The day was dedicated to world cinema by Prof. Rashmi Doraiswamy from Academy of Third World Studies at Jamia Milia Islamia and Kaushik Bhowmik, senior vice President at Osian. Kaushik talked about the evolution of cinema while Prof. Rashmi explained German Expressionism and Soviet cinema.
How did moving images become the feature films of today?
It started in the late nineteenth century with trials to make images move. Then there came one-shot films, one reelers, serials and finally feature films. The first one-shot video was produced in 1878. But history will remember Lumiere Brothers, who were the people who carried cinema to the whole world in the form of one-shot videos. Technicalities like how many frames in one second were still being understood then. So their clips that I saw today felt like fast-forward motions. E.g.a baby being spoon-fed at a fast pace but the mother eats her food normally or a poker game at top speed. Theirs was a time when colonialisation and modernisation had opened up new markets and steamships had made travel convenient. Journeys were no longer perilous, long drawn out affairs on camels and mules. This era of cinema was bazaar cinema. Cinema was one more attraction at fairs and festivals besides the three legged dog. Videos were produced and consumed very quickly. You just had to shoot it on the cinematograph, develop it and show it on the same cinematograph. It was rudimentary and it was clunky, but it was the origin of cinema.
Another genre of one-shots was of Georges Melies. Melies didn’t just capture movement like the Leimere Brothers, his videos had apparitions and disapperances. I was struck by the kind of multiple special effects present when computers were 30 years from discovery. So he basically captured the plays on stage which had advance magic-like special effects, a rage in France at that time. Cuts and editing were yet to be discovered.
When multiple shots could be juxtaposed, the era of one-reelers developed. The 1910s were
Charlie Chaplin’s golden period. Max Linder was his contemporary. Then came slapstick but more action comedy of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Another use of one-reelers was in suspense serials. A famous one is crime film serial Fantomas in 1913, directed by Louis Feuillade, based on the novel of the same name. The basic genres of cinema were comedy and thrill, popular even today. Literary cinema was invented by Griffith who made Birth of a Nation. All this so far was the era of silent cinema. The talkies came in 1927. And from then, it has gone on a journey throughout the world, mutating and evolving into what it is today.Prof. Rashmi Doraiswamy taught two early film movements today and will be covering Italian Neorealism and French New Wave Cinema tomorrow. In case you missed my previous posts about Young India Fellowship, click on this link and scroll down. http://lekhika-devu.blogspot.in/search/label/YIFP
Do svidaniya! Bis morgen!
Quite info loaded sessions at YIFP i see! must have been enlivening :) Lumiere brothers were being closely rivaled by a German family, excellently documented in 'A Trick of the Light'
ReplyDeleteYou can also watch the recent movie Hugo, revolving around a kid and Georges Melies.