Joining - Text 3
Hence projectionists’ use of film repairers, or their own two hands, to make up a reel a few hundred metres in length, bringing together a series of pictures, each of which was initially wound onto its own reel. For the first few years the projection space (or exhibition space) was where joining operations took place, rather than in the publishing (or manufacturing) space.
The practice of assembling by abutting took hold fairly quickly, but first a mechanical problem had to be solved so that film projectors would be able to accept larger and heavier reels than the usual smaller reels, without the weight involved in this new system putting enough pressure on the strip of film to cause it to break. The need to employ this kind of assembly was so imperative that a number of technical systems for this purpose were developed. The Lumière brothers, for example, designed a device to encourage this operation: the Carpentier-Lumière feeder, which was independent of the Cinématographe (it was made to be compatible with it without the need for modifications) and which made it possible to project reels of quite some length by placing more than four hundred metres of film on a single reel. It is not yet possible to accurately date the invention of this procedure.[1] Other devices, in particular the Biograph projector (1896) and the Animatographe (1897), developed in Britain by Robert William Paul, made possible the projection of longer strips of film from the start.
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[1] See André Gaudreault and Laurent Le Forestier, De l’assemblage au montage cinématographique: Instauration et standardisation d’une pratique (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2022), 98-99, forthcoming in English translation.