Aside from The Kiss, this year we have some genuinely amazing work from Georges Méliès – real one-minute horror and fantasy films, a huge leap forward for the artform.
The Haunted Castle (Le Manoir du diable)
The Kiss
Le Cauchemar (A Nightmare)
Snowball Fight
McKinley at Home, Canton, Ohio
Blackfriars Bridge
Lion, London Zoological Gardens
The Vanishing Lady
La Fée aux Choux
Carmaux, défournage du coke
Une Partie de Cartes
L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat
Annabelle Serpentine Dance
Repas de bébé
Barque sortant du port
Akrobatisches Potpourri
La Charcuterie mécanique
Démolition d’un mur
The Derby
L’Arroseur Arrosé
Cordeliers’ Square in Lyon
The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots
Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory
If you were surprised to find that Thomas Edison reciting “Mary Had A Little Lamb” wasn’t the first thing in the first mix, you may also recollect that sound film started in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. But here we are 32 years earlier, and what do you know, here’s the first example of someone combining moving pictures with recorded sound.
Of course this makes sense when you think about it. If you’ve got a gramophone and an experimental film camera around, why not try using them at the same time? William Kennedy Dixon, one of the more important people in the invention of film, had two men dance while another played the violin, with a fourth man making a brief appearance in the final seconds.
Vito Russo posited that this was the first piece of gay cinema, but I’m afraid that’s probably just wishful thinking – these were different times, when it was also quite common for men to dance with men without any homosexual overtones. It’s also not a good example of either dancing or violin playing, of course.
What I do find fascinating about the clip, though, it is the picture it gives of Edison’s Black Maria Studio, especially the gigantic recording horn, suspended on a wire from the ceiling. The ugliness of the work uniforms the men wear is also very interesting – a reminder that the photos we rely on for a sense of the Victorian age are usually their Sunday best, and not a real representation of everyday life
So here it is then, sound and vision, married together as awkwardly as two studio workers forced to dance a waltz.
Annabelle – Serpentine Dance
Corbett and Courtney Before the Kinetograph
Carmencita
Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894
Annie Oakley Shooting
Produced by William Dickson at Edison’s Black Maria studio in New Jersey, Blacksmith Scene is the earliest example of a staged scene with actors playing roles.
Cinema was even more a sideshow attraction than recorded sound in 1892. In pre-Lumiere France, cinematic pioneer Émile Reynaud was projecting slides with moving images in front of painted backgrounds at his Théâtre Optique in Paris. In a sense this had been done for hundreds of years with magic lantern shows, but Reynaud’s innovation was that foreground figures could be pre-painted frame by frame and set on film in order to produce the illusion of movement; in magic lantern shows figures would have hand-operated puppet-like fixed movements.
Reynaud’s figures are full of life and character, and while ‘lifelike’ might be a bit of a stretch, it’s a bold leap forward, and it’s a shame that it doesn’t get more recognition.
