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CHAPTER TWO
ANCIENT HISTORY
MOVIES AND LARGE-SCALE INDUSTRY
I call this chapter ancient history, because it deals with the period when moving pictures were a fairground sideshow, not an art.
It was in March 1 895 that the Lumiere brothers in France completed their film camera. But the new means of expression and the new form-language of film art were not born until ten or twelve years later, in the United States. Thus the technical facilities for film-making were already in the hands of a wealthy capitalist group at the end of the last century, but French cinematography nevertheless failed to produce a single manifestation of the new art. So the art of the film did not automatically grow out of the French cinematographic camera, nor was it a mechanical result of the general laws of vision. Other forces were required to bring into existence the new art and it is not by chance that it was born, not in Europe, but in the United States.
The technique of cinematography took shape in the very beginning of the twentieth century, and it was not by accident that it emerged at the time when other intellectual products were also beginning to be produced on a large industrial scale. It was in this same period that the giant publishing houses, the great theatrical concerns and concert agencies, the newspaper trusts and wholesale picture-dealing were born. The wholesale industrialization of art and literature did not start with the film, but the film arrived when this trend was just gathering momentum.
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