托福阅读｜托福阅读中的电影发展史

相传1872年，美国一个酒店里，Muybridge和别人打赌马在奔跑时是否有四个蹄子都腾空的时候……

Edward Muybridge, attempted to settle a $25, 000 bet over whether the four feet of a galloping horse ever simultaneously left the ground. He arranged a series of 24 cameras alongside a racetrack to photograph a galloping horse. Rapidly viewing the series of pictures produced an effect much like that of a motion picture. Muybirdge’s technique not only settled the bet (the feet did leave the ground simultaneously at certain instances) but also photography.

后来发生的事情大家都知道了，Muybridge赌赢了，顺便还促成了电影的发明。

Instead of 24 cameras taking one pictures in rapid order, it was Thomas Edison and his assistant, William Dickson, who finally developed what might have been the first practical motion-picture camera and viewing device, Edison was apparently trying to provide a visual counterpart to his recently invented phonograph.

Dickson后来改进了这个设备，成就了大名鼎鼎的Kinetoscope，甚至为了展示这个机器还给它拍了一个介绍短片。

但是，问题来了，这样的设备同一时间只能让一个人看，远没有让很多人同时看获益多，怎么办呢？

With the advent of projection, the viewer's relationship with the image was no longer private, as it had been with earlier peepshow devices such as the Kinetoscope and the Mutoscope, which was a similar machine that reproduced motion by means of successive images on individual photographic cards instead of on strips of celluloid. It suddenly became public — an experience that the viewer shared with dozens, scores, and even hundreds of others. At the same time, the image that the spectator looked at expanded from the minuscule peepshow dimensions of 1 or 2 inches (in height) to the life-size proportions of 6 or 9 feet.

对了，就是投影技术，真正让电影面向大众，于是就有了现代电影的雏形。

1894年William Dickson进行了有声电影的尝试。

1895年，最早的电影特技问世。

这一个个电影史上的里程碑造就了我们今天丰富多彩的电影。

虽然有关电影的阅读文章考到的频率不高，但是只要一出现还是会难倒一大片同学，所以大家还是要多积累一些相关的背景知识和词汇噢。

TPO中相关的文章有TPO-2-Early Cinema，TPO-12-Transition to Sound in Film，还有历年多次考到的真题The Early History of Motion Pictures.