. The main feature showed workers leaving the Lumiere brothers' factory in Lyon, that's it, and a train arriving at a station. But that showing is considered the birth of cinema, although the Lumiere brothers were not the only parents of the new medium.

CONSTANTIN COSTA-GAVRAS, Filmmaker: We cannot say that Lumiere invented the cinema.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Filmmaker Costa-Gavras says the Lumiere brothers are unique for a simple, commercial reason.

CONSTANTIN COSTA-GAVRAS: What is the extraordinary thing with Lumiere, for the first time they presented in a public- in an audience, in a paid audience, movie images, or the cinema. It was a big surprise. People were absolutely astonished to see a big screen with people like them moving, with a train. So that was the big invention of the Lumieres.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: The Lumieres were the first to show a film commercially, so they get the credit for inventing cinema, but, in 1895 there were folks at work in Germany and Britain on a similar film projection system, and, in the U.S., Thomas Edison was already making moving pictures for his Kinetoscope, his little hand-cranked peep-show box. All of the inventors were simply players in a centuries-old attempt to project images that move.

[interior of French Film Museum]

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: At the Espace Electra Cinematheque, the French Film Museum has organized an exhibition detailing that story.

PHILIPPE ARNOT, Editorial Director, Espace Electra Cinematheque: The purpose of this exhibition is to show that the cinema doesn't appear suddenly, magically, in a 1895.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Philippe Arnot [sp], editorial director of the Cinemateque.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: To see moving images is a very, very, very old dream in humanity.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Just how old that dream is becomes clear as Arnot and I wander around the white-walled ultra-modern exhibition space. It's filled with colorful contraptions, all invented to create the illusion of moving pictures.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: Here we have a few pieces about magic lantern. Lantern magic was a small box to see-

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Besides the magic lantern there are black rooms, Chinese shadows, and amorphuses [sp], inventions dating back to the 17th and 18th century. But dominating the space is a 19th-century machine about the size of a grand piano. It looks like a giant film projector lying on its side.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: This is TheatrOpic [sp].

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: [interviewing] Theater- an optical theater?

PHILIPPE ARNOT: Optical theater. The French name is TheatrOpic. It was invented by Aimee Renoux [sp]. Aimee Renoux was French, French living in the 19th century, and Aimee Renoux invented from the lantern magic a machine to show painted images animated.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: A projectionist would manually crank 700 hand-painted tiles. A light shown on the tiles and a mirror bounced the images out onto a screen. The amazing thing is how steady the image looks.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: Aimee Renoux invented something very, very, very, very important in order to have an excellent projection, which is a hole between every image.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Putting a sprocket hole in each frame of film was a crucial practical step on the way to the invention of the Cinematographe. By the middle of the 19th century, technology was moving forward rapidly. Photography was invented and the rush was on to find a way to make photos move. Arnot took me over to look at something devised by Etienne Jules Maray [sp] in 1882, an invention with which you literally shot film, a movie gun.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: We have the photographic rifle, which was an adaptation of the technological principles of the rifle.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: [interviewing] So you would put your finger on the trigger. I guess that so long as the trigger is being pulled the film is turning, and receiving- and the light is coming down the barrel of this-

PHILIPPE ARNOT: Absolutely.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: [interviewing] What did you use this for?

PHILIPPE ARNOT: Maray had a passion, which was to understand the movement.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Movement, in its most basic form, is the subject of many early films. By the 1890s, the basic building blocks for cinema were in place. Thomas Edison and his staff had figured out how to draw film at a steady pace past a light source. They called their invention the Kinetoscope, the peep-show box.

A French manufacturer of photo equipment, Antoine Lumiere, bought one at a Paris trade show in 1894 and took it back to his factory in Lyon. He gave it to his sons, Louis and Auguste. He told them to improve on the Edison method. The pair returned to the basics of the old magic lantern, where a single non-moving picture is held up in front of a light source and the image is projected through a lens onto a screen. The brothers coupled this with Edison's idea of moving the film steadily past the projector. They disregarded their father's advice to call their machine a Domatore [sp], a nonsense word the old man thought had a certain classical ring.

The Lumieres decided to call their invention a Cinematographe. After a few demonstrations at the Lyon factory they booked the Grand Cafe in Paris for that first commercial screening. The event passed with less fanfare than you might think, says the Cinemateque's Philippe Arnot.

PHILIPPE ARNOT: There were 33 people who paid to see the screening the first day. So it's hard to say that the first day was a great successs, but, what we know is people talked about this screening, surprised to see moving images, and success came quite quickly, but not the first day.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Word got out fast because they took their invention all ovr the world. The Cinematographe was also a camera, and they shot films wherever they went, showing them, along with pictures of France, to great acclaim. Six months after the first show they brought their machine to New York and presented a series of short films about French life. According to Charles Musser [sp], of Princeton University, they caused a sensation.

CHARLES MUSSER, Princeton University: For all sorts of reasons, I mean, those films were greeted with considerable - in fact, great enthusiasm in the United States. I mean, in some ways, the Lumiere films are the very opposite of Edison films, you know? They tended to be taken outdoors; the Edison films, at least for the Kinetoscope, were taken in the Black Mariah Studio [sp]. Initially they were films about the Lumiere family, about the Lumiere factory. They were much more conservative in many respects than the Edison films. They didn't break the kinds of taboos that the Edison films were doing.

MICHAEL GOLDFARB: Edison knew what a mass audience wanted to see; hoochie-koochie dancers, people kissing, not the sort of thing polite Victorians were used to watching in public. Edison may have been behind the Lumieres when it came to a system for projecting images onto a big screen, but, being a sharp businessman, he knew a good invention when he saw one. He quickly developed his own version of the Lumiere Cinematographe. The French brothers, however, were not interested in copying Edison's concept of good mass entertainment. They preferred making their documentaries about daily life around the world.

The public preferred Edison. The Lumieres stopped making movies in 1903. I'm Michael Goldfarb reporting.

BOB EDWARDS: The moviegoing experience has changed a lot since the Lumiere brothers.

Source: The Electric Library

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