Film

An animated GIF of a photographic sequence shot by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887. His chronophotographic works can be regarded as movies recorded before there was a proper way to replay the material in motion.

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**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 filmmakingand 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 CGIand 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 (a graphic recording of the spoken words, music and other sounds that accompany the images which runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and is not projected).

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures. They reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment, and a powerful medium for educating—or indoctrinating—citizens. The visual basis of film gives it a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions through the use of dubbing or subtitles to translate the dialog into other languages.

The individual images that make up a film are called frames. In the projection of traditional celluloid films, a rotating shutter causes intervals of darkness as each frame, in turn, is moved into position to be projected, but the viewer does not notice the interruptions because of an effect known as persistence of vision, whereby the eye retains a visual image for a fraction of a second after its source disappears. The perception of motion is partly due to a psychological effect called the phi phenomenon.

The name "film" originates from the fact that photographic film (also called film stock) has historically been the medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including *picture*, *picture show*, *moving picture*, *photoplay*, and *flick*. The most common term in the United Statesis *movie*, while in Europe *film* is preferred. Common terms for the field in general include *the big screen*, *the silver screen*, *the movies*, and *cinema*; the last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and critical essays. In early years, the word *sheet* was sometimes used instead of *screen*.

## Contents

* 1History
	+ 1.1Precursors
	+ 1.2Before celluloid
	+ 1.3First motion pictures
	+ 1.4Early evolution
	+ 1.5Sound
	+ 1.6Color
	+ 1.71950s: growing influence of television
	+ 1.81960s and later
* 2Film theory
	+ 2.1Language
	+ 2.2Montage
	+ 2.3Film criticism
* 3Industry
* 4Associated fields
* 5Terminology
	+ 5.1Preview
	+ 5.2Trailer and teaser
* 6Education and propaganda
* 7Production
	+ 7.1Crew
	+ 7.2Technology
	+ 7.3Independent
	+ 7.4Open content film
	+ 7.5Fan film
* 8Distribution
* 9Animation
* 10See also
* 11Notes
* 12References
* 13Further reading
* 14External links

## History

Main articles: History of film technology and History of film

Main article: Precursors of film
A frame from *Roundhay Garden Scene*, the world's earliest surviving film produced using a motion picture camera, by Louis Le Prince, 1888.

The Berlin Wintergarten theatre was the site of the first cinema ever, with a short film presented by the Skladanowsky brothers on 1 November 1895. (Pictured here is a variety show at the theater in July 1940.)

### Precursors

The art of film has drawn on several earlier traditions in fields such as oral storytelling, literature, theatre and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainment that had already featured moving and/or projected images include:

* shadowgraphy, probably used since prehistoric times
* camera obscura, a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic aid since prehistoric times
* shadow puppetry, possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India, Indonesia or China
* magic lantern, developed in the 1650s, also used in the multi-media phantasmagoria shows that were popular from 1790 throughout the first half of the 19th century and could feature mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile projectors, superimposition, dissolving views, live actors, smoke (sometimes to project images upon), odors, sounds and even electric shocks.

### Before celluloid

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.
A famous shot from Georges Méliès*Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon)* (1902), an early narrative filmand also an early science fiction film.

### First motion pictures

By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph an indefinitely long rapid sequence of images using only one lens, allowed several minutes of action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film. Some early films were made to be viewed by one person at a time through a "peep show" device such as the Kinetoscope and the mutoscope. Others were intended for a projector, mechanically similar to the camera and sometimes actually the same machine, which was used to shine an intense light through the processed and printed film and into a projection lens so that these "moving pictures" could be shown tremendously enlarged on a screen for viewing by an entire audience. The first kinetoscope film shown in public exhibition was Blacksmith Scene, produced by Edison Manufacturing Company in 1893. The following year the company would begin Edison Studios, which became an early leader in the film industry with notable early shorts including *The Kiss*, and would go on to produce close to 1,200 films.

The first public screenings of films at which admission was charged were made in 1895 by the American Woodville Latham and his sons, using films produced by their Eidoloscope company, and by the – arguably better known – French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière with ten of their own productions.[*citation needed*] Private screenings had preceded these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the Lumière brothers'.[*citation needed*]