Marc Zimmermann continues his overview of Dublin's cinema history.

Bioscope era
Gadgets and toys creating the illusion of moving images had been popular for several centuries, yet none of them had incorporated the invention of photography, pioneered by Josef Niépce and Louis Daguerre in 1830s France. From the 1870s onwards a number of inventors and photographers such as Eadweard Muybridge (UK) developed specialist photo cameras to record short sequences of movement by breaking them down into a number of photographic stills. The resulting series of images – such as a galloping horse in one famous 1878 experiment – could be viewed as 'moving pictures', but they had several drawbacks: Such sequences were just few seconds long, and had to be looped endlessly. Furthermore they could not be projected, and were displayed in coin-operated bioscopes – sizeable wooden boxes – usually with a hand crank and a viewing slit for just one person. Attractions called Bioscope Theatres sprang up throughout the world from 1894 onwards to offer entertainment, sometimes housing several dozen bioscopes with different scenes. Many other businesses, such as restaurants, also installed one or two of these 'gadgets' to attract patrons. These predecessors of cinemas proved to be very popular during a busy experimentation period throughout the 1890s.

The birth of film
Motion picture pioneers around the world worked simultaneously on separate technologies to record and project animated sequences. Inventors such as Max and Emil Skladanowsky in Germany, Auguste and Louis Lumière in France, and Thomas Alva Edison in the USA developed groundbreaking technologies and displayed the first films of notable length to paying audiences from December 1895 onwards. This projection onto a screen allowed patrons to view 'moving images' as an audience, thus film was born and future cinemagoers were hooked.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 109.