|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
Technology, Technology
| Article
# : |
15489 |
|
|
Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1989 |
2,670 Words |
| Author
: |
David D''Arcy
David D'Arcy broadcasts on cultural matters on National Public
Radio. |
Even in an era where machines govern the work place of art, where writers have become slaves to world processors, and computers plot the structure of stage lighting in the theater, film is the medium where technology dominates most. It fact, to say that film depends more on technology than any other medium is so easy to prove, it's a banality.
It is obviously difficult for anyone living now to remember that the original fascination with movies arose from the novel experience of seeing pictures move. A recent exhibition called Masterpieces of Moving Image technology at the America Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, showed how, in 1888, Thomas Edison had set out to create "an instrument that does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear." That led to the building of the first kinetograph camera by one of Edison's engineers in 1891. The device used celluloid film and photographed circular images one-half inch in diameter on perforated, flexible strips of films that moved horizontally through a mechanized sprocket system.
A few years later, a film exhibition technology was already in place. Edison introduced the kinetoscope, an early "peep show viewer" capable of presenting half-minute film shows. Edison sold the machines on a territory basis to showmen who installed them in arcades and kinetoscope parlors in all the major cities of the United States and Europe.
From the 1890s, when movie projection was first accomplished, to the early 1930s, when studios finally became comfortable using sound, the movie business was essentially driven by developments in technology to the point where the narrative Hollywood commercial
... (1995 of 16111 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
