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Home » pioneers

7 Pioneer Filmmakers Lost To Time

October 23, 2015 By Vernon Gadson Leave a Comment

Art is a fickle mistress, as has many times been proven the case. An artist’s “destiny” cannot really be predicted, or to be more coldly rational, his/her public evolution and legacy are part of a causal chain with many many factors involved which most of the time are outside of his direct control and subject to wild fluctuations depending on the “spirit of the times” or a given society’s culture, norms and values. Therefore, the conclusion of this causal chain cannot be determined with the insufficient information he/she or any of his/her peers have at the beginning of his/her career.

So it’s no surprise that you have one hit wonders that pop up bright as a comet and fade just as fast. Or on the contrary, slow starters who amaze the world with their talent and skills in the later part of their lives. Or chaotic up and down performances from artists who one day are amazing and then for a while (or a good while) are … disappointing to say the least. Then, some of them have comebacks.

Then, of course, there’s “the greats”. The ones that everyone knows because of their (as much as humanly possible) constant masterful outputs.

But what about those who were “greats”, but for one reason or another, simply disappeared from memory. Yes, as scary and unfair as this sounds for an artist, it happened enough times in our history. Which is why, in a feeble and minor attempt to right some of these injustices, you can read below about 7 pioneer filmmakers lost to time.

1. Francis Martin Duncan

7 pioneer filmmakers lost to time - Francis Martin Duncan

If you like today’s lengthy and informative documentaries (BBC, Discovery, National Geographic etc.), you probably have Mr. Duncan to thank. As he is the first to create a nature documentary in 1903. It’s called “Cheese Mites” and it was done using a combination of still photography and a microscope, which Duncan came up with. It features cheese mites going about their business, as I’m sure you’ll be surprised to find out.

2. James Williamson and George Albert Smith

These two pioneered most of the editing concepts still used today. The idea of creating a narrative by alternating the distance in the shots comes from them. In “Grandma’s Reading Glass” for example, of 1900, you can see the first POV ever. They did other cool stuff too, including breaking the fourth wall in “The Big Swallow” (1901).

3. William Dickson

William Dickson is one of the 7 pioneer filmmakers lost to time.

We can no longer conceive of a movie without sound. But that was the case for a long time. So, thank pioneers like William Dickson who made the very first partially successful attempt at a recording with both video and sound in 1894’s “Dickson Experimental Sound Film”. Though this attempt was on separate supports and not synchronized. However, he claimed he achieved success in 1899 (still well before the first official movie with sound, “The Jazz Singer” of 1927), but this recording has yet to be found.

4. Oscar Micheaux

The list of 7 pioneer filmmakers lost to time includes Oscar Micheaux.

This man, who was an African-American actor, fought to break some pretty impressive barriers at the time, and succeeded. Namely he made the first lengthy black movie to be shown in a “whites only” cinema. And his movies were shown more than once, including in theaters in Europe, despite being low-budget works as he had constant financial, legal and technical obstacles.

5. The Skladanowsky brothers

Everyone knows another set of brothers (the Lumieres) as the inventors of public cinema. But, surprisingly, the Skladanowsky brothers are the absolute first to have had a screening of a series of 9 second movies for which the audience paid to see. And all of this happened on the 1st of November 1985, a few weeks before the famous Lumieres premiere. But the projection system which the latter had was better, so they were remembered while the Skladanowskys were not.

6. Jean Painleve

7 pioneer filmmakers lost to time - Jean Painleve

This man managed (among many other achievements), to invent the technology needed for making the first underwater photos and movies, at the dawn of cinematography. Watch his documentary of 1934 “L’Hippocampe” in which he filmed sea-horses underwater.

7. Alice Guy-Blanche

Perhaps fiction is one of the most important things in art, with its ability to broaden mental horizons and its impulse for us to use our imagination. As the Lumieres’ screening of just a year earlier was still very much something that the world was trying to get used to, and all early movies shown presented facts of life, realities, Alice made a short about a woman magically picking babies from a cabbage patch. It’s called La Fee au Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) and it was filmed in 1896.

Image source: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Filed Under: movies Tagged With: dawn of cinema, early cinematography, filmmakers, pioneer filmmakers, pioneers

10 Software Pioneers of the 80s

April 24, 2014 By Fred Mitchell Leave a Comment

The ’80s are apparently back in style with a lot of nostalgia-capitalizing ventures are bringing them back with a glamorous vengeance. With that said, it’s about time we do a different kind of excursion into the 80s. Many associate that decade only with a few major rock bands and legendary singers or neon colors and ridiculous hair-styles. However, the ’80s were also a time when major technological progress was achieved and few software pioneers laid the foundation for the hyper digital world we live in today. Let’s take a look at ten of them, presented in no particular order. Since all of them are so great, making a top out of their contributions would be not only difficult but also kind of inappropriate.

1. Peter Norton

1

This guy is best known for the ground-breaking anti-virus, named after him. After a while, he sold it to Symantec, but all of us pre-millennial people have definitely heard of them back in the day. Current computer security systems still owe this guy a lot.

2. Chuck Geshke and John Warnok

2

We live in the world of Adobe reader and Photoshop (which is sometimes done hilariously wrong), but few of us know that these two guys founded Adobe Systems in 1982. They released the now ubiquitous Photoshop in 1989. This photo is taken in 1988, a year before.

3. Mitch Kapor

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He founded Lotus Software together with Jonathan Sachs in 1982, but it was Kapor who designed the Lotus 1-2-3, the spreadsheet program that made Lotus a software leader.

4. Scott Cook and Tom Proulx

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These two guys are to thank for how quickly the financial world moves today. Their company, Intuit, founded in California in 1983, rose to fame following the release of the Quicken program for personal finance. Later, the company also released its accounting software, QuickBooks, which further revolutionized the digital finances.

5. Michael Cowpland

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He launched Cowpland Research Laboratory, which would later be shortened to Corel, in 1985. Four years later, he introduced the still famous CorelDraw that trained generation of digital editing professionals.

6. John McAfee

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Probably not how you would imagine a computer geek to look, John McAfee is known for his turbulent life-style and trouble with the law, but his name also stands behind McAfee and Associates, another anti-virus giant founded in the 80s.

7. John Walker (with early employees)

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This guy founded the company Autodesk in 1982 and helped author its most well-known product, the AutoCAD software (CAD stands for computer-aided design). This software is still intensively used, especially within the engineering and architecture community, but not only.

8. Bill Warner

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He founded Avid in 1987, and the company is still famous for its video production possibilities and its editing software. He’s an MIT graduate and he modestly credits his start in technology to a farmer, John Beall, who made him start using chips in his prototypes.

9. Ed Iacobucci

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Iacobucci was a former IBM developer who co-founded Citrix in 1989. His untimely demise caused by cancer (in 2013) put an end to what was still a path of promising creativity and potential.

10. Ray Noorda

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Another software pioneer that met an early death, which left the computer world poorer in potential, Ray Noorda was the co-founder of Novell, the developer of NetWare. He died in 2006 of some Alzheimer-related complications, but his contributions changed the face of today’s digital world.

What’s truly admirable about these software pioneers of the 80s isn’t just their creativity and innovation, but also the fact that being a computer geek was less of a desirable endeavor in those days than it is now. Somehow, this gives passionate people from back then even more of a passionate aura and extra credit points, in my book.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: computer, geek, pioneers, software, technology, the 80s

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