1900s

Why the 1900s look like this

Film in the 1900s was still 35 mm nitrate, exposed in wooden cameras on tripods and cranked by hand at around sixteen frames a second. What changed was the audience. Films grew from single shots into stories: Méliès sent a rocket into the eye of the Moon in 1902, and The Great Train Robbery came out in 1903. By the middle of the decade storefront cinemas in American cities charged a nickel a show. Private filming stayed rare. A 35 mm camera, its film and the laboratory work cost far more than an ordinary family could spend, so the people filming gardens and garden parties were wealthy amateurs and the professionals they hired.

The emulsion was orthochromatic. It saw blue and green but no red, which is why skies in old films are blank white and red lips print nearly black. The silver grain was coarse. A cranking operator could never hold a perfectly even speed, so exposure wavered frame by frame and the picture flickered. The gate let the film drift a little from side to side, and the projected frame swam against the screen edge.

Color came after the shooting, in the laboratory. Tinting dyed the whole print, so the light parts of the picture took the color: amber or yellow for daylight and lamplight, blue for night, red for fire. Toning worked the other way, replacing the silver in the image with a colored compound, so the shadows took the color and the highlights stayed clear. From about 1905 a French studio sold stencil-colored prints. Workers cut a stencil for each color, frame by frame, and dyes were brushed or machined through them. The colors were flat, a little out of register, and spilled past the edges of the things they colored.

Animators found that a camera could expose one frame at a time. A drawing changed between exposures moved when projected. Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie of 1908 was drawn this way, and its motion has the jerky, held quality of single frames.

Snapshots, meanwhile, became cheap. In 1900 a cardboard box camera sold for a dollar and took 117 roll film, giving square pictures about 2¼ inches a side. A year later the 120 roll arrived; it is still made. Folding cameras with bellows were sharper, and a postcard-size roll film of 1903 let people print their negatives straight onto postcard backs: the real photo postcard. Prints were contact prints on developing-out paper, warm black or toned brown with sepia. In 1907 the first practical color plate went on sale in France. It carried a layer of potato starch grains dyed orange, green and violet, gave soft pastel color and needed exposures of a second or more in good light. At the other end of taste, pictorialist photographers made deliberately soft prints in gum and platinum to look like paintings.

What the camera rebuilds

The 1900s technologies run at a 16 fps cadence, held inside the 24 fps file your iPhone records (how frame holding works). The base is orthochromatic black and white, slightly finer and steadier than the 1890s, with heavy grain, flicker, gate weave and soft corners. Hand-Cranked Motion slows to 15 fps with stronger weave.

The color technologies follow the lab. Tinted Film Sequence puts an amber dye in the highlights and keeps the blacks black. Toned Film puts a steel blue in the shadows and keeps the whites white. Stencil Colour Film reduces your scene's colors to a few flat, pale stencil hues and lets them spill slightly off their edges. Single-Frame Animation holds every frame three times, for an 8 fps step. Period Film Print is the only one with scratches and dust.

In STILL, the decade's base is the box camera's square print with a white border, toned warm black. Around it you get a card-mounted studio portrait, 7:5 folding-camera prints, the long postcard shape, sepia and neutral prints, a pictorialist print with paper texture and a soft glow, and the color plate. Starch-Grain Colour Plate softens color and lays a fine, still mosaic of colored specks over it. Hand-Tinted Postcard washes light color over a sepia print.

With SOUND on PERIOD, your audio passes through an early acoustic phonograph: roughly 220 to 2,800 Hz, a horn resonance, surface crackle and hiss, and a little wow. Film of this decade was silent; the sound is the record player in the next room.

Shooting tips

• Tint for the time of day. Film an evening walk with Toned Film for a blue night, and a sunny lunch with Tinted Film Sequence for amber daylight. That is the color code silent prints used.
• Bring color to the stencil. Stencil Colour Film needs something to stencil. Shoot flowers, costumes or a bright shirt against a plain wall at DEGREE 7.
• Animate a desk. Put the phone on a stand and move a cup, a pen or a paper cut-out a little every half second with Single-Frame Animation. The held frames make smooth motion look stepped.
• A square from the beach. Seaside Holiday Snapshot is bright and low in contrast, as box cameras were in full sun. Frame your subject in the middle of the square, as box cameras encouraged.
• Hold still for color. Starch-grain plates needed long exposures, so their subjects posed. Shoot Starch-Grain Colour Plate in a garden with your sitter still, and keep DEGREE between 5 and 8.

Move on to the 1910s for war newsreels, two-color film and the vest-pocket camera.