THE
CINEMA IN FLUX

The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era

by Lenny Lipton

The first of its kind, this book traces the evolution of motion picture technology in its entirety. Beginning with Huygen’s magic lantern and ending in the current electronic era, it explains cinema’s scientific foundations and the development of parallel enabling technologies alongside the lives of the innovators. Product development issues, business and marketplace factors, the interaction of aesthetic and technological demands, and the patent system all play key roles in the tale.

The topics are covered sequentially, with detailed discussion of the transition from the magic lantern to Edison’s invention of the 35mm camera, the development of the celluloid cinema, and the transition from celluloid to digital. Unique and essential reading from a lifetime innovator in the field of cinema technology, this engaging and well-illustrated book will appeal to anyone interested in the history and science of cinema, from movie buffs to academics and members of the motion picture industry.

Welcome!

Learn about The Cinema in Flux and Its Author

About
The Book

The Table of Contents reflects the depth and breadth of the book. The subtitle says it all: ” The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era.”

About
Lenny Lipton

American inventor, author, and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940.

About
The Inventors

Scroll through a sample collage of 70 of the inventors discussed in the book.

“THE CINEMA IN FLUX reveals to us the history of how motion picture technology changed and progressed through its various eras; such knowledge can inform filmmakers of the heritage behind the camera and the screen—possibly shining a light on the question of ‘what’s next?’”

— Douglas Trumbull

The Cinema in Flux

The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era

From the Author’s Preface

From the
Author’s Preface

The Cinema in Flux is a book that follows a vision of cinema’s technological evolution in alignment with that of a number of modern cinema scholars. But not so long ago, for others who have written about it, cinema begins with inventions of Eastman’s film, Edison’s camera, and the Lumières’ Cinématographe, notions that have contributed to the popular view of the subject. This impression is conveyed by dutifully noting that the magic lantern is a preamble to the big event, relegated to the archeological nether regions of “pre-cinema,” which include prehistoric cave paintings, along with nods to Chinese, Indian, and Javanese shadow puppet shows. The idea that the era of the magic lantern is not pre-cinema but cinema itself, and not some archaic backwater, is based on the most fundamental definition of cinema technology, which in my view is the projection of motion.

“This extraordinary work by Lenny Lipton is valuable not only because of the quality of its analysis, its breadth, its vision, and its erudition, but also because of its clarity and literary style…”

— Laurent Mannoni
Curator, Cinémathèque Française, Paris

Testimonials

Here's what some of the top critics and academics
are saying about The Cinema in Flux.

Here's what some of the top critics and academics are saying about The Cinema in Flux.

“The technological development of the illusion of motion that creates ‘moving pictures’ is at the core of this important book. Lenny Lipton brings tremendous clarity to this idea: ‘moving’ being both apparent motion as well as an emotionally moving projected picture and sound, experienced together with others in a darkened theater…”

Douglas Trumbull Producer, Director, Visual Effects Mavric

“What makes Lenny Lipton’s book admirable and exciting, one of a kind, is that the author—one of the great designers of modern 3D—during his long career has been a technician, director, inventor, and entrepreneur. Thanks to his training and long experience, he has the knowledge of science and the film industry to allow him to approach the long history of cinema, punctuating it with patents, both those that were successful and industrial disasters, magnificent failures and major and minor developments. No film historian, until now, had such a valuable background.”

Laurent Mannoni Curator, Cinémathèque Française, Paris

“The first of its kind, this book traces the evolution of motion picture technology in its entirety. Beginning with Huygen’s magic lantern and ending in the current electronic era, it explains cinema’s scientific foundations and the development of parallel enabling technologies alongside the lives of the innovators. Product development issues, business and marketplace factors, the interaction of aesthetic and technological demands, and the patent system all play key roles in the tale.”

Springer Driving academic publishing since 1842

Let's Discuss the Book

Amazon Customer Rating

★★★★★ 5/5

Please write a review or post your thought on The Cinema in Flux below.

Congratulations to Lenny Lipton on his extraordinary book

October 11, 2021

An amazing work of scholarship, knowledge, organization, kindness and writing. It is generous to the many names in movie history, sung and unsung, who toiled through the years to make a new art form. If history and learning mean anything, the book will live forever. A testament to lives well spent.

Barry Spinello

Lenny Lipton’s book is intimidating, compelling, and incredibly interesting

October 6, 2021

Lenny Lipton’s book will become an encyclopedia of film technology, to be used by scholars, engineers and technicians, marketing people, and lawyers. And, it will become required reading for people who love film and the technology that has made it possible. It’s a book to be enjoyed as well as learned from.
Lipton traces the history of the development and evolution of film capture, production, and reproduction. But he does more than that, something that is very hard to accomplish in a history book – he tells a story and draws you into it.
Lipton traces the developments with pictures of the inventors, drawings of their apparatus and patents, examples of film clips, and other intriguing images. He takes us from Huygen’s Magic Lantern, a 17th-century image projector that used transparent plates and a light source for entertainment purposes, through a few wars and the technology push they created, to IMAX and the evolution of movies that mimic human video stereo vision, of which Lipton was one of the pioneering inventors. Many of the stories are told from a personal experience point-of-view. The overall insights and background information is astounding and speaks to the work Lipton put into this masterpiece—he spent over 10 years developing, researching and writing this book. But in fact, he spent all his whole life because this is as much about the last 30 years of his life as it is about the book.
This tome can be entered anywhere. You can literally open it up and randomly select a page to read. You will very quickly learn something you didn’t know, or even suspect. Why are their 15 perforations in film? How does sound get into the movie—the many ways that challenge was eventually solved is an incredible story. What happened to Cinerama, and all the other competing RAMAs. What role did (and does) TV play in the development and evolution of cinema. How did color TV come to be, and why? And how are the giant screens of today’s theaters driven with such brightness, speed, resolution, and spatial sound?
The book itself is beautiful, coffee-table quality—and in fact, it has a place of honor on my coffee table, so I can easily look at it and refer to it.

John Warren

Marvellous Book

October 6, 2021

This book is fantastic beyond words. For a long time I have been searching for a good comprehensive book on the history of motion picture technology. This is the first one I have found and it is wonderful. It is absolutely positively a must have for anyone interested in motion picture technology history.
There seems to be nothing that this book does not cover. And wow does it cover everything from the 17th century to the present in minute detail. Anything you want to know about this subject can most probably be found in this book.
The physical characteristics of the book are perfection. Its appearance is beautiful. The cover, the paper quality, the font, the page layouts are all excellent.
My compliments and appreciation to the author.

Randy

This book has a prized position on my bookshelves

July 15, 2021

Hi Lenny,
Just a quick note to say your new book is great, it has a prized position on my bookshelves.
I do believe there is one small error, on page 550, you mention that “The Robe” was shot for three kinds of exhibition. Actually the movie started shooting in the standard Academy ratio, but after one week the production was shut down. When filming started back up they started from scratch shooting in both CinemaScope and the Academy format on the assumption that not all theaters would be able to project the CinemaScope version. To my knowledge 3D was never planned for “The Robe.”
Thank you for all the work on this book, it will be a great reference.
Best regards, Lawrence

Lawrence Kaufman

Response from The Cinema In Flux, by Lenny Lipton

Hello Lawrence,
I cannot corroborate to my satisfaction that The Robe was also shot stereoscopically. According to Carr and Hayes in their book, Widescreen Movies (see page 60) the film was shot both anamorphically and in the standard 1.33 to 1 aspect ratio. I’ve done a literature search based on your query and cannot corroborate my assertion that the film was also shot in 3-D. Thank you for your correction and I hope other readers provide similar helpful suggestions.
Lenny

My First Amazon Review

June 23, 2021

“The Most Comprehensive History of Cinema I’ve Ever Read”
As an independent filmmaker and life-long cinephile, I was fascinated by the depth of history behind today’s movies. There is so much information and so many things that I never knew or was misinformed about in the past that are illuminated in this book. It’s full of helpful illustrations and pictures that support the information presented.
What Mr. Lipton does that is totally new and fresh is his novel classification system that links past moving image technology (dating back to the 15th century) to the present in a fluid stream of idea syntheses—from the magic lantern to digital 3-D.
The book, itself, is extremely well-produced. It’s heavy, with wonderful printing quality. The image reproduction is excellent and the type is very legible. And it’s quite aesthetically pleasing, overall.

Michael R.R. McLaughlin

Write your own review.

About the Author,
Lenny Lipton

About the Author of
The Cinema in Flux

Lenny Lipton, an American inventor, author, and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940. He was the lead inventor of the technology that enabled the film industry to project feature films in 3-D. He founded StereoGraphics Corporation in 1980 and in 1981 demonstrated the flickerless stereoscopic projection technique that is the basis for 80,000 theatrical cinema installations. He is the primary inventor of the ZScreen electro-optical modulator, introduced in 1988 and used for molecular modeling and aerial mapping visualization. In 1996 he was honored by the Smithsonian Institution for the invention of CrystalEyes, introduced by StereoGraphics in 1989, the first electronic eyewear for stereoscopic visualization such as molecular modeling, aerial mapping, and medical imaging. NASA used it to remotely drive the Mars Rovers and Lockheed to design the upgrade for the Hubble Space Telescope. He has been granted more than 70 United States Patents in the field of electronic stereoscopic displays.

“The most complete and accurate account of the technology behind movies, from the camera obscure to the modern digital era.”

— Springer

“[The Cinema in Flux asks:] Will cinema survive by transforming itself into an even more high-powered juggernaut of immersive and experiential technical perfection or will it retain its ability to be dramatically moving and an emotional experience based on writing, directing, photography, acting, editing, all in the service of illuminating the human experience while still preserving showmanship? The question before us is: will cinema lose its soul?”

— Douglas Trumbull

“Split into digestible sections and accompanied by plenty of illustrations.”

— Springer

Editing Portraits for The Cinema in Flux

Editing Portraits for
The Cinema in Flux

How the Many Portraits in the Book Were Created

T he Cinema in Flux is a book that has more than 570 illustrations, more than 70 of which are pictures of people who contributed to the history of motion picture technology. In some cases I was not able to find a good quality image of the person, which was the case for Earl Sponable, head of Fox’s research and development efforts for nearly half a century. I found only a few images of Sponable, all of poor quality, the best of which was his obituary portrait.

Continue Reading about how the portraits were created...

I think that the reader shouldn’t have to look through a barrier of blemishes, halftone dots, and other artifacts, to appreciate a photo, but a “restoration,” which might consist of removing spots and scratches and improving the tonality of the image, may not work if it is based on a low resolution source. In such a case overpainting using Photoshop techniques were used for the portrait of Sponable.

The Edison image presented a different challenge. Most of the images I use in Flux came to me as digital files, such as those from the collection of the Cinémathèque Française or the internet, but in the case of Edison, the one I liked the best was from Paul Spehr’s book The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson (New Barnet, UK: John Libbey Publishing Ltd., 2008).

There are many images of Edison, many of which were photographed in his later years, but I wanted a picture of him in his prime portraying his inventive, thoughtful, and playful nature. The image I scanned from Spehr’s book was good, but I thought I’d interpret it to make it more vital, so I used techniques of filtering and painting in Photoshop that some people call paintography, but I think it’s not an inadequate term; I call the process I used infiltration.

For the Edison photo a great deal of trial and error took place over a period of three years. I finally used a Photoshop technique to simulate a sketch that I then colored, blurred, and combined with the monochrome scan of Edison. I then painted over the blended images, which gave the result you see here.

I like it because it appears to be hand colored, but somewhat haphazardly, with unplanned effects that I find to be pleasing. Something comes across that I haven’t seen in other photos of the man; here Edison looks wistful.

“[A]bove all, [The Cinema in Flux] has an originality that strongly distinguishes it from its predecessors.”

— Laurent Mannoni
Curator, Cinémathèque Française, Paris

Connect with the Publisher

Release Dates and Lecture Availability

Email Address

customerservice@springernature.com

Phone

+ 1 800 777 4643
+ 1 212 460 1500

Address

Street Name, FL 54785
United States of America.

“Shows how competing technological, cultural, economic, and legal factors shaped the cinema and TV industries.”

— Springer

Let's Discuss the Book

Amazon Customer Rating

★★★★★ 5/5

Please write a review or post your thought on The Cinema in Flux below.

Congratulations to Lenny Lipton on his extraordinary book

October 11, 2021

An amazing work of scholarship, knowledge, organization, kindness and writing. It is generous to the many names in movie history, sung and unsung, who toiled through the years to make a new art form. If history and learning mean anything, the book will live forever. A testament to lives well spent.

Barry Spinello

Lenny Lipton’s book is intimidating, compelling, and incredibly interesting

October 6, 2021

Lenny Lipton’s book will become an encyclopedia of film technology, to be used by scholars, engineers and technicians, marketing people, and lawyers. And, it will become required reading for people who love film and the technology that has made it possible. It’s a book to be enjoyed as well as learned from.
Lipton traces the history of the development and evolution of film capture, production, and reproduction. But he does more than that, something that is very hard to accomplish in a history book – he tells a story and draws you into it.
Lipton traces the developments with pictures of the inventors, drawings of their apparatus and patents, examples of film clips, and other intriguing images. He takes us from Huygen’s Magic Lantern, a 17th-century image projector that used transparent plates and a light source for entertainment purposes, through a few wars and the technology push they created, to IMAX and the evolution of movies that mimic human video stereo vision, of which Lipton was one of the pioneering inventors. Many of the stories are told from a personal experience point-of-view. The overall insights and background information is astounding and speaks to the work Lipton put into this masterpiece—he spent over 10 years developing, researching and writing this book. But in fact, he spent all his whole life because this is as much about the last 30 years of his life as it is about the book.
This tome can be entered anywhere. You can literally open it up and randomly select a page to read. You will very quickly learn something you didn’t know, or even suspect. Why are their 15 perforations in film? How does sound get into the movie—the many ways that challenge was eventually solved is an incredible story. What happened to Cinerama, and all the other competing RAMAs. What role did (and does) TV play in the development and evolution of cinema. How did color TV come to be, and why? And how are the giant screens of today’s theaters driven with such brightness, speed, resolution, and spatial sound?
The book itself is beautiful, coffee-table quality—and in fact, it has a place of honor on my coffee table, so I can easily look at it and refer to it.

John Warren