A Million and One Nights

A History of the Motion Picture

Terry Ramsaye

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415760584
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136247446
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1964. When A Million and One Nights was first published in 1926, it was hailed as "the first complete source book on the motion picture" and its author, Terry Ramsaye, as "the first authentic film historian." The intervening years have established A Million and One Nights as a classic, standard work on the history of the motion picture from the beginning through 1925. The contents of this edition are identical with those of the original two-volume edition.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM ARISTOTLE TO PHILADELPHIA, PA.

NOW begins the world’s most human story—the history of the motion picture. It is a tale as old as creation, and as new as tomorrow morning’s paper.

For the first time in the history of civilization we can see the complete flowering of an art form in a single generation. Within thirty years, the motion picture has progressed from the sleeping germ of the age-old wish to the effulgent blossoming of the universal screen of today. Never before in all the ages has this happened. The beginnings of the stage are lost in obscure antiquity. The art of the printed book is half a millennium. Painting and music have come to us out of the remote unknown. All these are the fruit of patient endless time. But many, perhaps a majority of the readers of this page can remember when there were no motion picture films.

The men who saw the birth of sculpture, painting, and drama were mouldering in the sleep of the ages when the Redwoods came to clothe the Sierras, when Cheops planned his Pyramid. But the first men to see a motion picture on a film are yet alive, and with a hearty prospect of seeing many another. There is no parallel in all human experience.

But the motion picture is young only as the bud upon the tree is young. Under them both are roots deep in endless time. The motion picture is a bud that has flowered. To see and know rightly this flowering of the films we shall start our inquiry back down this branch of the tree of expression.

Here Romance and Science come blithely down the centuries bringing us the art of the screen and pictures that live. Among their retainers we shall find philosophers, savants and priests, gamblers, adventurers and cut-throats, noblemen, gentlemen and commoners, wise men and fools—all of the motley of life. This is the chapter of the savants.

The coming of the motion picture was inevitable. For ages it existed only in man’s desire. It has been attained because of that age old wish for the re-creation of events attended by emotions of pleasure.

When in that dim long ago, the leaders of thought laid down their fears of the whimsy of Gods and took up a hope in law and a reasonable universe, progress began toward the myriad attainments of the modern era. Among these we may importantly number the motion picture.

So long ago and so obscurely were the first discoveries on the path to the screen made that it would be futile to search for them. Aristotle in ancient Greece it was who first wrote down the observation that even a square hole in a shutter illumined by the sun cast a circular spot of light against the wall of a darkened room. He was only mildly curious about it. Natural science in his day consisted of noting oddities. Others of equal antiquity observed that the stone twirled by the slinger and the glowing light of a rapidly whirled firebrand both presented apparently continuous circles to the eye.

In those two primitive phenomena were hidden all of the secrets of the motion picture. That hole in the wall of a chamber in Hellas was the pinhole aperture which cast a true image of the sun, and that darkened room was in truth a camera. The circles described by the whirling stone of the Balearic slinger and the firebrand were demonstrations of the principle of the persistence of vision.

Doubtless many a curious scholar in the succeeding centuries saw various puzzling phenomena of light and images, but not until we arrive at so recent a milestone as the Italian Renaissance do we find recorded glimmerings of the beginning of the service of optics to art.

Somewhat hazy tradition credits the invention of a device known as the camera lucida to Leone Battista Alberti, a roistering, rejoicing artist of Florence.

Alberti may of course have been only among the first to use the apparatus. It was a prismatic arrangement by which a reduced virtual image of an object could be apparently cast on a drawing board, making it convenient for tracing outlines. Alberti was so versatile and so infinitely busy with the prodigious activities of the period that he probably welcomed such a labor-saving device. It is related of him that he astonished all Florence with his feats of strength and skill. He could, so history solemnly states in dignified Latin, make a standing jump over any man’s head. Also he could stand in an aisle of the Cathedral of Florence and toss a coin so high in the air that it could be heard to tinkle against the vaulted roof above. He was the Fairbanks of Florence.

The unborn motion picture’s destiny hovered through the fifteenth century about Florence. It was the remote, heroic year of 1452 when gay Ser Pero, the notary, having indulged in amorous dalliance with a comely peasant girl Catarina, found himself the father of a most vociferous and promising son, duly christened Leonardo.

Now this Leonardo da Vinci became all kinds of a man, artist, architect, decorator, engineer, scientist, and author.

One of Leonardo’s concerns was expressed in a pursuit of the most realistic results possible on the canvas of painting. He wanted to make the picture absolutely re-create the event, to make it happen again before the eyes of the spectator. His literal aims are reflected in a passage of his Trattato Della Pittura, where he writes:

I have seen a portrait so like that the favorite dog of the original took it for his master and displayed every sign of delight; I have also seen dogs bark at painted dogs and try to bite them; and a monkey make all sorts of faces at portraits of his own kind; I have seen swallows on the wing attempt to settle on iron bars painted across painted windows of painted houses.

In all of which Leonardo was doubtless nature-faking, but he was definitely stating the desire for a living picture.

This quest of reality made Leonardo pursue the secrets of life endlessly. He stood by execution yards to observe and sketch the expressions and gestures of poor creatures on their way to their doom. He littered his studio with gruesome bodies for dissection that he might learn the mysteries of muscle-controlled expression. He took life apart in search of secrets that should make his canvases live.

This search after the means of re-creating the event sent Leonardo, some centuries early, very directly in pursuit of the camera of to-day. Among Leonardo’s experiments was an investigation of the laws of perspective by placing a glass plate between the eye and the object, and noting thereon where the lines of sight cut the plane of the glass.

Then, too, Leonardo observed that if he cut a small circular hole in a shutter of a darkened room there would be an image on the wall opposite, showing in detail the building or landscape outside in the full light of the sun. This room was in reality the camera obscura, used by artists for centuries after, and it was indeed too the camera of to-day, lacking yet only the sensitized film or plate. If Leonardo had had the chemical means of coating the glass plate of his experiments in perspective and catching thereon the image he found on the wall of his room, he would have had photography, which in a nameless unconscious way he was seeking.

It had not apparently come to Leonardo that there was a possibility of pictures in motion. But he was after a strict recording of nature in the picture, up to the fact of motion. He hoped to suggest life by a frozen moment of it, a still photography in which the skill of hand and eye performed functions of photo-chemistry yet undiscovered.

Leonardo’s search after reality in art, his hunger for convincing pictures, made him seek every emotional aid. Vasari wrote of Leonardo that he employed musicians to play for Mona Lisa while she sat as his model. Doubtless there was a laughing up the sleeve among Leonardo’s contemporaries at such a fanciful extravagance. Stepping lightly over time and space to the Biograph studio in Los Angeles in 1913–4, four centuries after Leonardo, we find D. W. Griffith employing an orchestra to make Blanche Sweet emotional before the camera recording Judith of Bethulia. Griffith’s contemporaries laughed and scorned.

In Leonardo we have seen the artist beginning to use science consciously as an aid to capturing a moment of the event, a picture. The urge of art was strong indeed in his day. Art was the particular subsidized servant of authority and the Church. It was the great medium of propaganda, the medium of re-creating emotions by re-creating events. Painting marched side by side with pageantry and ritual. It was about the year 1500, only half a century after Gutenburg and Fust began printing from type. Dramatic ritual and the graphic arts were much more important then, before the printing craft loosed the modern flood of words upon the world. What was to be said to the masses had to be said in pictures. That is still largely true, but not for lack of words.

For a full two centuries after the coming of printing from type and the rising tide of books the pictorial art remained unchanged, losing ground in the unequal race with words. The picture was fast and firmly immobile, as immobile as the wood or canvas upon which it was painted. Before the art of the picture could hope for a share in the living fluidity of the word’s ability to state motion it had to be freed, loosened from the wall.

Just about two hundred years from the invention of the printing press and a century and a half after Leonardo’s prime, the picture began reaching for this new freedom which lay still centuries ahead. One evening in 1640 Athanasius Kircher invited nobles and wealthy citizens of Rome to a remarkable first night showing at the Jesuit College. Kircher desired to present for the consideration of the rich and the mighty the first model of his Magia Catoptrica, or magic lantern. Nowadays the same thing is done with similar pomp and to the same purpose by motion picture producers presenting their wares at private previews in the Ritz-Carlton.

Kircher’s show consisted of a few crudely painted slides depicting devils, demons and skeletons. Death, Evil, and the Devil were important factors in the life of that day, when the principal emotion useful for the control of the multitudes was fear. Kircher chose the Devil for his star quite as naturally as the motion picture maker of to-day reaches for Cinderella in some guise, purveying the positive appeals of hope and sex instead of the negative emotion fear.

The slide shadows on the wall filled the audience of ignorant nobles and the wealthy climbers of Rome with amazement and delight. There were plaudits for Kircher. This inventor of the magic lantern was a German from the ancient community of Geiss, known to a more modern day as Hesse Cassel, the territory which later contributed the Hessians to the war of the American Revolution.

Kircher the Jesuit has told at length in his book, published in 1646 under the title of Ars Magna Lucis et Umbræ (The Great Art of Light and Shade), about this magic lantern. This ancient volume has been brought to light by Will Day of London, an able authority and collector of motion picture archives. Kircher’s lantern had a lamp, reflector, and a lens, just as the magic lantern of to-day has.

Kircher also illustrated in this volume a method of changing from picture to picture by the use of a revolving drum. His drum shows pictures of the radiant sun, the head of a lion, and the head of an ass. He was really getting dangerously near the motion picture idea. His pictures were painted on glass.

Kircher’s magic lantern progressed from that day as fast as illuminants improved and lens makers evolved their craft. This was not really so long ago, when one reflects that the Pilgrims had become well established in Massachusetts by that date and that Southampton, Long Island, was thriving in Indian trade and the pursuit of “whayles and other greate fish.”

Through Kircher we see the pictures become liberated from the immobility of paint and canvas. The ingenuous Jesuit began with his Magia Catoptrica to make pictures of light and shade. They were not yet, in his crude hand-drawn slides, truly mobile in a pictorial sense but they contained that inherent possibility. His pictures in light and shadow were a step back toward the fluidity of motion in nature’s pictures presented direct to the eye from the object, also seen only in terms of light and shade.

Picture making on the wall was ready and waiting now to receive motion.

The striving after literal motion recreations of events continued with every conceivable sort of presentation. One of the most ingeniously elaborate of them is set forth in a playbill of 1811 recently found in London. It reads:

Sanger’s Mechanical Collection of Alabaster Figures and Moving Wax Work, now exhibiting in this town for — days only. The proprietor, in offering this truly moral, elegant and truly scientific exhibition to the notice of a discerning public, states, without fear of contradiction, that this expensive production of years of hard study and perseverance has been ultimately crowned with success. He thus fearlessly invites the patronage of all good members of society, as the aim, object and end of his endeavors have been to please the old and instruct the young; teaching them to look from nature to nature’s cause. The first enclosure contains a splendid lifelike representation of Moses striking the rock, or the Children of Israel in the Wilderness. Moses is seen at the head of the Israelites standing on a rock near Mount Horeb. The just proportion and mechanical movement of this figure surpasses everything of the kind that has hitherto been attempted. Moses is seen to raise his arm and strike the rock, from whence water appears to flow. The speculation of the eye and movement of the mouth, as if inviting the people to drink from the waters that are gushing from the rock. To the left is Aaron, with an intelligent smile upon his countenance, as he gazes on the stream which slakes the thirst of the great multitude. The whole of these beautiful figures will be set in motion by the aid of mechanical ingenuity. The movement of the limbs, the rolling of the eyes, and heaving of the chests of men, women, and children, taken altogether give it a life-like representation of what has in reality taken place, as we are bound to believe, according to the records of sacred history.

One is particularly delighted to note that these living wax works so handsomely registered the heaving of the chest. Chest heaving has become a prime essential of modern screen drama.

Not until nearly two hundred years after Athanasius Kircher and his lantern show, did scientific investigation begin determined pursuit of the mysterious principles of the appearances of motion, leading toward the motion picture. These scientific beginnings held no relation to showmanship, then apparent.

It was at the end of the first quarter of the last century when one Peter Mark Rôget of London began to make certain observations filled with motion picture portent. This Rôget is scientifically most important and historically little known. His name, shorn of every vestige of personality, survives among the tools of the writer’s craft in the title of Rôget’s Thesaurus, the word book.

As one might suspect from the doubly impressed Christianity of his christening in honor of two apostles, Rôget was a minister’s son. His father was John Rôget, formerly of Geneva, pastor of the French Protestant church in Threadneedle street, London. His mother was a sister of Sir Samuel Romilly, and to her gallant British biographers have credited Peter Mark’s heritage of mind. Their authority for this does not appear. The precocious youth was graduated from the medical school of the University of Edinburgh at the age of 19.

Rôget became a physician. It was doubtless a choice of mere practicality. The practice of medicine was, bear in mind, well near the only earning career open to a scientifically minded man of that day.

Rôget was interested in everything within the scope of science. He became an expert on water supply. He rioted in mathematics. He invented a logarithmic slide rule for rapid calculating and as a result was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Great Britain, becoming its secretary. He lectured on “The Laws of Sense and Perception” before the Royal College of Physicians and spent three earnest years on the study of the “external senses.” He was eagerly interested in the problem of the manner in which the human mind becomes conscious of the outside world.

It was therefore inevitable that Rôget should have engaged in researches bearing on the principles of vision, and that his findings should now be seen as uncovering various laws underlying the yet undreamed motion picture. Further it is intensely significant, bearing immediately on the principle of event recreation and the identity of picture and language that Rôget was so aggressively interested in mere words that he made the compilation of his classic Thesaurus the valedictory labor of his declining years. Clearly the word and the picture, the impression of the “external sense” of sight were intimately related in his mind.

The star of motion picture destiny, always traveling westward in the course of the race, reached England with Rôget. One day while he was engaged in his inquiry into the affairs of the external senses he chanced to glance from his study window to note the approach of a vehicle. I...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• The Art and Its Audience
• Illustrations
• The Prehistory of the Screen
• Chapter One: From Aristotle to Philadelphia
• Chapter Two: Muybridge in Myth and Murder
• Chapter Three: In the House of the Wizard
• Chapter Four: It Moves—October 6, 1889
• Chapter Five: $150 Saved; an Empire Lost
• Chapter Six: Wonders of the World’s Fair
• Chapter Seven: Black’s Pre-Film Pictureplay
• Chapter Eight: Two Gallants from Virginia
• Chapter Nine: Dancing Butterflies—Intrigue
• Chapter Ten: Major Latham Challenges
• Chapter Eleven: Armat Attains the Screen
• Chapter Twelve: Paul and “The Time Machine”
• Chapter Thirteen: LumiÈre’s Sixteen-A-Second
• Chapter Fourteen: Romances of the Lathams
• Chapter Fifteen: The Legend of Richmond
• Chapter Sixteen: Biograph Starts with a Punch
• Chapter Seventeen: A Trade Secret of 1896
• Chapter Eighteen: First Night on Broadway
• Chapter Nineteen: The Invasion of London
• Chapter Twenty: First Psalm of the Cinema
• Chapter Twenty-One: A Dance from Cairo and a Kiss
• Chapter Twenty-Two: Vaudeville Adopts the Films
• Chapter Twenty-Three: Recruiting the Ploneers
• Chapter Twenty-Four: When Corbett Fought Ruby Robert
• Chapter Twenty-Five: The Latham Star Declines
• Chapter Twenty-Six: Chicago—Spoor and Selig
• Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Lawless Film Frontier
• Chapter Twenty-Eight: Mckinley—Biograph’s First Night
• Chapter Twenty-Nine: Barnum’s Grandson Entertains
• Chapter Thirty: “Edison, JR.,” on the Spanish Main
• Chapter Thirty-One: The Charity Bazaar Fire
• Chapter Thirty-Two: Marshall Field and a Book Agent.
• Chapter Thirty-Three: The Saga of Calvary
• Chapter Thirty-Four: And then the Fight Started
• Chapter Thirty-Five: Blackton, Smith and Rock
• Chapter Thirty-Six: Melies Magic and the Pirates
• Chapter Thirty-Seven: Alaska, War and Tammany
• Chapter Thirty-Eight: Bright Lights and Dark Deeds
• Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Story Picture is Born
• Chapter Forty: The Screen Theatre Arrives
• Chapter Forty-One: Roosevelt and Dockstader
• Chapter Forty-Two: When Actors Scorned the Screen
• Chapter Forty-Three: Carl Laemmle Takes a Chance
• Chapter Forty-Four: Enter D. W. Griffith with Mss
• Chapter Forty-Five: Kalem and the First Ben Hur
• Chapter Forty-Six: Jeremiah J. Kennedy, Hardboiled
• Chapter Forty-Seven: And Now Comes Censorship
• Chapter Forty-Eight: The Trust War Begins
• Chapter Forty-Nine: Introducing Mary Pickford
• Chapter Fifty: Griffith Evolves Screen Syntax
• Chapter Fifty-One: T. R. Gets Nature-Faked Again
• Chapter Fifty-Two: Imp Kidnaps Trust Star
• Chapter Fifty-Three: The Discovery of California
• Chapter Fifty-Four: A Cowboy, an Undertaker, Et Al
• Chapter Fifty-Five: The Lathams’ Last Day
• Chapter Fifty-Six: Adventures in Kinemacolor
• Chapter Fifty-Seven: Tom Ince Raises a Moustache
• Chapter Fifty-Eight: Herring, Diamonds and Selznick
• Chapter Fifty-Nine: Adolph Zukor and Sarah Bernhardt
• Chapter Sixty: The Gishes, “Pink” and “Blue”
• Chapter Sixty-One: The Screen Discovers Sex
• Chapter Sixty-Two: Lasky Rents A Barn
• Chapter Sixty-Three: “The Birth of a Nation”
• Chapter Sixty-Four: “Charlie Chapman” Gets an Offer
• Chapter Sixty-Five: The Screen and Press Conspire
• Chapter Sixty-Six: Panchito Villa Sells a War
• Chapter Sixty-Seven: “Roxy” Comes to Broadway
• Chapter Sixty-Eight: Washington, London and the Taj Mahal
• Chapter Sixty-Nine: Jack Johnson’s Film Knockout
• Chapter Seventy: Bara and the Vampire
• Chapter Seventy-One: “104,000” for Little Mary
• Chapter Seventy-Two: Triangle, Fairbanks and Riesenfeld
• Chapter Seventy-Three: Henry Ford Answers a War Cry
• Chapter Seventy-Four: $670,000 for Chaplin
• Chapter Seventy-Five: Mary, Quite Contrary, Takes a Million
• Chapter Seventy-Six: Two Millions on Belshazzar
• Chapter Seventy-Seven: Zukored and Selznicked
• Chapter Seventy-Eight: Wilson, Hearst and Creel
• Chapter Seventy-Nine: Mary, Mcadoo and Monte Carlo
• Chapter Eighty: Will Hays Goes to Lunch
• Chapter Eighty-One: Today
• Appendix
• Index
• About the Author