When people think of cinema films they often think Friday night at the local movie theater, but did anyone ever think where it all came from?
Motion pictures were initially exhibited as a carnival novelty and developed to one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment, and mass media in the 20th century and into the 21st century. Most films before 1930 were silent. Motion picture films have substantially affected the arts, technology, and politics. Moving images were produced on revolving drums and disks in the 1830s with independent invention by Simon von Stampfer in Austria, Joseph Plateau in Belgium and William Horner in Britain.
On June 19, 1872, under the sponsorship of Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge they successfully photographed a horse named Sallie in fast motion using a series of 24 stereoscopic cameras. The experiment took place on June 11 at Palo Alto farm in California with the press present. The exercise was meant to show whether a running horse ever had all four legs lifted off the ground at once. The cameras were arranged along a track parallel to the horses, and a tip wire, which took pictures by the horse’s hooves, controlled each camera shutter. They were 21 inches apart to cover the 20 feet taken by the horse stride, taking pictures at one thousandth of a second.
On June 21 1889, William Greene was granted the patent no. 10131 for his chronophotographic camera. It was capable of taking up to ten photographs every second using perforated celuloid film. A paper on the camera was published in the British Photographic News on February 28, 1890. On 18 March, Mr. Greene sent a small part of the story to Thomas Edison, whose laboratory had been developing a motion picture system known as the Kinescope. The report was reprinted in scientific America on April 19. Greene then gave a public demonstration in 1890 but the low frame rate combined with the device's apparent unreliability did not manage to make an impression on the viewers.
In the first eleven years of motion pictures show cinema moving from a novelty to a highly established large scale entertainment industry. The films represent a movement from films consisting of one shot, almost always completely made by one person with a few, or no assistants, towards films several minutes long consisting of several shots, which were made by large companies in something like industrial conditions.
Illustrated songs were a notable exception to the silent film trend that began in 1894 in vaudeville houses and persisted as late as the late 1930s in film theaters.[10] Live performance or sound recordings were paired with hand-colored glass slides projected through stereopticons and similar devices. In this way, song narrative was illustrated through a series of slides whose changes were simultaneous with the narrative development. The main purpose of illustrated songs was to encourage sheet music sales, and they were highly successful with sales reaching into the millions for a single song. Later, with the birth of film, illustrated songs were used as filler material preceding films and during the reel changes.
In the beginning there were technical difficulties in lining up the images with sound. It was clear that Edison originally intended to create a sound film system, which would not gain worldwide recognition 1917. However, there was still significant interest in motion pictures for films to be produced without sound. This is referred to as the silent era of film. In order to augment the viewers experience, silent films were commonly paired with some live musicians and sometimes small sound effects and even commentary were spoken by the showman or projectionist. In most countries, came to be used to provide dialogue and narration for the film, dispensing with narrators, but in Japanese cinema human narration remained popular throughout the silent era. The technical problems were resolved six years layer in 1923.
Animations were another big development of cinema, in 1923 a large studio called Laugh-O-Grams went bankrupt and its owner Walt Disney opened a new studio in Los Angeles. Disney’s first project was the Alice Comedies a series that featured a live action girl who interacted with an abundance of “cartoon” looking characters. Some of the first animated sound films with recorded sound synchronized with the animation were the Song Car-Tunes films and Dinner Time. The earliest sound Song Car-Tunes films were Oh Mabel and Mother, Mother, Mother Pin a Rose on Me and Goodbye My Lady Love Disney’s first notable breakthrough was 1928’s Steamboat Willie, the third of the Mickey Mouse series, which was the first cartoon to include a fully post-produced soundtrack, featuring voice and sound effects printed on the film itself a sound film. The short film showed an happy fun loving mouse named Mickey neglecting his work on a steamboat to instead make music using the animals aboard the boat. Mickey Mouse is still to this day one of the most recognizable characters in the world.
During the 1970s, filmmakers increasingly depicted explicit sexual content and showed gunfight and battle scenes that included graphic images of bloody deaths - a good example of this is Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left. Also in the 1970’s there was an increase in the popularity of martial arts films, largely due to its reinvention by Bruce Lee.

In the 1980’s audiences began increasingly watching films on their home VCRs earlier part of that decade, the film studios tried legal action to ban home ownership of VCRs because it was a violation of copyright, which was unsuccessful. The sale and rental of films on home video tapes became a significant way to exhibit of films, and an additional source of revenue for the film industries. The early 1990s saw the development of a commercially successful independent cinema in the United States. Although cinema was increasingly dominated by special-effects films such as Terminator, Jurassic Park and Titanic, also independent films by Steven Soderburgh.
So as you can see cinema has gone through many changes through out the years, and is continuously changing making new developments; but none of that would be possible without the past influences.