5 - The emergence of cinema

Summary

This chapter investigates the emergence of cinema from the world of live entertainment as analysed in the preceding part. It examines the pictures' technological origins, the time lag between innovation and take-off, and evaluates the extent to which cinema carried organisational and economic developments that began in live entertainment to new frontiers. It will also attempt to pinpoint the take-off quantitatively by identifying discontinuities in industry growth and comparing this with qualitative evidence.

The above agenda is an essential component of this book's thesis that motion picture technology industrialised entertainment. Without a time lag, and with no origins in live entertainment, film would have been far more an entirely new industry rather than part of a process of industrialisation. This chapter argues in addition that the one-off qualitatively new aspect that cinema offered that had no precedent in live entertainment was tradeability. This chapter also sets the scene for the quality race discussed in the next.

What follows is not a detailed descriptive history of early cinema in Britain, France and the US that tries to tell the ‘complete’ story, if that ever was possible. An entire book could be devoted to this. John Barnes, for example, used five volumes for the first five years of film in Britain. Several other studies offer rich histories of the national motion picture industries.

Origins: technology and preconditions

As with many innovations, the idea of cinema preceded the invention itself.