Cinema: moving pictures or the industry of making films
Today I’m going to write about cinema. I’m interested in this topic because watching films can help us understand a great deal about life and human relationships. Every time we watch a film, we learn about other worlds and lifestyles and at the same time, we travel about two hours to other realities. Cinema is important because as a teacher, I can use films, short films, documentaries, trailers or clips to present topics or issues so students can discuss or debate.
I will be talking about where cinema came from, secondly who invented it and finally, I’m going to mention the most important periods of the history of cinema around the world. Let’s begin with the origins of cinema; moving images have always been popular. In China, for example, 5,000 years ago, they used firelight to project images of puppets onto screens and this was called “shadow plays”.
Cinema became possible by the invention of two French brothers, Louis and Auguste Lumiere, in 1895. The Lumiere Cinematograph” allowed large audiences to watch “moving pictures”. They showed several short films and they were all documentaries. Let’s continue with the periods of the history of cinema. There are seven important periods; the history begins in the Far East, with shadow plays. The, The Lumiere brothers in 1895, The Silent Era (1912), The Talkies (1928), The Golden Age (1932), The TV Revolution (1950) after the Second World War and currently, the Modern Film Industry.
I’m going to conclude by quoting Auguste Lumiere, who said: “Cinema can be exploited for a certain time but apart from that, it has no commercial value at all”. I’d love to hear what Auguste Lumiere would say about making films in this century, after all the commercial value given to the Modern Film Industry.
