The “seventh art” never sets

It is really difficult for us human beings of the 21st century to think of a time when there was no possibility of recording reality with a movie camera or video camera.

Yet, until just over a century ago, photography already seemed like technical magic.

When the French Lumière brothers patented a single instrument capable of projecting a sequence of images onto a white screen, in order to create the effect of movement, it seemed like a miracle to their contemporaries. The first short film produced, from 1895, was entitled "The exit of the workers from the Lumière workshops" and captured a moment of life taken from reality. Its first screening generated a very strong emotional impact on the audience present, impressed by the possibility of obtaining a exact reproduction of reality. Another of the first Lumière films, entitled "The arrival of the train at Ciotat station", in which what at the time was the symbol par excellence of dynamism and speed appeared, the train , was an immediate success among the public and caused a profound echo, quickly impressing spectators all over the world . It is said that at one of the first screenings of the film there was a general stampede because the images showed a locomotive It got closer and closer and the spectators believed they were on the verge of being overwhelmed.

A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since those first pioneering films, but the magic of what was baptized a century ago as the "seventh art" has not been lost . Indeed, it always seems to rise again, when faced with crisis, like a new Arabian phoenix. This is demonstrated to us, once again, by the volume "Nuova storia del cinema" (Hoepli editore, 2023, pp. 414, also e-book), written by several hands and edited by the film critic Beatrice Fiorentino .

The book takes us back to the dawn of the phenomenon to show us how cinematography has always been able to renew itself and keep up with the times .

After the Lumières' invention, cinema became a mass phenomenon, films increased in length (even if most lasted ten minutes or so), more complex stories began to be told, and the first stars were born. The films were strictly black and white. The few color sequences present in the films of the early twentieth century were created by hand-painting each frame. Full color films began to be produced only from the 1930s.

Furthermore, early cinema did not know special effects and the shots were almost all fixed. In fact, there was no zoom, and moving the cameras to obtain different shots in the same scene was very complex because they were heavy and cumbersome machines. Above all, that cinema was wordless, it was silent cinema because there was no way to record together and synchronize images, voices and sounds. In cinemas, films were accompanied by the sound of a piano or a small orchestra (in the more luxurious cinemas). The images were also interspersed with captions that explained what was happening on the screen, captions often read by a speaker because a large part of the audience was illiterate.

Some spectators even specialized in reading the lips of the actors acting on the screen so as to understand what they were saying. Cinema only became talkie in 1927 and talking films became widespread starting in the 1930s . To solve the language problem in foreign films , dubbing was also invented . In the early years, however, it was not possible to dub and the same film was shot in multiple languages and with different actors so as to sell the film in as many countries as possible .

In short, there are truly many stories to tell about cinema and its world and Beatrice Sorrentino's volume aims to be an invitation to discover them and their protagonists. Through a narrative approach accessible to both expert cinephiles and neophytes, the most important artistic, historical, technological and social stages that have marked the history of the seventh art are examined: silent cinema and the golden age of Hollywood; genres and auteur cinema; the movements, the schools, the currents; neorealism and the vague; New Hollywood, postmodern cinema, the crisis of the cinema and the response of comic films, sagas and reboots, up to the challenges of new languages in the era of on demand platforms. All this in a work that relies on a plurality of voices in an attempt to offer different perspectives, non-univocal perspectives in defining a route to orient ourselves in the continuous flow of images in which we are now immersed. Objective: to try to have fun looking at the past with the eyes of the present , with the possibility of glossing over or delving deeper, speeding up and slowing down, lingering or skipping ahead, even rehabilitating, always showing dutiful respect for the untouchable masters, but without being too inhibited by preconceived dogmas or excessive awe.

If the objective is to inform about the origins, the main desire is to create a connection with the present, venturing to think about the future. That of a cinema different from yesterday and today, but always cinema.