1899, "movie hall," from French cinéma, shortened from cinématographe "device for projecting a series of photographs in rapid succession so as to produce the illusion of movement," coined 1890s by Lumiere brothers, who invented the technology, from Latinized form of Greek kinēmat-, combining form of kinēma "movement," ...
Etymology. Borrowed from French cinéma, clipping of cinématographe (term coined by the Lumière brothers in the 1890s), from Ancient Greek κίνημα (kínēma, “movement”) + γράφω (gráphō, “write, record”).
The word cinema derives from the Greek kinematographos = kinema and grapho. Κinema (cinema) means the movement and the verb grapho means to write, to record. Cinema records the movement, it is moving images. In English the whole Greek word has been kept in the word cinematography, which is the film making.
When I grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, no-one ever spoke of 'going to the cinema' or 'going to the movies' or even 'seeing a film'. It was always 'going to the pictures'. I don't think I properly registered the word 'cinema' until the late 1950s. Older people still spoke of 'picture palaces' or 'picture houses'.
The rise of "talkies" from the late 1920s onwards led to a radical shake-up of the entertainment industry. Live entertainment went into decline and variety theatres became movie palaces, where eager punters could see exactly the same entertainment as their fellows in Los Angeles, Berlin or Bombay.
A movie theater may also be referred to as a movie house, film house, film theater, cinema or picture house. In the US, theater has long been the preferred spelling, while in the UK, Australia, Canada and elsewhere it is theatre.
A 'Movie theatre' is an American expression equivalent to the English 'Cinema' (See above). Sometimes you could use the word “theater” without “movie”.
The first public Kinetoscope demonstration took place in 1893. By 1894 the Kinetoscope was a commercial success, with public parlours established around the world. The first to present projected moving pictures to a paying audience were the Lumière brothers in December 1895 in Paris, France.
Cinema is from the French cinématographe which comes in part from the greek kinema, meaning movement. So, cinema is really just another word meaning moving picture. It also has come to mean more generally the process of film-making and also the building where films are shown.
The first commercially produced film in natural color was A Visit to the Seaside (1908). The eight-minute British short film used the Kinemacolor process to capture a series of shots of the Brighton Southern England seafront.
In 1905, John P. Harris and Harry Davis opened a five-cents-admission movie theater in a Pittsburgh storefront, naming it the Nickelodeon and setting the style for the first common type of movie theater. By 1908 there were thousands of storefront Nickelodeons, Gems and Bijous across North America.
In 1896, Vitascope Hall, believed to be the first theater in the U.S. devoted to showing movies, opened in New Orleans. In 1909, The New York Times published its first film review (of D.W.
In 1894, the world's first commercial motion-picture exhibition was given in New York City, using Thomas Edison's kinetoscope. In the following decades, production of silent film greatly expanded, studios formed and migrated to California, and films and the stories they told became much longer.
The first color cinematography was by additive color systems such as the one patented by Edward Raymond Turner in 1899 and tested in 1902. A simplified additive system was successfully commercialized in 1909 as Kinemacolor.
Here in Scotland they say fillums. “Cinema”, to mean a place where movies are shown. “Theatre” (note the spelling) in British English means a place where live actors perform a play on stage. “Movie theatre” would be understood, but isn't commonly used.
The idea is, in America one would write movie theater and in Great Britain, we'd say movie theatre. But an interesting fact is that "movie theater" is an American term. In Great Britain, you're more likely to hear one say, "Going to the Cinema," or "Going to the pictures."
In 1895, Woodville Latham, a chemist and Confederate veteran of the Civil War, lured away a couple of Edison's employees and perfected the technique of motion picture projection. In that same year, over in France, Auguste and Louis Lumiere invented the cinematographe which could perform the same modern miracle.
By 1910 the motion picture industry had run through a series of experimental terms and words. However, all those names turned out to be awkward misfits, and simpler terms like “moving picture” and “picture show” had crept into common usage.
What were movies without sound called in the 1920s?
Made from the 1890s through the late 1920s, silent films are movies without synchronized sound and dialogue. Instead, music was often played live in theaters to accompany and punctuate the action that took place on the screen, and dialogue was conveyed through intertitles, or shots of printed text.
The first movie houses were dubbed "nickelodeons," combining the price of admission with the Greek word for theater. By 1908, there were nearly 8,000 nickelodeon theaters in the U.S. and in two years the number had grown to 10,000.
