page_title: Film
section_title: Before celluloid
hierarchical_section_title: Film / History / Before celluloid
caption_attribution_description: English: Screenshot from Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) Português: Uma cena do filme francês "Viagem à Lua", de 1902.
context_page_description: Film, also called movie, motion picture or moving picture, is a visual art-form used to simulate experiences that communicate ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images. These images are generally accompanied by sound, and more rarely, other sensory stimulations. The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.
  The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques, by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these techniques, and other visual effects.
  Traditionally, films were recorded onto celluloid film stock through a photochemical process and then shown through a movie projector onto a large screen. Contemporary films are often fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution, and exhibition, while films recorded in a photochemical form traditionally included an analogous optical soundtrack.
context_section_description: The stroboscopic animation principle was introduced in 1833 with the phénakisticope and also applied in the zoetrope since 1866, the flip book since 1868, and the praxinoscope since 1877, before it became the basic principle for cinematography.
  Experiments with early phenakisticope-based animation projectors were made at least as early as 1843. Jules Duboscq marketed phénakisticope projection systems in France between 1853 and the 1890s.
  Photography was introduced in 1839, but at first photographic emulsions needed such long exposures that the recording of moving subjects seemed impossible. At least as early as 1844, photographic series of subjects posed in different positions have been created to either suggest a motion sequence or to document a range of different viewing angles. The advent of stereoscopic photography, with early experiments in the 1840s and commercial success since the early 1850s, raised interest in completing the photographic medium with the addition of means to capture colour and motion. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published about the idea to combine his invention of the phénakisticope with the stereoscope, as suggested to him by stereoscope inventor Charles Wheatstone, and use photographs of plaster sculptures in different positions to be animated in the combined device. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented such an instrument as the "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope". He marginally advertised it for a short period. It was a commercial failure and no complete instrument has yet been located, but one bioscope disc has been preserved in the Plateau collection of the Ghent University. It has stereoscopic photographs of a machine. 
  By the late 1850s the first examples of instantaneous photography came about and provided hope that motion photography would soon be possible, but it took a few decades before it was successfully combined with a method to record series of sequential images in real-time. In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge eventually managed to take a series of photographs of a running horse with a battery of cameras in a line along the track and published the results as The Horse in Motion on cabinet cards. Muybridge, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschütz and many others would create many more chronophotography studies. Muybridge had the contours of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with his zoopraxiscope in his lectures from 1880 to 1895. Anschütz developed his own Electrotachyscope in 1887 to project 24 diapositive photographic images on glass disks as moving images, looped as long as deemed interesting for the audience.
  Émile Reynaud already mentioned the possibility of projecting the images in his 1877 patent application for the praxinoscope. He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société française de photographie on 4 June 1880, but did not market his praxinoscope a projection before 1882. He then further developed the device into the Théâtre Optique which could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, patented in 1888. He created several movies for the machine by painting images on hundreds of gelatin plates that were mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. From 28 October 1892 to March 1900 Reynaud gave over 12,800 shows to a total of over 500,000 visitors at the Musée Grévin in Paris.
caption: A famous shot from Georges Méliès Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902), an early narrative film and also an early science fiction film.
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