Dialogue Editing

6 NO ONE WORKS IN A VACUUM
demonstrate his tinfoil phonograph, 1 a bitter war of innovation, patent fi ghts,
and downright thievery was raging in Europe and the United States to come
up with methods of photographing and projecting moving pictures. Most
initial attempts at displaying motion were inspired by Victorian parlor toys
like the Phenakistoscope and later the Zoetrope (a spinning slotted cylinder
that contained a series of photographs or drawings); a strobe effect gave
the impression of motion when the pictures were viewed through the slots.
Enjoyable though those gadgets were, they weren’t viable ways to fi lm and
project real life.
Auguste and Louis Lumière’s public screening of La sortie des ouvriers de
l’usine Lumière in 1895 is generally acclaimed as the “birth of cinema,” but,
then, Christopher Columbus is credited with discovering America. Believe
what you will. La sortie des ouvriers, about a minute long, was a static shot of
workers leaving the Lumière plant. Was this really the fi rst fi lm to be shown?
Of course not. As early as 1888, Augustin Le Prince was able to fi lm and
project motion pictures. And Edison, who long claimed to be the inventor of
cinema, was making movies in 1892.
Since 1892, Birt Acres and Léon Bouly had been independently improving
their motion picture systems and their movies. But Bouly couldn’t pay the
yearly patent fees for his invention and his license expired, while Acres
proved a prodigious inventor and fi lmmaker but managed to slip into relative
obscurity. Meanwhile, Antoine Lumière, father of Auguste and Louis, more
or less copied Edison’s Kinetoscope while taking advantage of Bouly’s lapsed
patent. The offspring of this effort was the Lumière Cinématographe, 2 a camera,
projector, and fi lmprinter all rolled into one. The brothers Lumière shot
and commercially distributed numerous short actualités, including l’Arrivée
d’un train en gare (Arrival of a Train at a Station) and Déjeuner de bébé (Baby’s
Lunch).
In all fairness, the Lumière family had more going for them than just sharp
elbows. By 1895, the world was evidently ready to pay money to see factory
workers leaving work or a train arriving at a station. Plus, the Cinématographe
was startlingly lightweight and portable compared to its behemoth
competitors.
1 Biographies of Thomas Edison aren’t hard to come by, but a rich and simple source of
Edison history and archival material is the U.S. Library of Congress web site, which has a
section devoted to him. Edison phonograph sound clips and movie excerpts are available,
as are countless historical documents (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edhome.html).
2 Tjitte de Vries. “The Cinématographe Lumière: A Myth?” Photohistorical Magazine of the
Photographic Society of The Netherlands (1995, http://www.xs4all.nl/~wichm/myth.html).