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A Remembrance of Early Movies prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Mister Edison didn't think that projecting movies was the way to go, so he invented a thing called a Kinetoscope. You looked through a little eye-piece at the top of the Kinetoscope, and could see the film strip going through. Most of these movies were less than twenty seconds long — but when we got Kinetoscopes put into our Phonograph Parlor, we were amazed at those twenty seconds! It was so amazing to see actual photographs move, just like real life! And you could see each Kinetoscope film for only a nickel. It didn't matter that they had no story, only a short scene of everyday life — chickens being fed, a girl dancing, or some men tearing down a wall — it was enough that they moved. I read articles about two brothers in France, the Lumières, who got one of Edison's movie cameras and modeled one of their own after it. They called it the Cinématographe (every one of these things had some Greek name), and started making their own films. The Lumières also invented the first projector that worked. Before this, the film might get caught in the projector and get ripped, or it might stay too long in front of the light and burn up. But, building on the work of Major Woodville Latham and his two sons in Virginia, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince in France, and William Friese-Greene in England, the Lumières were able to make a projector that worked. I read of several films that the Lumières made and showed on screens, while we were still looking through our Kinetoscopes. They had one of workers leaving their father's factory, one of a baby eating, and one a train coming into a station. This last one apparently scared the moviegoers to death! They were so surprised by the train coming straight toward them that many of them jumped out of the way! It's hard to imagine now that people couldn't tell that it wasn't real, but back then, it looked so real, it was hard to tell the difference. Then there was one called The Sprayer Sprayed, which I was able to see years later. This was the first movie with a story, despite what everybody says about The Great Train Robbery. A man is watering the lawn with a hose when a young boy comes up and stands on the hose, stopping the water. The man looks into the hose, only to have the boy step off the hose, spraying the man in the face. The man then runs and grabs the boy and sprays him. It didn't seem like anything at the time, I'm sure, but looking back at the movie now, it's funny how the camera never moved — the man chased the boy outside of the frame, and the camera never moved to follow them. But at that time (I believe it was first shown in about 1895), nobody had thought yet of moving the camera — the camera wasn't supposed to do anything, just capture whatever was there in its line of vision. Soon, Mister Edison realized that he had to project films over here. A young man named Thomas Armat had come up with a projector, and Mister Edison bought it from him to market it under the Edison Company name. Mister Edison called it the Vitascope. I remember seeing one of the earliest Vitascope films when a traveling vaudeville show came through town. This was before the nickelodeons started springing up all over, letting anyone with a nickel see projected films. It was called The Kiss, and it showed two popular stage performers of the time kissing. There was a huge outcry over the picture, which some considered pornographic. It seems silly now, what with the developments of the past few years — but it didn't take long for censorship talk to start, did it? But before long it seemed that the Lumières and the Edison Company wanted to make different kinds of films. The Lumière brothers were the fathers of the documentary, filming whatever happened to be near the camera, while Mister Edison's films kept tending more and more toward fiction and staged scenes. prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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