The syndicate of Maguire and Baucus acquired the foreign rights to the Kinetoscope in 1894 and began to market the machines. Edison opted not to file for international patents on either his camera or his viewing device, and, as a result, the machines were widely and legally copied throughout Europe, where they were modified and improved far beyond the American originals. In fact, it was a Kinetoscope exhibition in Paris that inspired the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, to invent the first commercially viable projector. Their cinématographe, which functioned as a camera and printer as well as a projector, ran at the economical speed of 16 frames per second. It was given its first commercial demonstration on Dec. 28, 1895.
Unlike the Kinetograph, which was battery-driven and weighed more than 1,000 pounds (453 kg), the cinématographe was hand-cranked, lightweight (less than 20 pounds [9 kg]), and relatively portable. This naturally affected the kinds of films that were made with each machine: Edison films initially featured material such as circus or vaudeville acts that could be taken into a small studio to perform before an inert camera, while early Lumière films were mainly documentary views, or “actualities,” shot outdoors on location. In both cases, however, the films themselves were composed of a single unedited shot emphasizing lifelike movement; they contained little or no narrative content. (After a few years design changes in the machines made it possible for Edison and the Lumières to shoot the same kinds of subjects.) In general, Lumière technology became the European standard during the early primitive era, and, because the Lumières sent their cameramen all over the world in search of exotic subjects, the cinématographe became the founding instrument of distant cinemas in Russia, Australia, and Japan.
In the United States the Kinetoscope installation business had reached the saturation point by the summer of 1895, although it was still quite profitable for Edison as a supplier of films. Raff and Gammon persuaded Edison to buy the rights to a state-of-the-art projector, developed by Thomas Armat of Washington, D.C., which incorporated a superior intermittent movement mechanism and a loop-forming device (known as the Latham loop, after its earliest promoters, Grey Latham and Otway Latham) to reduce film breakage, and in early 1896 Edison began to manufacture and market this machine as his own invention. Given its first public demonstration on April 23, 1896, at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City, the Edison Vitascope brought projection to the United States and established the format for American film exhibition for the next several years. It also encouraged the activities of such successful Edison rivals as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which was formed in 1896 to exploit the Mutoscope peep-show device and the American Biograph camera and projector patented by W.K.L. Dickson in 1896. During this time, which has been characterized as the “novelty period,” emphasis fell on the projection device itself, and films achieved their main popularity as self-contained vaudeville attractions. Vaudeville houses, locked in intense competition at the turn of the century, headlined the name of the machines rather than the films (e.g., “The Vitascope—Edison’s Latest Marvel,” “The Amazing Cinématographe”). The producer, or manufacturer, supplied projectors along with an operator and a program of shorts. These films, whether they were Edison-style theatrical variety shorts or Lumière-style actualities, were perceived by their original audiences not as motion pictures in the modern sense of the term but as “animated photographs” or “living pictures,” emphasizing their continuity with more familiar media of the time.
During the novelty period, the film industry was autonomous and unitary, with production companies leasing a complete film service of projector, operator, and shorts to the vaudeville market as a single, self-contained act. Starting about 1897, however, manufacturers began to sell both projectors and films to itinerant exhibitors who traveled with their programs from one temporary location (vaudeville theatres, fairgrounds, circus tents, lyceums) to another as the novelty of their films wore off at a given site. This new mode of screening by circuit marked the first separation of exhibition from production and gave the exhibitors a large measure of control over early film form, since they were responsible for arranging the one-shot films purchased from the producers into audience-pleasing programs. The putting together of these programs—which often involved narration, sound effects, and music—was in effect a primitive form of editing, so that it is possible to regard the itinerant projectionists working between 1896 and 1904 as the earliest directors of motion pictures. Several of them, notably Edwin S. Porter, were, in fact, hired as directors by production companies after the industry stabilized in the first decade of the 20th century.
By encouraging the practice of peripatetic exhibition, the American producers’ policy of outright sales inhibited the development of permanent film theatres in the United States until nearly a decade after their appearance in Europe, where England and France had taken an early lead in both production and exhibition. Britain’s first projector, the theatrograph (later the animatograph), had been demonstrated in 1896 by the scientific-instrument maker Robert W. Paul. In 1899 Paul formed his own production company for the manufacture of actualities and trick films, and until 1905 Paul’s Animatograph Works, Ltd., was England’s largest producer, turning out an average of 50 films per year. Between 1896 and 1898, two Brighton photographers, George Albert Smith and James Williamson, constructed their own motion-picture cameras and began producing trick films featuring superimpositions (The Corsican Brothers, 1897) and interpolated close-ups (Grandma’s Reading Glass, 1900; The Big Swallow, 1901). Smith subsequently developed the first commercially successful photographic colour process (Kinemacolor, c. 1906–08, with Charles Urban), while Williamson experimented with parallel editing as early as 1900 (Attack on a Chinese Mission Station) and became a pioneer of the chase film (Stop Thief!, 1901; Fire!, 1901). Both Smith and Williamson had built studios at Brighton by 1902 and, with their associates, came to be known as members of the “Brighton school,” although they did not represent a coherent movement. Another important early British filmmaker was Cecil Hepworth, whose Rescued by Rover (1905) is regarded by many historians as the most skillfully edited narrative produced before the Biograph shorts of D.W. Griffith. Méliès and Porter
The shift in consciousness away from films as animated photographs to films as stories, or narratives, began to take place about the turn of the century and is most evident in the work of the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Méliès was a professional magician who had become interested in the illusionist possibilities of the cinématographe; when the Lumières refused to sell him one, he bought an animatograph projector from Paul in 1896 and reversed its mechanical principles to design his own camera. The following year he organized the Star Film company and constructed a small glass-enclosed studio on the grounds of his house at Montreuil, where he produced, directed, photographed, and acted in more than 500 films between 1896 and 1913.