Where does the word “cinema” come from?

Whether we like going to the movies, talking about movies, or doing movies, for more than a century, we’ve been using a little 6-letter word (the first two syllables of which are the name of the site you’re currently visiting). When we try to challenge the 7th art.

Pronounced by audiences, fans, and industry professionals as if it had always been there, the word “cinema,” short for “cinematographer,” simply did not exist 132 years ago. But how was it created? who invented And what exactly does it mean?

“Rewrite the Movement”

We had to go back to February 1892 to hear the name “cinematograph” for the first time. At that time the word was still spelled “Cynématographe” and referred exclusively to the new invention of Leon Bull, who was therefore the first to file a patent under that name three years before the Light brothers!

Made up of two words from the ancient Greek – “kinema”, which means “motion” and “graphein”, which means “writing” – the cinematograph should lead to a machine that can “transcribe movement”.

Bowl and light

Officially described as a “reversible photography and optical device for motion analysis and synthesis,” Leon Bull’s creation certainly fails to get people talking. We don’t know exactly what he was capable of, or even if Leon Bulley managed to organize a public demonstration worthy of the name to highlight it. Nevertheless, in 1894, when he could no longer pay for the rights to the patent, the inventor lost ownership of the word “cinematograph”.

A year later, in March 1895, having perfected the kinetograph mechanism (an invention of Thomas Edison and William Dixon) and using the copyright-free word “cinematograph”, brothers Louis and Auguste Lummer organized the first private screening of a motion picture. Freed from a factory in Lyon, and thus credited with authoring what would soon become… cinema.

Physiotherapy or cinema?

Note that four years earlier, Edison and Dixon’s kinetoscope had already allowed them to project a film, but to separate viewers who watched one after the other in a small box and were therefore not placed together in the same room. The name of their invention, also from the ancient Greek, consisted of the words “kinetos” (meaning “mobile”) and “skopeo” (meaning “observation”).

But as we mentioned above, as for the word “cinema” (abbreviation of “cinematograph”, which we now use in everyday language), it is a literal translation of the Greek word “kinema”, which therefore means motion.

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