Cinematography as a field of specialization can be traced to the turn of the 19th century:

December 28th 1895 can be considered the birthday of projected film presented in a theater. It was then that Antoine LumiTre from Lyon, the director of a plant producing film materials and the father of August and Louis LumiTre, hosted in the Grand CafT of Paris a show of living pictures. It was shot by cameras that his sons had developed, and presented with projectors they had constructed. It was the first time the term 'cinTmatographe' was used, formed of the Greek words 'kinTma' (movement) and 'graphein' (to write, to draw, to inscribe). Among those invited was also the director of the Houdini Theater, the master illusionist Georges MTliFs (History of Cinematography, 2003).

á According to Giannetti and Eyman (2001, p. 11), ôthe motion picture was an invention with many inventors.ö Early films were relatively brief and it was not until 1903 when Edwin S. Porter created The Great Train Robbery that movies became longer and special effects such as matte shots of a train passing as seen through a stationhouse window along with various distance shots appeared. The nickelodeon, the works of D.W. Griffith, and new methods of editing, filming, lighting, and employing realistic exterior and inte

Permeating many of the Hollywood films of this era, says Dimendberg (2003), are films that focus on remarkably dissimilar themes, locations, and characters. With some notable exceptions, many of the films produced in this decade were designed to cheer audiences suffering from the ill effects of the Great Depression. Consequently, while realism was developed as a key cinematographic focus in the 1930s, many cinematographers worked with directors and producers who painted vivid pictures of extremely glamorous worlds representing what Dimendberg (2003) considers to be an artificial coherence rather than a harmony among the furnishings symptomatic of the activity of a designer rather than the idiosyncratic accumulation of objects over the course of an individual or institutional history.

rior shots and new frame sizes changed the ways in which films were made (Giannetti & Eyman, 2001).

History of cinematography. (2003). Available at www.mlab.uiah

This is particularly evident, says Black (19950, in films such as All Quiet on the Western Front, a war film that detailed the horrors of war in manner that made a strong anti-war message implicit for audiences. Cinematographer Arthur Edson was responsible for the dramatic use of light and shadow (known in art as chiaroscuro) that make this film unique in early film history.

One of the most important developments impacting upon Hollywood cinematography in the 1930s was the development of the Technicolor process which became available in 1931 (1930s: Technicolor and beyond, 2003). The provision of a beam-splitting prism behind the objective in the Technicolor 3-strip camera made it impossible to use the wide angle objectives generally available in the early 1930s. Technicians set about providing a lens of short focal length and wide relative aperture with the long back focal distance necessary to clear the prism. The most notable feature of these lenses