IELTS Listening: The history of moving pictures

Introduction: the speaker helps you with the word ‘hooves’ –

Many believe that the story first began in America in 1877, when two friends were arguing over whether a horse ever had all four feet or ‘hooves’ off the ground when it galloped. 

31. Some photographs of a horse running showed

A  all feet off the ground.

To settle the bet, a photographer was asked to photograph a horse galloping and the bet was settled because you could see that all the hooves were off the ground in some of the photos.

The person who became interested in taking the moving pictures to its next step was the famous American inventor Thomas Edison. Actually, he didn’t do the work himself but rather asked a young Scotsman in his employ to design a system, which he did.

32. The Scotsman employed by Edison

B used available technology to make a new system

Now this young fellow was clever because the first thing he did was study other systems – primitive as they were – of moving pictures and then put all the existing technologies together to make the first entire motion picture system.

33. One major problem with the first system was that

C  the camera was very heavy.

There were, however, a couple of problems with the system. The camera weighed over 200 kilograms and only one person at a time could see the film.

34. Rival systems started to appear in Europe after people had

A  been told about the American system..

Well now, news of the new system in America travelled fast and a number of rival European systems started to appear once people had heard about it.

35. In 1895, a famous new system was developed by

A  a French team working alone.

Then in 1895, three systems were all developed, more or less at the same time and independently of each other. I guess the most famous of these was by the Lumiere Brothers from France, and they called their system the cinematographe which of course is where the word ‘cinema’ comes from. [There were also two brothers in Germany who developed a successful system and they called it a bioskop.]

36. Longer films were not made at the time because of problems involving

C the film projector.

A continuing problem at the time was that the films had a tendency to break when they were being played – a problem which was caused by the tension between the two wheels, or ‘reels’ as they are called, which hold the film.

37. The ‘Lantham Loop’ invention relied on

A  removing tension between the film reels.

They developed the ‘Lantham Loop’, which was the simple addition of a third reel between the two main reels, and this took all the tension away with the result that the film stopped snapping.

Questions 38-40

Write NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS for each answer.

38. The first motion picture was called The Great Train Robbery.

So now there was a real possibility of having films of more than two or three minutes, and this led to the making of The Great Train Robbery – the very first movie made.

39. Sound effects were used for the first time on film in 1926.

I guess the next big step in terms of development of technology was to have people actually talking on the film, and the first step towards this was in 1926 when sound effects were first used on a film.

40. Subtitles were added to The Lights of New York because of its poor sound quality.

This film featured actors speaking only during parts of the film and was called The Jazz Singer, and it wasn’t until 1928 that the first all-talking film was produced, and this was called The Lights of New York. Unfortunately, the sound on this early film was not very good and I believe they put subtitles on the film – that is, they printed the dialogue along the bottom of the film to compensate for this poor sound quality.