ABSTRACT

Cinema appeared internationally in the 1890s, the result of exchanges between inventors and industrialists on several continents. Cinema has been called “the art of the twentieth century”. Originally this phrase denoted art of the modern, the product and the expression of the energies of a new age. Cinema appeared as a technological art, based in mass production, the product of a democratic consumerist age. Projection systems, such as the magic lantern, which threw images painted on glass onto a screen by means of light focused through lenses, had existed since the seventeenth century. An arguably new idea underlies the material basis and mechanical devices of cinema: the recording of time – allowing a past moment to be “replayed.” While various systems of notation and representation allowed a record of the past, the first technological direct recording of the flow of a temporal phenomenon came with the phonograph, which records sounds, especially the voice, music, and allows them to be replayed.