To begin, let’s look at the origin of film or more generally, the whole medium of screened information. I’ve always wondered about this medium. Shouldn’t we question why humanity ended up using moving pictures accompanied
with sounds as the primary form of information transfer? As a species, we currently spend an average of seven hours per day looking at some sort of screen, whether it’s a phone, TV or computer. Granted, screens
aren’t anymore just for the purposes of entertainment. In the modern era, screens make up the backbone of basically everything, displaying numbers and information for all things that keep the world going. Yet, it’s interesting
to note that the first screen was invented purely for the purposes of entertainment. The first ever film to employ actors, the Blacksmith Scene, was directed in 1893 by William Dickson, the inventor of the Kinetoscope. This
was a rudimentary device that displayed a film through a small peephole, designed for the purposes of making profit by providing customers with dynamic, visual entertainment. This film, along with several others, was available
for viewing in New York in the first ever motion picture house (i.e. a cinema) on 14 April 1894. For 25 cents, one could view an assortment of short films on any of the ten Kinetoscopes available.
As creatures of pleasure, perhaps it makes sense that the first use of a screen was for entertainment. Prior to Dickson’s Kinetoscope parlour, we humans were entertained in other ways. For visual entertainment, there were paintings.
Auditorily, there was music. For raw storytelling, there were books. And perhaps the best combination of the three were stage plays. The problem with all of these is that they were individually limited. Paintings can only provide
static visual information. Music was purely auditory. Books were limited by the ability of being able to read. And the stage play — though as effective as a motion picture for entertaining since it can tell a story visually and
auditorily — was a physically taxing medium; the actors and stage workers had to work hard every time they performed. The invention of the motion picture opened up a world of opportunity. Creators could carefully develop their content;
the pressures of live performance disappeared. And the viewers could experience the viscerality of a stage play on a screen time and time again, if they so wished. Motion pictures had become the ultimate form of entertainment.
Had the world taken another path in history, would we still have films? I think so. There is something fundamental about films. Films capitalise on the two easiest reproducible (and arguably the two most important) senses: sight and
hearing. Once the screen was made, anything could be projected onto the screen, as long as a filmmaker had the imagination to do so. And we have been experts at making sounds since the dawn of time. It is, after all, how we communicate.
Films are a logical step in entertainment precipitated by advances in technology.
Even on a fundamental level, humanity was always destined to end up with films. Films are just another medium for telling stories and expressing art, something we have been doing since the beginning. Both these things are inextricably
linked; by creating art, we implicitly establish a story and vice versa: storytelling is art. This duality - art and storytelling - is as old as humanity. Its earliest recorded form manifests itself as the cave painting. Yet, I’m sure
before cave paintings, prehistoric humans were still uttering anecdotes to each other in a primitive, faraway tongue of things that had happened, could have happened, and would happen. Storytelling and art define us as a species. And
films are the ultimate form of expressing these two things.
