(40) Students’ Corner
J. V. Vil’anilam
The Audiovisual Media: Film Cinema was the first modern means of mass communication, but it all began with photography
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ll media can be divided into three (or four) categories: (a) Traditional media, such as the semaphore and stage performances; (b) written and printed media, such as manuscript and mimeographed (cyclostyled) newspapers, mechanically printed newspapers, leaflets, pamphlets, books, and magazines; (c) electronic media, particularly, the audiovisual media, including photography, gramophone records, telegraph, telephone, radio, film, television (TV), record players, audio and video tapes, the Internet and e-mail, and mobile phone; and now (d) social media, including blogs and tweets sent with the help of electronic devices. All audio and visual devices originated around the latter half of the 19th century, but important developments occurred in the 20th century. The electronic media paved the way to what is now correctly or incorrectly known as the social media. (Many consider it a misnomer as they see it as an extension of the electronic media.)
The Cinema
The word ‘cinema’ has come from the cinematographe, the motion picture camera and projector system used by the Lumiere brothers in France in March 1895. The cinema has other names too: film, motion picture, and movies, all indicating
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photography and movement.1 Scientists and inventors in various countries worked in the last decades of the 19th century for developing the various scientific aspects of ‘light-writing’ (that is the literal meaning of photography). There are at least six inventors associated with photography and film: Etienne Jules Marey (France), Edward Muybridge (United States), Auguste and Louis Lumiere (France), and colleagues Thomas Alva Edison and K. L. Dickson (both in the United States). All these outstanding people started as ‘image-catchers’ first and then ‘image-movers,’ and all of them worked in the last decades of the 19th century. The Lumiere brothers started exhibiting moving pictures in Paris; their inaugural show was on 28 November 1895. They were the first to show the cinema in India—their first show was at the Watson Hotel in Bombay (Mumbai) on 7 July 1896, that is, six months after their first show in Paris. Although these early cinema shows were just images of moving pictures—’a train arriving on the platform’, or ‘people coming out of a factory’—they show how anything moving on the screen was a big fascination for viewers whether in Paris, New York, or Mumbai. These facts also show that the motion picture in India is
as old as that in Europe or in the United States. In a way, the cinema is the first modern means of mass communication because it can reach hundreds or thousands of people at the same time through cinema halls in different locations. Many millions would have watched a movie in six months or a year. But let us not forget that it all began with photography. The capturing of images on a permanent or semi-permanent basis was the first step. This was accomplished by another Frenchman, Joseph Niepce. A series of developments in physics and the science of light, and several chemicals helped him in this. Pioneers in physical and chemical sciences helped in ‘fixing’ the images captured by photographers. Over a long period and through time-consuming and frequent experiments in viewing through the camera, adjusting the positions of the shooter and the object shot, and the fixing of the images captured, the pioneers arrived at suitable chemicals, exposure time, and the quantity of light on the object. The third quarter of the 19th century saw great photographic enterprises and great photographers, such as Mathew Brady who captured historically important events (the Civil War in the United States and the Crimean War). Towards the end of the 19th century, George Eastman