From Novelty to Narrative

The origins of cinema as an independent medium lie in the development of mass communication technologies evolved for other purposes (Cook, 2004). Specifically, photography (1826–1839), roll film (1880), the Kodak camera (1888), George Eastman’s motion picture film (1889), the motion picture camera (1891–1893), and the motion picture projector (1895–1896) each had to be invented in succession for cinema to be born.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Early experiments in series photography for capturing motion were an important precursor to cinema’s emergence. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge set up a battery of cameras triggered by a horse moving through a set of trip wires. Adapting a Zoëtrope (a parlor novelty of the era) for projecting the photographs, Muybridge arranged his photograph plates around the perimeter of a disc that was manually rotated. Light from a “Magic Lantern” projector was shown through each slide as it passed in front of a lens. The image produced was then viewed on a large screen (Neale, 1985). If rotated rapidly enough, a phenomenon known as persistence of vision (an image appearing in front of the eye lingers a split second in the retina after removal of the image), allowed the viewer to experience smooth, realistic motion.

Perhaps the first movie projector, Muybridge called his apparatus the Zoopraxiscope, which was used to project photographic images in motion for the first time to the San Francisco Art Association in 1880 (Neale, 1985).

In 1882, French physiologist and specialist in animal locomotion, Étienne-Jules Marey, invented the Chronophotographic Gun in order to take series photographs of birds in flight (Cook, 2004). Shaped like a rifle, Marey’s camera took 12 instantaneous photographs of movement per second, imprinting them on a rotating glass plate coated with a light-sensitive emulsion. A year later, Marey switched from glass plates to paper roll film. But like Muybridge, “Marey was not interested in cinematography…. In his view, he had invented a machine for dissection of motion similar to Muybridge’s apparatus but more flexible, and he never intended to project his results” (Cook, 2004, p. 4).

In 1887, Hannibal Goodwin, an Episcopalian minister from New Jersey, first used celluloid roll film as a base for light-sensitive emulsions. George Eastman later appropriated Goodwin’s idea and in 1889, began to mass-produce and market celluloid roll film on what would eventually become a global scale (Cook, 2004). Neither Goodwin nor Eastman were initially interested in motion pictures. However, it was the introduction of this durable and flexible celluloid film, coupled with the technical breakthroughs of Muybridge and Marey, that inspired Thomas Edison to attempt to produce recorded moving images to accompany the recorded sounds of his newly-invented phonograph (Neale, 1985). It is interesting to note that, according to Edison’s own account (cited in Neale, 1985), the idea of making motion pictures was never divorced from the idea of recording sound. “The movies were intended to talk from their inception so that, in some sense, the silent cinema represents a thirty-year aberration from the medium’s natural tendency toward a total representation of reality” (Cook, 2004, p. 5).

Capitalizing on these innovations, W.K.L. Dickson, a research assistant at the Edison Laboratories, invented the first authentic motion picture camera, the Kinetograph—first constructed in 1890 with a patent granted in 1894. The basic technology of modern film cameras is still nearly identical to this early device. All film cameras, therefore, have the same five basic functions: a “light tight” body that holds the mechanism which advances the film and exposes it to light; a motor; a magazine containing the film; a lens that collects and focuses light on to the film; and a viewfinder that allows the cinematographer to properly see and frame what they are photographing (Freeman, 1998).

Thus, using Eastman’s new roll film, the Kinetograph advanced each frame at a precise rate through the camera, thanks to sprocket holes that allowed metal teeth to grab the film, advance it, and hold the frame motionless in front of the camera’s aperture at split-second intervals. A shutter opened, exposing the frame to light, then closed until the next frame was in place. The Kinetograph repeated this process 40 times per second. Throughout the silent era, other cameras operated at 16 frames per second; it wasn’t until sound was introduced that 24 frames per second became standard, in order to improve the quality of voices and music (Freeman, 1998). When the processed film is projected at the same frame rate, realistic movement is presented to the viewer.

However, for reasons of profitability alone, Edison was initially opposed to projecting films to groups of people. He reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) that if he made and sold projectors, exhibitors would purchase only one machine from him—a projector—instead of several Kinetoscopes (Belton, 2013) that allowed individual viewers to look at the films through a magnifying eyepiece. By 1894, Kinetographs were producing commercially viable films. Initially the first motion pictures (which cost between $10 and $15 each to make) were viewed individually through Edison’s Kinetoscope “peep-shows” for a nickel apiece in arcades (called Nickelodeons) modeled on the phonographic parlors that had earlier proven so successful for Edison (Belton, 2013).

It was after viewing the Kinetoscope in Paris that the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, began thinking about the possibilities of projecting films on to a screen for an audience of paying customers. In 1894, they began working on their own apparatus, the Cinématograph. This machine differed from Edison’s machines by combining both photography and projection into one device at the much lower (and thus, more economical) film rate of 16 frames per second. It was also much lighter and more portable (Neale, 1985).

In 1895, the Lumière brothers demonstrated their Cinématograph to the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industries Nationale (Society for the Encouragement of National Industries) in Paris. The first film screened was a short actuality film of workers leaving the Lumière factory in Lyons (Cook, 2004). The actual engineering contributions of the Lumière brothers were quite modest when compared to that of W.K.L. Dickson—they merely synchronized the shutter movement of the camera with the movement of the photographic film strip. Their real contribution is in the establishment of cinema as an industry (Neale, 1985).

Source: Screen capture courtesy Lumière Institute

The early years of cinema were ones of invention and exploration. The tools of visual storytelling, though crude by today’s standards, were in hand, and the early films of Edison and the Lumiére brothers were fascinating audiences with actuality scenes—either live or staged—of everyday life. However, an important pioneer in developing narrative fiction film was Alice Guy Blaché. Remarkable for her time, Guy Blaché was arguably the first director of either sex to bring a story-film to the screen with the 1896 release of her one-minute film, La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) that preceded the story-films of Georges Méliès by several months.

One could argue that Guy Blaché was cinema’s first story “designer.” From 1896 to 1920 she wrote and directed hundreds of short films including over 100 synchronized sound films and 22 feature films and produced hundreds more (McMahan, 2003). In the first half of her career, as head of film production for the Gaumont Company (where she was first employed as a secretary), Guy Blaché almost single-handedly developed the art of cinematic narrative (McMahan, 2003) with an emphasis on storytelling to create meaning.

Source: Collection Solax, Public Domain

By the turn of the century, film producers were beginning to assume greater editorial control over the narrative, making multi-shot films and allowing for greater specificity in the story line (Cook, 2004). Such developments are most clearly apparent in the work of Georges Méliès. A professional magician who owned and operated his own theater in Paris, Méliès was an important early filmmaker, developing cinematic narrative which demonstrated a created cause-and-effect reality. Méliès invented and employed a number of important narrative devices, such as the fade-in and fade-out, “lap” (overlapping) dissolve as well as impressive visual effects such as stop-motion photography (Parce qu’on est des geeks! 2013). Though he didn’t employ much editing within individual scenes, the scenes were connected in a way that supported a linear, narrative reality.

By 1902, with the premiere of his one-reel film Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon), Méliès was fully committed to narrative filmmaking. Unfortunately, Méliès became embroiled in two lawsuits with Edison concerning issues of compensation over piracy and plagiarism of his 1902 film. Although he remained committed to his desire of “capturing dreams through cinema” (Parce qu’on est des geeks! 2013) until the end of his filmmaking career—and produced several other ground-breaking films (Les Hallucinations Du Baron de Münchhausen, 1911, and A La Conquête Des Pôles, 1912)—his legal battles left him embittered and by 1913, Méliès abandoned filmmaking and returned to performing magic.

Middle-class American audiences, who grew up with complicated plots and fascinating characters from such authors as Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, began to demand more sophisticated film narratives. Directors like Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Griffith began crafting innovative films in order to provide their more discerning audiences with the kinds of stories to which theatre and literature had made them accustomed (Belton, 2013).

Influenced by Méliès, American filmmaker Edwin S. Porter is credited with developing the “invisible technique” of continuity editing. By cutting to different angles of a simultaneous event in successive shots, the illusion of continuous action was maintained. Porter’s Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery, both released in 1903, are the foremost examples of this new style of storytelling through crosscutting (or, intercutting) multiple shots depicting parallel action (Cook, 2004).

Taking this a step further, D.W. Griffith, who was an actor in some of Porter’s films, went on to become one of the most important filmmakers of all time, and truly the “father” of modern narrative form. Technologically and aesthetically, Griffith advanced the art form in ways heretofore unimagined. He altered camera angles, employed close-ups, and actively narrated events, thus shaping audience perceptions of them. Additionally, he employed “parallel editing”—cutting back and forth from two or more simultaneous events taking place in separate locations—to create suspense (Belton, 2013).

Source: Screen capture, M.R. Ogden

Source: Screen capture, M.R. Ogden.

Even though Edison’s Kinetograph camera had produced more than 5,000 films (Freeman, 1998), by 1910, other camera manufacturers such as Bell and Howell, and Pathé (which acquired the Lumière patents in 1902) had invented simpler, lighter, more compact cameras that soon eclipsed the Kinetograph. In fact, “it has been estimated that, before 1918, 60% of all films were shot with a Pathé camera” (Cook, 2004, p. 42).

Nearly all of the cameras of the silent era were hand-cranked. Yet, camera operators were amazingly accurate in maintaining proper film speed (16 fps) and could easily change speeds to suit the story. Cinematographers could crank a little faster (over-crank) to produce slow, lyrical motion, or they could crank a little slower (under-crank) and when projected back at normal speed, they displayed the frenetic, sped-up motion apparent in the silent slapstick comedies of the Keystone Film Company (Cook, 2004).

Source: mitchellcamera.com.

By the mid-1920s, the Mitchell Camera Corporation began manufacturing large, precision cameras that produced steadier images than previously possible. These cameras became the industry standard for almost 30 years until overtaken by Panavision cameras in the 1950s (Freeman, 1998).

In the United States, the early years of commercial cinema were tumultuous as Edison sued individuals and enterprises over patent disputes in an attempt to protect his monopoly and his profits (Neale, 1985). However, by 1908, the film industry was becoming more stabilized as the major film producers “banded together to form the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) which sought to control all aspects of motion picture production, distribution and exhibition” (Belton, 2013, p. 12) through its control of basic motion picture patents.

In an attempt to become more respectable, and to court middle-class customers, the MPPC began a campaign to improve the content of motion pictures by engaging in self-censorship to control potentially offensive content (Belton, 2013). The group also provided half-price matinees for women and children and improved the physical conditions of theaters. Distribution licenses were granted to 116 exchanges that could distribute films only to licensed exhibitors who paid a projection license of two dollars per week.

Unlicensed producers and exchanges continued to be a problem, so in 1910 the MPPC created the General Film Company to distribute their films. This development proved to be highly profitable and “was… the first stage in the organized film industry where production, distribution, and exhibition were all integrated, and in the hands of a few large companies” (Jowett, 1976, p. 34) presaging the emergence of the studio system 10 years later.

The Studio System

For the first two decades of cinema, nearly all films were photographed outdoors. Many production facilities were like that of George Méliès, who constructed a glass-enclosed studio on the grounds of his home in a Paris suburb (Cook, 2004). However, Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, dubbed the “Black Maria,” was probably the most famous film studio of its time. It is important to note that the “film technologies created in [such] laboratories and ateliers would come to offer a powerful system of world building, with the studio as their spatial locus” (Jacobson, 2011, p. 233). Eventually, the industry outgrew these small, improvised facilities and moved to California, where the weather was more conducive to outdoor productions. Large soundstages were also built in order to provide controlled staging and more control over lighting.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

By the second decade of the 20^th Century, dozens of movie studios were operating in the U.S. and across the world. A highly secialized industry grew in southern California, honing sophisticated techniques of cinematography, lighting, and editing. The Hollywood studios divided these activities into preproduction, production, and post-production. During preproduction, a film was written and planned. The production phase was technology intensive, involving the choreography of actors, cameras and lighting equipment. Post-production consisted of editing the films into coherent narratives and adding titles—in fact, film editing is the only art that is unique to cinema.

The heart of American cinema was now beating in Hollywood, and the institutional machinery of filmmaking evolved into a three-phase business structure of production, distribution, and exhibition to get their films from studios to theater audiences. Although the MPPC was formally dissolved in 1918 as a result of an antitrust suit initiated in 1912 (Cook, 2004), powerful new film companies, flush with capital, were emerging. With them came the advent of vertical integration.

Through a series of mergers and acquisitions, formerly independent production, distribution, and exhibition companies congealed into five major studios; Paramount, Metro-Goldwin-Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros, RKO (Radio-Keith-Orpheum), and Fox Pictures. “All of the major studios owned theater chains; the minors—Universal, Columbia, and United Artists—did not” (Belton, 2013, p. 68), but distributed their pictures by special arrangement to the theaters owned by the majors. The resulting economic system was quite efficient. “The major studios produced from 40 to 60 pictures a year… [but in 1945 only] owned 3,000 of the 18,000 theaters around the country. [yet] these theaters generated over 70% of all box-office receipts” (Belton, 2013, p. 69).

As films and their stars increased in popularity, and movies became more expensive to produce, studios began to consolidate their power, seeking to control each phase of a film’s life. However, since the earliest days of the Nickelodeons, moralists and reformers had agitated against the corrupting nature of the movies and their effects on American youth (Cook, 2004). A series of scandals involving popular movie stars in the late 1910s and early 1920s resulted in ministers, priests, women’s clubs, and reform groups across the nation encouraging their membership to boycott the movies.

In 1922, frightened Hollywood producers formed a self-regulatory trade organization—the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA). By 1930, the MPPDA adopted the rather draconian Hayes Production Code. This “voluntary” code, intended to suppress immorality in film, proved mandatory if the film was to be screened in America (Mondello, 2008). Although the code aimed to establish high standards of performance for motion-picture producers, it “merely provided whitewash for overly enthusiastic manifestations of the ‘new morality’ and helped producers subvert the careers of stars whose personal lives might make them too controversial” (Cook, 2004, p. 186).

Sound, Color and Spectacle

Since the advent of cinema, filmmakers hoped for the chance to bring both pictures and sound to the screen. Although the period until the mid-1920s is considered the silent era, few films in major theaters actually were screened completely silent. Pianists or organists—sometimes full orchestras—performed musical accompaniment to the projected images. At times, actors would speak the lines of the characters and machines and performers created sound effects. “What these performances lacked was fully synchronized sound contained within the soundtrack on the film itself” (Freeman, 1998, p. 408).

Source: M.R. Ogden

By the late 1920s, experiments had demonstrated the viability of synchronizing sound with projected film. When Warner Bros Studios released The Jazz Singer in 1927, featuring synchronized dialog and music using their Vitaphone process, the first “talkie” was born. Vitaphone was a sound-on-disc process that issued the audio on a separate 16-inch phonographic disc. While the film was projected, the disc played on a turntable indirectly coupled to the projector motor (Bradley, 2005). Other systems were also under development during this time, and Warner Bros Vitaphone process had competition from Movietone, DeForest Phonofilm, and RCA’s Photophone.

Though audiences were excited by this new novelty, from an aesthetic standpoint, the advent of sound actually took the visual production value of films backward. Film cameras were loud and had to be housed in refrigerator-sized vaults to minimize the noise; as a result, the mobility of the camera was suddenly limited. Microphones had to be placed very near the actors, resulting in restricted blocking and the odd phenomenon of actors leaning close to a bouquet of flowers as they spoke their lines; the flowers, of course, hid the microphone. No question about it, though, sound was here to stay.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Once sound made its appearance, the established major film companies acted cautiously, signing an agreement to only act together. After sound had proved a commercial success, the signatories adopted Movietone as the standard system—a sound-on-film method that recorded sound as a variable-density optical track on the same strip of film that recorded the pictures (Neale, 1985). The advent of the “talkies” launched another round of mergers and expansions in the studio system. By the end of the 1920s, more than 40% of theaters were equipped for sound (Kindersley, 2006), and by 1931, “…virtually all films produced in the United States contained synchronized soundtracks” (Freeman, 1998, p. 408).

Movies were gradually moving closer to depicting “real life.” But life isn’t black and white, and experiments with color filmmaking had been conducted since the dawn of the art form. Finally, however, in 1932, Technicolor introduced a practical three-color dye-transfer process that slowly revolutionized moviemaking and dominated color film production in Hollywood until the 1950s (Higgins, 2000). Though aesthetically beautiful the Technicolor process was extremely expensive, requiring three times the film stock, complicated lab processes, and strict oversight by the Technicolor Company, who insisted on strict secrecy during every phase of production. As a result, most movies were still produced in black and white well into the 1950s; that is, until single-strip Eastman Color Negative Safety Film (5247) and Color Print Film (5281) were released, “revolutionizing the movie industry and forcing Technicolor strictly into the laboratory business” (Bankston, 2005, p. 5).

By the late 1940s, the rising popularity of television and its competition with the movie industry helped drive more changes. The early impetus for widescreen technology was that films were losing money at the box office because of television. In the early years of film, the 4:3 aspect ratio set by Edison (4 units wide by 3 units high, also represented as 1.33:1) was assumed to be more aesthetically pleasing than a square box; it was the most common aspect ratio for most films until the 1960s (Freeman, 1998) and that adopted for broadcast by television until the switch to HDTV in 1998. However, the studios’ response was characteristically cautious, initially choosing to release fewer but more expensive films (still in the standard Academy aspect ratio) hoping to lure audiences back to theaters with quality product (Belton, 2013). However, “[it] was not so much the Hollywood establishment… as the independent producers who engineered a technological revolution that would draw audiences back” (Belton, 2013, p. 327) to the movie theaters.

It was through the efforts of independent filmmakers during the 1950s and early 1960s, that the most pervasive technological innovations in Hollywood since the introduction of sound were realized. “A series of processes changed the size of the screen, the shape of the image, the dimensions of the films, and the recording and reproduction of sound” (Bordwell, Staiger & Thompson, 1985, p. 358).

Cinerama (1952) launched a widescreen revolution that would permanently alter the shape of the motion picture screen. Cinerama was a widescreen process that required filming with a three-lens camera and projecting with synchronized projectors onto a deeply curved screen extending the full width of most movie theaters. This viewing (yielding a 146° by 55° angle of view) was meant to approximate that of human vision (160° by 60°) and fill a viewer’s entire peripheral vision. Mostly used in travelogue-adventures, such as This is Cinerama (1952) and Seven Wonders of the World (1956), the first two Cinerama fiction films—The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm and How the West Was Won—were released in 1962, to much fanfare and critical acclaim. However, three-camera productions and three-projector system theaters like Cinerama and CineMiracle (1957) were extremely expensive technologies and quickly fell into disuse.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Anamorphic processes used special lenses to shoot or print squeezed images onto the film as a wide field of view. In projection, the images were unsqueezed using the same lenses, to produce an aspect ratio of 2.55:1—almost twice as wide as the Academy Standard aspect ratio (Freeman, 1998). When Twentieth Century-Fox released The Robe in 1953 using the CinemaScope anamorphic system, it was a spectacular success and just the boost Hollywood needed. Soon, other companies began producing widescreen films using similar anamorphic processes such as Panascope and Superscope. Nearly all these widescreen systems—including CinemaScope—incorporated stereophonic sound reproduction.

Source: M.R. Ogden

If widescreen films were meant to engulf audiences, pulling them into the action, “3D assaulted audiences—hurling spears, shooting arrows, firing guns, and throwing knives at spectators sitting peacefully in their theatre seats” (Belton, 2013, p. 328).

The technology of 3D is rooted in the basic principles of binocular vision. Early attempts at reproducing monochromatic 3D used an anaglyphic system: two strips of film, one tinted red, the other cyan, were projected simultaneously for an audience wearing glasses with one red and one cyan filtered lens (Cook, 2004). When presented with slightly different angles for each eye, the brain processed the two images as a single 3D image. The earliest 3D film using the anaglyphic process was The Power of Love in 1922.

In the late 1930s, MGM released a series of anaglyphic shorts, but the development of polarized filters and lenses around the same time permitted the production of full-color 3D images. Experiments in anaglyphic films ceased in favor of the new method. In 1953, Milton Gunzberg released Bwana Devil, a “dreadful” film shot using a polarized 3D process called Natural Vision. It drew in audiences and surprisingly broke box office records, grossing over $5 million by the end of its run (Jowett, 1976). Natural Vision employed two interlocked cameras whose lenses were positioned to approximate the distance between the human eyes and record the scene on two separate negatives. In the theater, when projected simultaneously onto the screen, spectators wearing disposable glasses with polarized lenses perceived a single three-dimensional image (Cook, 2004). Warner Bros released the second Natural Vision feature, House of Wax (1953), which featured six-track stereophonic sound and was a critical and popular success, returning $5.5 million on an investment of $680,000 (Cook, 2004). “Within a matter of months after the initial release of Bwana Devil, more than 4,900 theaters were converted to 3D” (Belton, 2013, p. 329).

Although Hollywood produced 69 features in 3D between 1953 and 1954, most were cheaply made exploitation films. By late 1953, the stereoscopic 3D craze had peaked. Two large budget features shot in Natural Vision, MGM’s Kiss Me Kate (1953) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954) were released “flat” because the popularity of 3D had fallen dramatically. Although 3D movies were still made decades later for special short films at Disney theme parks, 3D was no longer part of the feature-film production process (Freeman, 1998). One reason for 3D’s demise was that producers found it difficult to make serious narrative films in such a gimmicky process (Cook, 2004). Another problem was the fact that audiences disliked wearing the polarized glasses; many also complained of eyestrain, headaches and nausea.

But, perhaps, the biggest single factor in 3D’s rapid fall from grace was cinematographers’ and directors’ alternative use of deep-focus widescreen photography—especially anamorphic processes that exploited depth through peripheral vision—and compositional techniques that contributed to the feeling of depth without relying on costly, artificial means. Attempts to revive 3D, until most recently, met with varying degrees of success, seeing short runs of popularity in the 1980s with films like Friday the 13^th, Part III and Jaws 3D (both 1983).

In 1995, with the release of the IMAX 3D film, Wings of Courage—and later, Space Station 3D in 2002—the use of active display LCD glasses synchronized with the shutters of dual-filmstrip projectors using infrared signals presaged the eventual rise of digital 3D films 10 years later.

Hollywood Becomes Independent

“The dismantling of the studio system began just before World War II when the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division filed suit against the [five] major [and three minor] studios, accusing them of monopolistic practices in their use of block booking, blind bidding, and runs, zones, and clearances” (Belton, 2013, p. 82).

In 1948, in the case of U.S. vs. Paramount, the Supreme Court ruled against the block booking system and recommended the breakup of the studio–theater monopolies. The major studios were forced to divorce their operations from one another, separate production and distribution from exhibition, and divest themselves of their theater chains (Belton, 2013). “RKO and other studios sold their film libraries to television stations to offset the losses from the Paramount case. The studios also released actors from contracts who became the new stars of the television world” (Bomboy, 2015). Other factors also contributed to the demise of the studio system, most notably changes in leisure-time entertainment, the aforementioned competition with television, and the rise of independent production (Cook, 2004). Combined with the extreme form of censorship Hollywood imposed upon itself through the Hayes Production Codes—and “after World War II, with competition from TV on the family front, and from foreign films with nudity on the racy front” (Mondello, 2008)—movie studios were unable (or unwilling) to rein in independent filmmakers who chafed under the antiquated Code.

In another landmark ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1952 (also known as the “Miracle decision”) that films constitute “a significant medium of communication of ideas” and were therefore protected by both the First and Fourteenth Amendments (Cook, 2004, p. 428). By the early 1960s, supported by subsequent court rulings, films were “guaranteed full freedom of expression” (Cook, 2004, p. 428). The influence of the Hayes Production Code had all but disappeared by the end of the 1960s, replaced by the MPAA ratings system (MPAA, 2011) instituted in 1968, revised in 1972, and now in its latest incarnation since 1984.

Though the 1960s still featured big-budget, lavish movie spectacles, a parallel movement reflected the younger, more rebellious aesthetic of the “baby boomers.” Actors and directors went into business for themselves, forming their own production companies, and taking as payment lump-sum percentages of the film’s profits (Belton, 2013). The rise and success of independent filmmakers like Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, 1967), Stanley Kubrick (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968), Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, 1969), Dennis Hopper (Easy Rider, 1969), and John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, 1969), demonstrated that filmmakers outside the studio system were freer to experiment with style and content. The writing was on the wall, the major studios would no longer dominate popular filmmaking as they had in the past.

In the early 1960s, an architectural innovation changed the way most people see movies—the move from single-screen theaters (and drive-ins) to multiscreen cineplexes. Although the first multi-screen house with two theaters was built in the 1930s, it was not until the late 1960s that film venues were built with four to six theaters. What these theaters lacked was the atmosphere of the early “movie palaces.” While some owners put effort into the appearance of the lobby and concessions area, in most cases the “actual theater was merely functional” (Haines, 2003, p. 91). The number of screens in one location continued to grow; 1984 marked the opening of the first 18-plex theater in Toronto (Haines, 2003).

The next step in this evolution was the addition of stadium seating—offering moviegoers a better experience by affording more comfortable seating with unobstructed views of the screen (EPS Geofoam, n.d.). Although the number of screens in a location seems to have reached the point of diminishing returns, many theaters are now working on improving the atmosphere they create for their patrons. From bars and restaurants to luxury theaters with a reserved $29 movie ticket, many theater owners are once again working to make the movie-going experience something different from what you can get at home (Gelt & Verrier, 2009).

Multichannel Sound

Sound plays a crucial role in making any movie experience memorable. Perhaps none more so than the 2018 Oscar nominated Dunkirk (2017), in which sound editor Richard King combines the abstract and experimental score of Hans Zimmer with real-world soundscapes to create a rich, dense, and immersive experience (Andersen, 2017). As impressive as it is, Dunkirk “doesn’t break new ground, but the sound design is still impressive, taking full advantage of the powerful subwoofers and speakers in IMAX cinemas” (Hardawar, 2017).

There’s no mistaking the chest-rumbling crescendo associated with THX sound in theaters. It’s nearly as recognizable as its patron’s famous Star Wars theme. Developed by Lucasfilm and named after THX1138 (George Lucas’ 1971 debut feature film), THX is not a cinema sound format, but rather a standardization system that strives to “reproduce the acoustics and ambience of the movie studio, allowing audiences to enjoy a movie’s sound effects, score, dialogue, and visual presentation with the clarity and detail of the final mastering session” (THX, 2016).

At the time of THX’s initial development in the early 1980s, most of the cinemas in the U.S. had not been updated since World War II. Projected images looked shoddy, and the sound was crackly and flat. “All the work and money that Hollywood poured into making movies look and sound amazing was being lost in these dilapidated theaters” (Denison, 2013).

Even if movies were not being screened in THX-certified theaters, the technical standards set by THX illustrated just how good the movie-going experience could be and drove up the quality of projected images and sound in all movie theaters. THX was introduced in 1983 with Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi and quickly spread across the industry. To be a THX Certified Cinema, movie theaters must meet the standards of best practices for architectural design, acoustics, sound isolation and audio-visual equipment performance (THX, 2016). As of mid-2016, self-reported company data states that there are about 4,000 THX certified theaters worldwide (THX, 2016).

While THX set the standards, Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound is one of the leading audio delivery technologies in the cinema industry. In the 1970s, Dolby Laboratories introduced Dolby noise reduction (removing hiss from magnetic and optical tracks) and Dolby Stereo—a highly practical 35mm stereo optical release print format that fit the new multichannel soundtrack into the same space on the print occupied by the traditional mono track (Hull, 1999).

Dolby’s unique quadraphonic matrixed audio technique allows for the encoding of four channels of information (left, center, right and surround) on just two physical tracks on movie prints (Karagosian & Lochen, 2003). The Dolby stereo optical format proved so practical that today there are tens of thousands of cinemas worldwide equipped with Dolby processors, and more than 25,000 movies have been released using the Dolby Stereo format (Hull, 1999).

By the late 1980s, Dolby 5.1 was introduced as the cinematic audio configuration documented by various film industry groups as best satisfying the requirements for theatrical film presentation (Hull, 1999). Dolby 5.1 uses “five discrete full-range channels—left, center, right, left surround, and right surround—plus a… low-frequency [effects] channel” (Dolby, 2010a). Because this low-frequency effects (LFE) channel is felt more than heard, and because it needs only one-tenth the bandwidth of the other five channels, it is refered to as a “.1” channel (Hull, 1999).

Dolby also offers Dolby Digital Surround EX, a technology developed in partnership with Lucasfilm’s THX that places a speaker behind the audience to allow for a “fuller, more realistic sound for increased dramatic effect in the theatre” (Dolby, 2010b).

Dolby Surround 7.1 is the newest cinema audio format developed to provide more depth and realism to the cinema experience. By resurrecting the full range left extra, right extra speakers of the earlier Todd-AO 70mm magnetic format, but now calling them left center and right center, Dolby Surround 7.1 improves the spatial dimension of soundtracks and enhances audio definition thereby providing full-featured audio that better matches the visual impact on the screen.

Film’s Slow Fade to Digital

With the rise of CGI-intensive storylines and a desire to cut costs, celluloid film is quickly becoming an endangered medium for making movies as more filmmakers use digital cinema cameras capable of creating high-quality images without the time, expense, and chemicals required to shoot and process on film. “While the debate has raged over whether or not film is dead, ARRI, Panavision, and Aaton quietly ceased production of film cameras in 2011 to focus exclusively on design and manufacture of digital cameras” (Kaufman, 2011).

But, film is not dead—at least, not yet. Separate from its unlikely continued viability as an exhibition format, 35mm film was used in shooting nearly 100 movies (in whole or in part) in 2015. Steve Bellamy, the president of Motion Picture and Entertainment for Kodak, wrote in an open letter, “There have been so many people instrumental in keeping film healthy and vibrant. Steven Spielberg, JJ Abrams and … [generations] of filmmakers will owe a debt of gratitude to Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino for what they did with the studios. Again, just a banner year for film!” (cited in Fleming Jr., 2016). 35mm is making a comeback as a prestige choice among A-list directors who embrace the medium’s warm natural aesthetic or wish to emulate a period look. With recent efforts by the likes of J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Quentin Tarantino, and Judd Aptow, who lead a group of other passionate film supporters to urge Hollywood to keep film going (Giardiana, 2014), it looks like—for now, anyway—35mm is “still the stock of choice for really huge productions that want to look good and have enough complications (and a big enough budget) that the cost of digital color correction vs. the expense of shooting film no longer becomes a factor” (Rizov, 2015).

“Of course, facts are funny things. Digital cinema has a very short history—Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) was the first full-on 24p [high definition digital] release… and… [10 years later], more than one-third of the films [up for] the industry’s highest honors were shot digitally” (Frazer, 2012). In 2013, only four of the nine films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards were shot on film, and The Wolf of Wall Street was the first to be distributed exclusively digitally (Stray Angel Films, 2014). And the trend toward increasing digital acquisition seems to be continuing. At the 2018 Oscars, of the ten nominations for Best Picture, seven were shot digitally (ARRI Alexa XT and ARRI Mini), including The Shape of Water which won the coveted award. However, the three other nominated films were shot on film. The 2018 Oscar nominations in the technical categories, however, are very good news for ARRI and the Alexa cameras; four of the five films nominated for Best Cinematography were shot using the ARRI Alexa. Only Dunkurk (2017), directed by Christopher Nolan with Dutch cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, was the sole nomination shot using film; 65mm IMAX to be exact (Pennington, 2018). Contrast this with, Blade Runner 2049 (2017), directed by Denis Villeneuve and shot by British cinematographer Roger Deakins, using the ARRI Alexa XT with Zeiss Prime lenses and a large 2.40:1 aspect ratio for the film’s release in IMAX (Pennington, 2018) and you can see that digital cameras can hold their own against the “gold standard” of traditional film.

Although visual aesthetics are important in cinematic storytelling, so is budget. Rachel Morrison, the cinematographer for director Dee Rees’ 1940s period film Mudbound (2017)—and the first female to be nominated in the cinematography category—originally wanted to shoot on celluloid, but budget constraints forced a rethink. Eventually, Morrison used the ARRI Alexa Mini and 50-year old anamorphic lenses to create the vintage look (Pennington, 2018). Digital presents a significant savings for low-budget and independent filmmakers. Production costs using digital cameras and non-linear editing are a fraction of the costs of film production; sometimes as little as a few thousand dollars, and lower negative costs mean a faster track to profitability.

At Sundance 2018, all award-wining fiction films were shot digitally with the dominant camera being the ARRI Alexa or the Alexa Mini followed by the Panasonic VariCam and RED Weapon Helium 8K (O’Falt, 2018a). For Sundance documentaries, given their unique shooting situations, digital was the camera of choice and ranged from iPhones and GoPro action cameras to DSLRs (mostly Canon 5D Mark III), Canon C300, mirrorless Sony A7s, Sony FS7, and the ARRI Amira (O’Falt, 2018b). However, perhaps one of the most innovative films to come out of Sundance, was Sean Baker’s 2015 feature film, Tangerine. The film was full of surprises. As a social realist film, the treatment of its subject matter (transgender prostitutes) raised a few eyebrows. But, perhaps most surprising of all was the fact that the entire film was shot in anamorphic widescreen aspect ratio (2.35:1) using the iPhone 5s (3, in fact), a then $8 app (Filmic Pro), a hand-held Steadicam Smoothee, and a set of prototype lenses from Moondog Labs (Newton, 2015). Although the decision to use the iPhone 5s was initially made as a matter of budget necessity, Baker, and his co-cinematographer Radium Cheung, observed that the mobile phones added considerably to their goal of realism (Thomson, 2015). Sometimes, the best technology for making a film is what you have in your hand!

It is obvious that digital acquisition “offers many economic, environmental, and practical benefits” (Maltz, 2014). For the most part, this transition has been a boon for filmmakers, but as “born digital” productions proliferate, a huge new headache emerges: preservation (Maltz, 2014). This is why the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences sounded a clarion call in 2007 over the issue of digital motion picture data longevity in the major Hollywood studios. In their report, titled The Digital Dilemma, the Academy concluded that, although digital technologies provide tremendous benefits, they do not guarantee long-term access to digital data compared to traditional filmmaking using motion picture film stock. Digital technologies make it easier to create motion pictures, but the resulting digital data is much harder to preserve (Science & Technology Council, 2007).

The Digital Dilemma 2, the Academy’s 2012 update to this initial examination of digital media archiving, focused on the new challenge of maintaining long-term archives of digitally originated features created by the burgeoning numbers of independent and documentary filmmakers (Science & Technology Council, 2012). Digital preservation issues notwithstanding, film preservation has always been of concern. According to the Library of Congress Film Preservation Study, less than half of the feature films made in the United States before 1950 and less than 20 percent from the 1920s are still around. Even films made after 1950 face danger from threats such as color-fading, vinegar syndrome, shrinkage, and soundtrack deterioration (Melville & Simmon, 1993). However, the “ephemeral” nature of digital material means that “digital decay” is as much a threat to films that were “born digital” as time and the elements are to nitrate and celluloid films of the past. The good news is that there is a lot of work being done to raise awareness of the risk of digital decay generally and to try to reduce its occurrence (Maltz, 2014). Among the things discovered from exploring issues surrounding digital preservation is “the crucial role of metadata for maintaining long-term access to digital materials… [The] information that gets stored needs to include a description of its contents, its format, what hardware and software were used to create it, how it was encoded, and other detailed ‘data about the data.’ And digital data needs to be managed forever” (Maltz, 2014).

Along with digital acquisition technology, new digital distribution platforms have emerged making it easier for independent filmmakers to connect their films with target audiences and revenue streams (through video-on-demand, pay-per-view, and online distribution). However, these platforms have not yet proven themselves when it comes to archiving and preservation (Science & Technology Council, 2012). “Unless an independent film is picked up by a major studio’s distribution arm, its path to an audiovisual archive is uncertain. If a filmmaker’s digital work doesn’t make it to such a preservation environment, its lifespan will be limited—as will its revenue-generating potential and its ability to enjoy the full measure of U.S. copyright protection” (Science & Technology Council, 2012, p. 6). For now, at least, the “digital dilemma” seems far from over.

As physical film acquisition yields to digital recording, so too has film editing made the digital shift.

With digital cinema cameras like the ARRI Alexa and the RED cameras coming into more common use, and the advanced, computer-based non-linear editing systems having the capability of working with the digital footage at full resolution; it is now possible to shoot, edit, and project a movie without ever having to leave the digital environment.

Digital 3D

The first digital 3D film released was Disney’s Chicken Little, shown on Disney Digital 3D (PR Newswire, 2005). Dolby Laboratories outfitted about 100 theaters in the 25 top markets with Dolby Digital Cinema systems in order to screen the film. The idea of actually shooting live-action movies in digital 3D did not become a reality until the creation of the Fusion Camera, a collaborative invention by director James Cameron and Vince Pace (Hollywood Reporter, 2005). The camera “fuses” two Sony HDC-F950 HD cameras “2½ inches apart to mimic the stereoscopic separation of human eyes” (Thompson, 2010). The camera was used to film 2008’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and 2010’s Tron Legacy.

Cameron used a modified version of the Fusion Camera to shoot 2009’s blockbuster Avatar. The altered Fusion allows the “director to view actors within a computer-generated virtual environment, even as they are working on a ‘performance-capture’ set that may have little apparent relationship to what appears on the screen” (Cieply, 2010).

Source: CAMERON|PACE Group

Photo credit: Marissa Roth

Another breakthrough technology born from Avatar is the swing camera. For a largely animated world such as the one portrayed in the film, the actors must perform through a process called motion capture which records 360 degrees of a performance, but with the added disadvantage that the actors do not know where the camera will be (Thompson, 2010). Likewise, in the past, the director had to choose the shots desired once the filming was completed. Cameron tasked virtual-production supervisor Glenn Derry with creating the swing camera, which “has no lens at all, only an LCD screen and markers that record its position and orientation within the volume [the physical set space] relative to the actors” (Thompson, 2010). An effects switcher feeds back low-resolution CG images of the virtual world to the swing camera allowing the director to move around shooting the actors photographically or even capturing other camera angles on the empty stage as the footage plays back (Thompson, 2010).

When Hollywood studio executives saw the $2.8 billion worldwide gross receipts for Avatar (2009), they took notice of the film’s ground-breaking use of 3D technology; and when Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland—originally shot in 2D—had box office receipts reach $1 billion thanks to 3D conversion and audiences willing to pay an extra $3.50 “premium” upcharge for a 3D experience, the film industry decided that 3D was going to be their savior. Fox, Paramount, Disney, and Universal collectively shelled out $700 million to help equip theaters with new projectors, and the number of 3D releases jumped from 20 in 2009 to 45 in 2011. However, there was a slight drop to 41 in 2012, that fell further to only 35 in 2013 (Movie Insider, 2014a & 2014b respectively), and 3D releases for 2014 topped out at only 39 films while 2015 saw a sharp decline with only 28 3D releases that year (Box Office Mojo, 2017c). 2016 and 2017 saw a slight up-tick in 3D releases (35 and 34, respectively), and projected 3D film releases for 2018-2019 presently total 27, (Box Office Mojo, 2017c).

What accounts for this up and down—but, mostly down—cycle in 3D film releases? Does the success of landmark 3D films like Avatar (2009), Hugo (2011), Gravity (2013), The Martian (2015), and Disney’s 3D release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), represent true innovations in cinematic storytelling, or has 3D been subsumed by moneymaking gimmickry? Perhaps, the answer draws from both perspectives. “Some movies use the technology to create more wonderfully immersive scenes, but others do little with the technology or even make a movie worse.” (Lubin, 2014). In part, it could also be that the novelty has worn off with film audiences tired of having their expectations go unfulfilled. Citing the analysis of 1,000 random moviegoers’ Tweets, Phillip Agnew, an analyst with Brandwatch (a social media monitoring and analytics company), observed that, “Before taking their seats, the majority of cinema goers [600 out of 1,000] were positive about 3D films” (Agnew, 2015). However, comments made after screening the 3D movie showed that viewers were mostly disappointed. “Positive mentions decreased by 50%, whilst the amount of negative mentions more than doubled. Consumers expecting to see the ‘future of cinema’ were instead paying more for a blurrier viewing experience, and in many cases, headaches” (Agnew, 2015). Likewise, moviegoers may have tired of paying the hefty surcharge for 3D films that failed to meet their expectations. The latter could be the result of studios rushing post-production conversions of 2D films into 3D resulting in inferior products.

Digital Theater Conversions

In 1999, Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace was the first feature film projected digitally in a commercial cinema—although there were very few theaters capable of digital projection at the time.

January 2012, marked the film industry’s crossover point when digital theater projection surpassed 35mm. Nearly 90,000 movie theaters were converted to digital by the end of 2012 (Hancock, 2014).

By 2014, Denmark, Hong Kong, Luxembourg, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada, and South Korea had achieved nearly full digital conversion. Meanwhile, Belgium, Finland, France, Indonesia, Switzerland, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S. are all well above 90 percent penetration for digital screens, while China accounted for over half of the 32,642 digital theater screens in the Asia-Pacific region (Hancock, 2014).

Australia, Singapore and Malaysia reported having achieved near 100 percent digitization in 2015, leaving South America as the only region lagging behind the rest of the world (Sohail, 2015).

The Motion Picture Association of America’s Theatrical Market Statistics 2016 report, observed that, in 2016, the number of digital screens in the United States now account for 98 percent of all US screens and the number of 3D screens increased two percent from 2015 (MPAA, 2017). Interestingly, analog screens were also up by 18 percent between 2015-2016 (MPAA, 2017), perhaps reflecting a resurgence in niche “art house” screenings of “classic” films. Continued rapid growth in global digital cinema conversion is still due in large measure to double digit growth in the Asia Pacific region (over 18 percent) with China accounting for 10 percent of the growth (MPAA, 2017). It appears that this slightly slower rate of digital screen proliferation than past years could be reaching its limit due to market penetration (MPAA, 2017).

Roger Frazee, Regal Theater’s Vice President of Technical Services, having observed the changes, stated, “Films are now 200-gigabyte hard drives, and projectors are those big electronic machines in the corridor capable of working at multiple frame rates, transmitting closed-captioned subtitles and being monitored remotely. The benefit of digital is, you don’t have damaged film. You don’t have scratched prints, and it looks as good in week six as it does on day one” (cited in Leopold, 2013).

But, the global digital theater conversion is approaches it’s endgame, as the MPAA reports, “Today, 95 percent of the world’s cinema screens are digital, up [nearly] two percentage points from 2015” (2017, P. 8). So now exhibitors and technology manufacturers have turned their attention to the developing other technologies that can enhance the audience experience, drive innovation, and—hopefully—new revenues. the most visible (and audible) technologies being explored include laser projection and immersive audio (Hancock, 2015a).