International Cinema

Art, Culture, and the International Movie-going Experience

The Cinema Experience

Sharing an individual experience
Movies combine the visual arts, the performing arts, the literary arts, architecture, and music into a dynamic and engaging emotional experience. Movies are intended to be viewed in a large theatre, on a large screen, in the dark, with a group of people.

The Cinema Experience

Sharing an individual experience
Viewing movies on television, at home from a DVD, in an airplane, or on an IPod are not a Cinema Experience, but an economic reality.

What is Cinema
Persistence of vision: a characteristic of human perception whereby the brain retains images cast upon the retina of the eye for 1/20th to 1/5th of a second beyond their actual removal in the field of vision from the field of vision. The phi phenomenon: a phenomenon that causes us to see the individual blades of a rotating fan as a unitary circular form or the different hues of a spinning color wheel as a single homogenous color.

How it works
Motion pictures are a series of still images run in rapid succession giving the illusion of continuous movement. In the United States, 24 still images per second are photographed and then projected for the audience. In Europe and in many foreign countries, the standard is 25 still images per second.

The Inventors
Thomas Edison was looking for an invention that would allow him to provide visual accompaniment to his phonograph sound recordings. The Lumiere brothers invented a portable system that combined a motion picture camera, projector, and film printer. It was called the Cinematographe. This is where the term Cinema and Cinematography came from. This machine was designed to run at 16 frames per second.

Lumiere Brothers First Movies

Early Films of Thomas Edison

The Cinema Industry

Although Edison envisioned and built a novelty machine where customers would view the film directly through a small window, the Lumiere Brothers projected their motion pictures for a public audience. This was the beginning of the cinema industry as we know it today.

The Impact on Culture

Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. This course will introduce you to some of movies and artists that have influenced the creation of motion pictures worldwide.