ABSTRACT
In 1896 the French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière became the first to project moving film to an audience. Like other pioneers in film, such as Thomas Edison in the USA, the Lumières imagined that their work with moving pictures would be directed towards scientific research rather than the establishment of an entertainment industry. Edison claimed that he decided to leave the movie industry as soon as its potential as a ‘big amusement proposition’ became clear, although his career makes this difficult to accept since he employed some cut-throat business practices. It is certainly true that when Edison ran his first 50 feet of film in 1888, the future he envisaged for moving pictures was more akin to what we now know as television; the emphasis was to be on domestic, information-based usage. However, despite the inappropriateness of the pioneers’ initial objectives, it took barely fifteen years into the twentieth century for the narrative feature to establish itself – both as a viable commercial product and as a contender for the status of the ‘seventh art’, the new century’s first original art form.
