Ch.1: Brief History of Cinema

 

        To begin, after reading chapter 1: Brief History of Cinema, it was extremely difficult to choose a clip that stood out to me because they all were very interesting, and all had extreme impacts on how movies are produced and consumed. The 2 clips that I will make this blog post about is "The Jazz Singer" by Warner Bros. and "A Trip To The Moon" by George Melies.

       First, I really enjoyed The Jazz Singer due to the story behind the film and for the fact that it was the first film to use synchronized dialogue. The film surprised me, I assumed that since it was the first film with spoken dialogue I assumed that the quality of the sound would not be that great, but after hearing the first few seconds it sounded near perfect. When it comes to the actual film itself it is one that is quite simple, mainly just 2 characters having a conversation, but by being able to hear them speak it allows you to hear the emotion in their voices, gives you the ability to hear their accent, and it assists the actors in become more recognizable and loved. About the context of the film, watching the film without sound is something that I do not really enjoy, so hearing that everyone would reject Sam Warner's idea of a movie with sound really surprised me. I would have expected people to be jumping up and down with excitement to the thought of movie with sound. Lastly, about the context , it was quite sad to see that Sam Warner died right before seeing his impact on the film industry. He completely revolutionized how movies were done. It was also sad to see that many production companies had to close down due to the simple fact that they weren't able to just get all the new technology to make these sound movies.

           Next, A trip to the moon really caught my attention, it was interesting to see how this movie was way ahead of its time. This movie implemented huge sets, multiple scenes, a large cast, special effects, and a great storyline. Although there was no sound in the film, I was quickly able to imagine what the sound would be like such as the people cheering, the cannon shooting, etc. The props and the costumes made the film much more entertaining as well. The movie being 12 minutes long made me wonder how they can tell a whole story about landing on the moon in such short time, but after watching the film it was really cool to see how something is always occurring, no scenes are being wasted,  and it was just a quick linear progression from picking who is going to the moon, building the rocket ship, landing on the moon, etc. Lastly, like I mentioned before, the special effects were great for a film of this time. It was incredible to see the smoke coming from the factories, the snow falling down, the moon transitioning into a man's face then the rocket landing on their eye, etc.

         In conclusion I did not know what to expect before reading this chapter, almost every clip had been new to me, but to my surprise I greatly enjoyed seeing all of these old movie clips and reading about how historical they were.