Flicks

 

   The older I get, the more vivid the past seems. Less than two years before I was born, Hitler was still alive and squirming in the vise that was closing in on him. Had time begun to spool backwards when I was born, I would now be living in the second Grant administration. So it doesn't feel that long ago when I learn that on this day in 1894 Thomas Edison showed a kinetoscopic film of a man sneezing.

   Edison had invented the phonograph back in 1877 and people were on him constantly to invent a movie projector to go along with it. Edison wasn't excited about the potential of movies. He didn't think they'd make much money, but he did set some of his employees to work on the project in the back lab.

   One major problem with kinetoscopes was that only one person at a time could watch the show through a peep hole. Inventors in Europe had been working on movies for years. Other people had been projecting pinhole images onto flat surfaces since prehistoric times. In the 1600s magic lanterns used a light and a lens to project images painted on glass plates onto a wall in a darkened room.

   In the nineteenth century, the magic lantern was followed by a variety of devices: the phenakistiscope, the zoetrope, as well as the humble flip book. The film in these early projectors was made of paper or canvas looped around parallel rollers. The movie only lasted a few seconds, but the audience was happy to watch the show over and over. Early critics complained of the flickering quality.

   As the century rolled on, there came the Fantoscope, the Bioscope and the Kinematoscope, not to be confused with the kinetoscope. Inventors like to throw in some Greek when naming their inventions: kineto=movement, scopos=to view. In 1870 a Philadelphia inventor demonstrated his Phasmatrope (trope=turn) to an audience of 1500 at a music academy. His short film showed four couples waltzing. There was a 40 member orchestra present to provide verisimilitude. 

   George Eastman's invention of photographic film in 1884 made longer movies possible. A Frenchman, Louis Le Prince, made the oldest known functional moving picture in 1888. It's an extremely short film of people walking in a garden in Leeds, England. Le Prince moved his family to the U.S. to promote his invention. He returned to France to visit family and disappeared after boarding a train. He was 49 and in debt. The theory is that he took his own life.

   Inventors in Europe began showing movies in theaters and made lots of money. When Edison saw that, he upscaled his early Kinetoscope into the Vitascope and his company began making its own movies. Hollywood was not far behind.

   At the beginning of this post, I fantasized living into the past, but in reality I moved into the future with everyone else, thank God. When I was four, my parents took me to my first movie, Snow White. The movie had come out originally in 1938. I was seeing a re-release. It was one of those immersive experiences. The theatre closed shortly thereafter, a victim of the new-fangled television fad. 

   The theatre stood empty and unused for years and I passed it everyday on my way to school. I heard a rumor at school that there was an open door at the back of the theatre. After school a couple of friends and I found the door and explored the place. It was dark inside, but enough light leaked in to provide a camera obscura image of the ever-changing world outside the cave of the imagination.

Date night at the Kaiserpanorama, Berlin, 1880.