|
|
Post by c64 on Jun 15, 2020 19:55:52 GMT
Sorry, I have missed the exact 100 years anniversary, but the movie is now almost exactly 100 years old. Wikipedia, <click here>Enjoy!Of course there are englisch subtitles you can switch on or off. It doesn't affect the experience since the film is silent anyway. Isn't it amazing that it took so long to record audio AFTER moving pictures were invented? Today, most people could build something from scratch that more or less records some audio - but making something capable to record pictures from scratch is impossible for most people (without looking stuff up). Same with the telephone, the fax machine came before the actual telephone, transmitting text and sending pictures was done long before talking on the line was possible. |
|
|
|
Post by the light works on Jun 15, 2020 20:20:49 GMT
Sorry, I have missed the exact 100 years anniversary, but the movie is now almost exactly 100 years old. Wikipedia, <click here>Enjoy!Of course there are englisch subtitles you can switch on or off. It doesn't affect the experience since the film is silent anyway. Isn't it amazing that it took so long to record audio AFTER moving pictures were invented? Today, most people could build something from scratch that more or less records some audio - but making something capable to record pictures from scratch is impossible for most people (without looking stuff up). Same with the telephone, the fax machine came before the actual telephone, transmitting text and sending pictures was done long before talking on the line was possible. interestingly, the idea of a telephone answering machine directly preceded the phonograph. yet the actual telephone answering machine hit the market WAY later. (details: Edison believed the telephone would be too complex to be privately owned, and so set up to produce a machine by which an operator could record telephone messages to be played back to recipients in the same manner as telegraph recipients would receive a message at the telegraph office - which became the phonograph, while advances in technology quickly led to a telephone in every home.) |
|
|
|
Post by c64 on Jun 15, 2020 20:36:43 GMT
Now you might wonder why I think this movie is such a big deal. Laurel and Hardy started around the same time (1921 I think) and there were many, many movies made before this one. There are two major reasons:
1. And this is the most simple one: The length of the movie. Over an hour of playing time. Every inch of footage is very expensive and you need more than twice for production. So movies were usually very short. Back then, most productions were just a few minutes so it was custom to play the weekly news, then a movie and maybe a three minute cartoon. This is also why the "double feature" was invented. When someone had seen the news already, there was little reason to go watch another movie. So they came up with the "double feature", two movies to make it worth visiting the cinema more than once in a month or week. Usually an expensive good movie, the "A-movie" and a cheap one, the "B-movie" to keep the admission fees low.
The Cabinet des Dr. Caligari is a movie more than long enough to be played on its own.
2. The way the actors work. In the Theater (and especially in the Opera), sound is most important. Most of the audience is relative far away so they can't see the actors well enough to notice minor details. So a theater actor needs to speak loud, slowly and make use of excessive gestures which can be seen from far away. Also facial expressions had to be amplified with makeup and used rarely.
Early cinema is the other way round. You can see the most minor details but you can't hear anything. Naturally all actors were trained the traditional theater way of conveying content. It took a long time for movie makers to realize that this is really bad. It took a long time for movie makers to understand that closeups are a much better tool than making the actors jumping around as high as they can. Also the audience is fixed, the camera is not! And the way you aim the camera is the perfect tool to make sure the audience is aware of important details which wouldn't be noticed in classic theater.
So while this movie still looks like theater, it isn't! They had to keep the look of theater to avoid confusing the audience which is used to the old format, but they avoid real theater acting and use most of the basics of modern cinema and TV already!
|
|
