Moving Image: Seeing Things
Films and television programming are unique to all other art forms in that they make use of all the others: theatre, visual art, music etc. It is a media which challenges the creativity and engages the imagination of its creators and its audience alike. It influences our emotions like no other art form; it can make us sad, happy, even angry. What is more it is probably the only medium that every one of us can access from our living rooms with the touch of a button.
The Captured Image
Of course before the moving image there was the 'captured image'.
Photography comes from the Greek words 'phos' meaning light and
'graphis' meaning stylus or paintbrush. It is the process of
creating pictures by capturing light on a light-sensitive medium or
'drawing with light'. Patterns of light reflected from objects are
recorded onto mediums such as film or memory chips through timed
exposure. This process is carried out through a mechanical,
chemical or digital device: the camera.
Modern photography can be traced back to the early years of the
19th century with the first permanent photograph being produced in
France in 1826.
Museums, like this one, use photographic collections as a window
into the past, from these records we can piece together a picture
of social and industrial history long forgotten. Without thinking
we too are documenting our own lives and times in the same way with
every holiday or family snap we take.
The Magic Lantern
The Magic Lantern was the predecessor to the slide projector and
goes back as far as 2nd century China and was well known in Europe
by the mid-17th century. By simply using an oil lamp or candle,
images hand painted on glass could be projected onto a screen. By
the Victorian era there was an army of travelling projectionists
taking their shows to towns and villages across the country. Many
of these 'lanternists' used animation techniques and special
effects to enhance their shows and usually played an accompanying
soundtrack on a musical instrument
The invention of photography increased the repertoire of available
images and soon the travelling lanternists were joined by amateur
photographers who instead of showing the usual comic or moral
tales, would show eager audiences images of far-off lands and
famous people and places hitherto inaccessible.
Sadly after the advent of the moving picture in the 19th century
these lantern shows became redundant, and the lanterns themselves
became no more than collector's curiosities. The glass slides
however remain a record of the times in which they were taken and
an invaluable resource for researchers.
Television
Television gets its name from a mixture of latin and greek and
means 'far sight'. It was not the invention by a single person, but
an end result of a string of innovations by many individuals
starting with Willoughby Smith in 1873 who discovered the
photoconductivity of the element selenium. It wasn't until 1926
that the first public demonstration of a device which would become
what we now know as a television was given by Scotsman, John Logie
Baird.
By the 1940s, televisions were switching on in households across
Europe and North America, however the real upsurge in sales in the
UK happened because of one event - people not content to sit around
the radio listening to commentators describe the scene, wanted to
see for themselves the pomp and ceremony surrounding the coronation
of Queen Elizabeth in 1953.
By the 1960s, the golden age of television, more families had
television than ever before allowing people to be influenced by the
wider world like never before, the horrors of the war in Vietnam
were brought into peoples living rooms on a daily basis, the
criticism of Government policy which followed was unprecedented and
could never have happened without television. The spectacle of the
momentous events unfolding in space exploration influenced an
entire generation of young boys who would grow up dreaming of
becoming astronauts. In the modern era these new horizons opened up
to us by television have stimulated our collective imaginations and
demonstrated that there are no limits on what we can achieve with
our lives.
The Big Screen
On October 4th, 1888, a Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, presented
'Roundhay Garden Scene' the world's first motion picture to a
stunned audience in Leeds, Yorkshire. The first paying venue opened
in 1895 at Le Grand Café in Paris and this event is now referred to
as 'The Birth of Cinema', and Paris became the motion picture
capital of the world.
The rise of cinema in Europe was interrupted by the outbreak of
the First World War in 1914 leaving the industry to flourish in the
United States, leaving Hollywood as the new home of
cinema.
By the 1920s, filmmakers were attaching soundtracks to their
movies and the 'talkie' was born. The next advancement in
technology, movies in colour, took longer to catch on with the
public but as the processes improved, more and more films were made
in this media. By the end of World War 2, Hollywood viewed colour
as essential to attracting audiences in its competition with home
television which was still black and white.
With the introduction of home video in the late 20th century, many
wondered if the local cinema could survive, the industry needn't
have worried, with the advancement of modern digital technology and
improved movie houses offering a wider choice of film in
comfortable modern surroundings, cinema has never been as popular
as it is today, with many cinemas recording record
attendances.
