Андрей Тихомиров
From the history of cinema
The Media Museum in the UK conducted many studies and searches in the archives, as a result of which the very first color film in the world was found called "Journey to the Moon", which dates back to 1901-1902.
It belonged to Georges Méliès, a filmmaker from France, who recorded the expedition to the moon. He managed to achieve the color effect in the "Journey" with the help of three films with different colors, namely blue, red and green. Due to their superimposition on each other, Georges managed to get an image of different shades. Unfortunately, he did not have time to complete the idea.
Before the discovery of the Melies tape, Herbert Kalamus was considered the founder of color cinema. In 1912, he founded the Technicolor company with its own film coloring technology. The painting was colored due to the special equipment of the camera with a system of glass prisms that divided the luminous flux from the lens into two. The filters also transferred the image in two colors to different films. Precisely because such a process of applying color is quite time-consuming and complex, the company released the first film only in 1917. In 1922, Technicolor showed the movie "Victims of the Sea" on the screens, which was a huge success with the audience, although it was colored with only four colors (green, red, black, white).
Despite many earlier findings, the official year of the appearance of cinema in color is considered to be 1935. Then director Ruben Mamoulian released his film "Becky Sharp", which is an adaptation of the book "Vanity Fair".
The word "cinema" soon after the invention of the cinema camera began to be applied to a new kind of spectacle. Subsequently, it began to be used to denote a new kind of art that arose on its basis, as well as all cases of the use of cinema for scientific research, education and information. Cinematography has now become a branch of culture that produces films and shows them to the audience. In a number of countries, it is a large sector of the economy. Cinematography is the most popular form of art, an important means of propaganda and information.
The formation of cinema in Russia
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the work of Russian scientists and technicians contributed to the invention of cinematography, methods of cinematographic recording and sound projection. However, in tsarist Russia, due to its technical and economic backwardness, film production began only in 1907-1908, although already in 1896 Russian photographers V. A. Sashin (Fedorov) and A. K.Fedetsky successfully filmed the first documentaries. Since 1896, foreign, mainly French, films have been shown in Russia.
In St. Petersburg, in the Aquarium Garden, and a day later, on May 6, in Moscow, in the Hermitage summer garden. In the same year, the first chronicle filming took place, timed to coincide with a significant event – the accession to the throne of the last Russian tsar Nicholas II. The Lumiers sent their cameraman Kamil Cerf to the ceremony (although, according to J. Sadoul, it was Francis Dubie, who was filming under the direction of M. Perigo), and his shooting turned out to be, firstly, the first filming on the territory of Russia, secondly, the world's first relevant political newsreel, and thirdly, gave rise to the first genre of Russian cinema – the "royal chronicle", which was then filmed by court photographers until the abdication of the tsar in March 1917.
In 1908, the company A. O. Drankov released the first Russian feature film "Ponizovaya Volnitsa" ("Stenka Razin"), which staged a famous folk song. In 1908-1911, films based on works of classical literature and drama, as well as films about the events of Russian history, were produced in large numbers. The artistic level of the first Russian films was low. There was no own technical base, the necessary materials (film, chemicals, etc.) and equipment were imported from abroad. The production of films was, as a rule, in the hands of businessmen. The tsarist censorship sought to limit the subject of films to "salon-psychological", criminal-adventure plots. The decadent, pessimistic sentiments that spread after the defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 had a great influence on the content of the films.
The heyday of Russian cinema in the 1910s occurred during the First World War. It was at this time that the cinematography of old Russia was formed in its thematic and stylistic originality, and film production reached a maximum (500 films in 1916). Films shot in genres that were almost unrelated to national traditions appeared on the screens: detectives, in the Russian interpretation turned into stories about robbers ("Sonka – The Golden Pen" by Alexander Chargonin, 1915; "The Robber Vaska Churkin" by Evgeny Petrov-Krayevsky, 1916); psychological dramas, complicated in local conditions by the motive of social inequality ("The Spirit of the Times" by Andrei Andreev, 1915; "Forget about the Fireplace" by Peter Chardynin, 1917), the same motive is added to secular melodrama.
Russian Russian cinema, however, showed the influence of the progressive traditions of Russian literature and painting, and the experience of the advanced Russian theater in the best works of pre-revolutionary cinema. "Leading pre-revolutionary film directors Ya. A. Protazanov, V. R. Gardin, E. F. Bauer, etc., cameramen A. A. Levitsky, E. O. Slavinsky, V. A. Starevich, L. P. Forestier, etc. in the early years of their work, they created films with serious artistic merits – "The Queen of Spades" (based on the story by A. S. Pushkin) and "Andrey Kozhukhov" (directed by Ya. A. Protazanov), "The Noble Nest" (based on the novel by I. S. Turgenev, directed by V. R. Gardin), "Belated Flowers" (directed by V. M. Sushkevich)" (The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, the State Scientific Publishing House "The Great Soviet Encyclopedia", 2nd edition, editor-in-chief B.A. Vvedensky, volume 50, 1957, p. 632).
