An esteemed film industry expert offers his own list of the most influential technical developments of the 20th Century, and explains how they advanced the art of cinematography.
by A personal survey by David Samuelson
We film technicians are lucky people. We work in a field that has transformed the way humanity sees the world. What's more, we work in a technical environment that embraces and reflects the changing world around it.
There is always a tendency, in any generation, to look at the newest and latest developments as being the best and greatest of all time. Old-timers like me often smile, admire these innovations, and say, "What will they think of next?" However, age and experience tell us that yesterday's miracles will surely become today's so-whats, and be replaced by tomorrow's miracles, whatever they may be.
For a long time, I have had the notion that since the beginnings of cinematography, there have probably been only 20 or 30 basic inventions that qualify as genuinely momentous developments that forever changed the way films are made.
To be considered for my list, an invention has to be totally original — not a development or an improvement of something that has come before. Also, it can't be just an idea. Secondly, the invention must advance the way a script is interpreted on the screen, and, in cinematographic terms, allow the creation of images that were previously not possible. Thirdly, it should appear to our current belief and experience that, although the technology may have been improved upon, the basic concept is likely to be in use for as long as cinematography itself lasts. Lastly, the invention must be serially manufactured and available to all filmmakers around the world, and not just a one-off to serve a particular purpose on a particular production before being discarded and forgotten until it is reinvented in a more universal form.
Before the end of the last century, the basic inventions in cinematography were transparent film base, light-sensitive photographic emulsions, the intermittent motion picture camera, the film printer, and the intermittent motion picture projector. These five separate inventions combined gave us "cinema" as we know it today.
Perhaps the first important invention after the intermittent film camera itself was the use of top and bottom film loops, without which it was not possible to pull much more than 100' (about two minutes) of film off a roll without tearing the perforations. At the time, the loop made it possible to film an entire boxing bout without tearing the film halfway through the first round. For the filmmakers of the time, it was as big a breakthrough as anything that has happened since.
Woodville Latham of the U.S. is usually credited as registering the original patent of the film loop in 1896, but according to a sworn statement by Laurie Dickson (who was the actual inventor of Thomas Edison's intermittent camera in 1892), Eugene Lauste pioneered the loop in 1895 when he invented the Eidoloscope, the first wide-film projector.
The next really important development was the standardization of film emulsion design: the sizes and positions of the perforations, the size and shape of the image area and the position of the frame line in relation to the perforations. The early situation was well summed up in "ABC of the Cinematograph," by Cecil T Hepworth, who wrote in 1897, "I have said that the pictures on films supplied by different makers vary slightly in height, and it follows, therefore, that there must be a slight difference in the distance apart of the perforations, seeing that there are always four holes to a picture. Thus, if you hold up to the light, one on top of the other, two films by different makers, you will rarely see that the rows of holes will exactly correspond for more than a short distance. Sometimes the difference is noticeable in a couple of inches; in others, the holes may seem to correspond for a foot or more."
The perforator that punched four holes at a time — and also incorporated a register pin to locate the film relative to the position of one of the previous set of holes before punching the next set — was enormously important. Each frame was pulled down to the same place relative to one particular perforation of the previous four, making in-camera double exposures possible — the first "special effects." We should be eternally grateful for the pioneering work of Albert Howell of Bell & Howell, for the standardization work and eternal diligence of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (now the SMPTE) and to other standards organizations and manufacturers throughout the world for making it possible to hold together any two pieces of film, from anywhere in the world, and ensure that they will always coincide.
During the first quarter of the 20th Century, the most important invention was photographic/optical sound, via which the soundtrack was firmly attached to the image so that the two would stay in sync. Eugene Lauste, working in the U.K. in 1906, was the first to patent such a system. He went to America in 1911 to give the first demonstration there of a combined sound-on-film recording and reproduction system. Like so many great inventors, he ran out of money before he could commercialize the project; in 1923, the undertaking fell to Lee De Forest, of Bell Telephone Laboratories in the U.S., to produce the first photo/optical system that was readily available to all. A number of films with sound content were made after 1925 using both photographic sound-on-film recording systems and any of the many gramophone-disk systems that then existed. However, it was not until the 1927 showing of The Jazz Singer, which used the Vitaphone sound-on-disk system, that "talkies" really caught the public's imagination. It was a year later that photographic sound-on-film became the norm.
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