ABSTRACT
Like so many other inventions of the nineteenth century, before the era of corporate capitalism and the systematic application of massive funds to research and development, the invention of cinematography was a hit-and-miss process. Moreover, its technical gestation was a long-drawn-out affair, because it brought together uneven developments in a variety of fields, separate products of the growth of the forces of production under nineteenth-century capitalism. While the evolution of many of these elements has been studied in considerable detail, one of them, celluloid, has been somewhat neglected. This neglect is surprising when you realize that celluloid played such a particular role. It was the final catalyst, as it were, in the dialectic of invention of cinematography. Its appearance in the requisite form (as a thin strip) stimulated the almost immediate solution of all the essential problems which the inventors had been working on for so long.
