A 

film – also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or

(slang) flick – is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates
ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere through the use of moving images.
These images are generally accompanied by sound and, more rarely, other sensory stimulations.
[1]
 The word "cinema", short for cinematography, is often used to refer to filmmaking and the film
industry, and to the art form that is the result of it.

Recording and transmission of film

The moving images of a film are created by photographing actual scenes with a motion-picture
camera, by photographing drawings or miniature models using traditional animation techniques,
by means of CGI and computer animation, or by a combination of some or all of these
techniques, and other visual effects.
Before the introduction of digital production, series of still images were recorded on a strip of
chemically sensitized celluloid (photographic film stock), usually at the rate of 24 frames per
second. The images are transmitted through a movie projector at the same rate as they were
recorded, with a Geneva drive ensuring that each frame remains still during its short projection
time. A rotating shutter causes stroboscopic intervals of darkness, but the viewer does not notice
the interruptions due to flicker fusion. The apparent motion on the screen is the result of the fact
that the visual sense cannot discern the individual images at high speeds, so the impressions of
the images blend with the dark intervals and are thus linked together to produce the illusion of
one moving image. An analogous optical soundtrack (a graphic recording of the spoken words,
music and other sounds) runs along a portion of the film exclusively reserved for it, and was not
projected.
Contemporary films are usually fully digital through the entire process of production, distribution,
and exhibition.

Etymology and alternative terms

The name "film" originally referred to the thin layer of photochemical emulsion[2] on the celluloid
strip that used to be the actual medium for recording and displaying motion pictures.
Many other terms exist for an individual motion-picture, including "picture", "picture show",
"moving picture", "photoplay", and "flick". The most common term in the United States is "movie",
while in Europe "film" is preferred. Archaic terms include "animated pictures" and "animated
photography".
"Flick" is in general a slang term, first recorded in 1926. It originates in the verb flicker, owing to
the flickering appearance of early films.[3]
Common terms for the field in general include "the big screen", "the silver screen", "the movies",
and "cinema"; the last of these is commonly used, as an overarching term, in scholarly texts and
critical essays. In early years, the word "sheet" was sometimes used instead of "screen".

History
Main articles: History of film technology, History of film, and Precursors of film
See also: History of animation
Precursors
The art of film has drawn on several earlier traditions in fields such as
oral storytelling, literature, theatre and visual arts. Forms of art and entertainmentthat had
already featured moving and/or projected images include:

 shadowgraphy, probably used since prehistoric times

 camera obscura, a natural phenomenon that has possibly been used as an artistic
aid since prehistoric times
  shadow puppetry, possibly originated around 200 BCE in Central Asia, India,
Indonesia or China
 The magic lantern, developed in the 1650s. The multi-media phantasmagoria shows
that magic lanterns were popular from 1790 throughout the first half of the 19th
century and could feature mechanical slides, rear projection, mobile
projectors, superimposition, dissolving views, live actors, smoke (sometimes to
project images upon), odors, sounds and even electric shocks.
Before celluloid

Animated GIF of Prof. Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheibe No. X (Trentsensky & Vieweg 1833)
The stroboscopic animation principle was introduced in 1833 with the stroboscopic disc (better
known as the phénakisticope) and later applied in the zoetrope (since 1866), the flip book (since
1868), and the praxinoscope(since 1877), before it became the basic principle for
cinematography.
Experiments with early phénakisticope-based animation projectors were made at least as early
as 1843 and publicly screened in 1847. Jules Duboscq marketed phénakisticope projection
systems in France from c. 1853 until the 1890s.
Photography was introduced in 1839, but initially photographic emulsions needed such
long exposures that the recording of moving subjects seemed impossible. At least as early as
1844, photographic series of subjects posed in different positions have been created to either
suggest a motion sequence or to document a range of different viewing angles. The advent of
stereoscopic photography, with early experiments in the 1840s and commercial success since
the early 1850s, raised interest in completing the photographic medium with the addition of
means to capture colour and motion. In 1849, Joseph Plateau published about the idea to
combine his invention of the phénakisticope with the stereoscope, as suggested to him by
stereoscope inventor Charles Wheatstone, and to use photographs of plaster sculptures in
different positions to be animated in the combined device. In 1852, Jules Duboscq patented such
an instrument as the "Stéréoscope-fantascope, ou Bïoscope", but he only marketed it very
briefly, without success. One Bïoscope disc with stereoscopic photographs of a machine is in the
Plateau collection of the Ghent University, but no instruments or other discs have yet been found.
An animation of the retouched Sallie Garner card from The Horse in Motionseries (1878–1879) by
Muybridge
By the late 1850s the first examples of instantaneous photography came about and provided
hope that motion photography would soon be possible, but it took a few decades before it was
successfully combined with a method to record series of sequential images in real-time. In
1878, Eadweard Muybridge eventually managed to take a series of photographs of a running
horse with a battery of cameras in a line along the track and published the results as The Horse
in Motion on cabinet cards. Muybridge, as well as Étienne-Jules Marey, Ottomar Anschützand
many others, would create many more chronophotography studies. Muybridge had the contours
of dozens of his chronophotographic series traced onto glass discs and projected them with
his zoopraxiscope in his lectures from 1880 to 1895.

An Anschütz electrotachyscope
American Scientific, 16/11/1889, p. 303

Anschütz made his first instantaneous photographs in 1881. He developed a portable camera

that allowed shutterspeeds as short as 1/1000 of a second in 1882. The quality of his pictures
was generally regarded to be much higher than that of the chronophotography
works Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey.[4] In 1886, Anschütz developed
the Electrotachyscope, an early device that displayed short motion picture loops with 24 glass
plate photographs on a 1.5 meter wide rotating wheel that was hand-cranked to the speed of
circa 30 frames per second. Different versions were shown at many international exhibitions,
fairs, conventions and arcades from 1887 until at least 1894. Starting in 1891, some 152
examples of a coin-operated peep-box Electrotachyscope model were manufactured by Siemens
& Halske in Berlin and sold internationally.[5][4] Nearly 34,000 people paid to see it at the Berlin
Exhibition Park in summer 1892. Others saw it in London or at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.On
25 November 1894, Anschütz introduced a Electrotachyscope projector with a 6x8 meter
screening in Berlin. Between 22 February and 30 March 1895, a total of circa 7,000 paying
customers came to view a 1.5-hour show of some 40 scenes at a 300-seat hall in the old
Reichstag building in Berlin.[6]
4:59
Pauvre Pierrot (1892) repainted clip
Émile Reynaud already mentioned the possibility of projecting the images of the Praxinoscope in
his 1877 patent application. He presented a praxinoscope projection device at the Société
française de photographie on 4 June 1880, but did not market his praxinoscope a
projection before 1882. He then further developed the device into the Théâtre Optique which
could project longer sequences with separate backgrounds, patented in 1888. He created
several movies for the machine by painting images on hundreds of gelatin plates that were
mounted into cardboard frames and attached to a cloth band. From 28 October 1892 to March
1900 Reynaud gave over 12,800 shows to a total of over 500,000 visitors at the Musée Grévin in
Paris.

First motion pictures

A frame from Roundhay Garden Scene, the world's earliest surviving film produced using a motion picture
camera, by Louis Le Prince, 1888
By the end of the 1880s, the introduction of lengths of celluloid photographic film and the
invention of motion picture cameras, which could photograph a rapid sequence of images using
only one lens, allowed action to be captured and stored on a single compact reel of film.
Movies were initially shown publicly to one person at a time through "peep show" devices such
as the Electrotachyscope, Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope. Not much later, exhibitors managed
to project films on large screens for theatre audiences.
The first public screenings of films at which admission was charged were made in 1895 by the
American Woodville Latham and his sons, using films produced by their Eidoloscope company,
[7]
 by the Skladanowsky brothers and by the – arguably better known – French brothers Auguste
and Louis Lumière with ten of their own productions.[citation needed] Private screenings had preceded
these by several months, with Latham's slightly predating the others´s.[citation needed]

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