(Note: Due to the 1896 version being lost media, the video here is a remake by Alice Guy from 1900. It is often incorrectly cited as the 1896 original.)
Alice Guy was born in Paris on July 1, 1874, and began her career as a secretary for inventor and industrialist Léon Gaumont in 1894. She directed La Fée aux Choux as a means of demonstrating the possibilities of the camera manufactured by Gaumont, in the process not only producing quite possibly the first fantasy film but becoming the first female film director!
The film was based on a French children’s tale that boys are born in cabbages and girls in roses (a cabbage supposedly resembling a baby’s head). It was quite long for its time, clocking at 1 minute! Guy was soon promoted to the company’s head of motion picture production and directed most of their films until 1905. She not only experimented with cinematic techniques (running film backward, double exposure, etc.) but also used Gaumont’s Chronophone to produce around 100 “sound” films between 1906 and 1907.
Over time, a lot of her accomplishments were forgotten or attributed to her male colleagues. Today only a few of films she produced remain.
Noble P. et al. (2013). ‘Languages of love: 10 unusual terms of endearment’, BBC News, 30 May. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22699938 [Accessed: 22 December 2021].
Whereas most films at the time were documentaries that chronicled small events (a dance, waves crashing, workers leaving a factory, etc.), L’Arroseur Arrosé (also known as Le Jardinier / The Gardener) presented a complete and self-contained narrative – an early instance of scripted storytelling! The story is circular: we see the gardener in his normal environment, this normality is disrupted by the boy who steps into the frame, and upon the boy being punished for his prank and banished from the screen, a return to normality. The comedy works due to the audience seeing events from an omniscient point-of-view, thus being privy to events unaware to the gardener and anticipating the outcome.
Lumière claimed that film was based on a prank played by his younger brother Édouard on the family gardener François Clerc; however evidence points to him being possibly influenced by a popular comic strip gag that first appeared in Le Chat Noir on July 4, 1885, titled Arrosage public (art: Uzès, the pseudonym of Achille Lemot). Other iterations include Ein Bubenstreich in the October 15, 1886, issue of Fliegende Blätter (art: Hans Schließmann) and the oft-cited L’Arroseur from a 1887 publication by Quantin (art: Hermann Vogel). All closely depict the events from the film. It is not entirely impossible that Édouard, influenced by the comic strip, re-created the scene in real-life and inspired his older brother. Depending on what is to be believed, L’Arroseur Arrosé may be considered the first instance of film adaptation.
Imagerie artistique de la Maison Quantin, Série 4, Planche n°4, 1887 (art: Hermann Vogel).
As copyright law had not yet been defined for this emerging medium, competing filmmakers would often re-shoot popular films and present to audiences as their own. Remakes of this picture include A Surrey Garden (1896; Birt Acres), The Bad Boy and the Gardener (1896; James H. White), L’Arroseur (1896; Georges Méliès), L’Arroseur Arrosé (1897; Alice Guy), A Practical Joke (1898; George Albert Smith). François Truffaut included a homage to it in Les Mistons (1958).
Poster by Marcellin Auzolle.
Its poster was illustrated by Marcellin Auzolle and is the first one designed to promote an individual film (prior emphasis lay on technological novelty of shows).
Bibliography
Burns, P. T. (2010). ‘Chapter Fifteen 1895-1900’, The History of the Discovery of Cinematography. Available at: http://www.precinemahistory.net/1895.htm [Accessed: 18 December 2021].
IMDb contributors (n.d.). ‘Tables Turned on the Gardener (1895)’, IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000014/ [Accessed: 18 December 2021].
When it comes to the early years of cinema, it is difficult to attribute “firsts” with absolute certainty, largely due to lost records, lost media, rumors and general misconceptions made popular. Likewise, while it is generally accepted that the first public screening of films was by the Lumière brothers, they were preceded by two German brothers, Max and Emil Skladanowsky, by almost two months.
On November 1, 1895, they screened their Wintergartenprogramm to a paying audience at the Berlin Wintergarten Varieté. The full program consisted of: Italienischer Bauerntanz Komisches Reck Das Boxende Känguruh Jongleur Akrobatisches Potpurri Kamarinskaja Serpentintanz Ringkämpfer Apotheose
The films were projected using Max Skladanowsky’s Bioscop dual projector. As the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe was superior to the Bioscop, the Skladanowsky brothers soon fell into obscurity.
One of the more memorable shorts in the program was Das Boxende Känguruh, as evident by Birt Acres’ “remake” the following year, The Boxing Kangaroo (1896). It was not uncommon for early filmmakers to replicate popular films. Even in the Skladanowsky brothers’ program, there is a version of the Serpentine Dance and the Lumière brothers would screen Les Forgerons, a variation of Blacksmith Scene.
Bibliography
Blankenship, J. (2012). ‘1 November 1895: Premiere of Wintergarten Program Highlights Transitional Nature of Early Film Technology’.In: Kapczynski, J. M. & Richardson, M. D. (ed.) A New History of German Cinema. New York: Camden House.
IMDb contributors (n.d. a). ‘Das boxende Känguruh (1895)’, IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0000018/ [Accessed: 4 December 2021].
The titular performer in this film is a Spanish dancer who would perform at Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York City. According to some sources, she is the first woman to appear in a U.S. motion picture.
The 21-second film came under attack by anti-obscenity activists due to provocative tugs at the bottom of her skirt and her ankles being exposed. In some places the film was banned, resulting in one of the earliest examples of censorship in the industry.
Some attribute it to the efforts of Thomas Edison and William Dickson. Others mark the dawn of moving pictures with the works of brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. General consensus rests upon technicalities.
In the 1870’s, Eadweard Muybridge experimented with sequential imaging (chronophotography). He was hired by Leland Stanford, former governor of California, to produce a series of photographs chronicling a horse galloping to finally get an accurate depiction of the action. Efforts thus far in the art world left something to be desired when it came to realism, depicting a galloping horse with all legs extended and off the ground.
Baronet by George Townley Stubbs, 1794.
Muybridge set up multiple cameras along a track and produced a series of photographs published under the title of The Horse in Motion. The images could be translated onto a disc which, when played with the Zoopraxiscope, would produce animation. Although a significant precursor to movie projection, it consisted of a series of photographs each taken by a different device as opposed to footage captured by a single device. As such, it was more of an evolved version of the Phenakistiscope, introduced in 1833. If looser definitions are used, it is possible to keep working backwards until Ancient Greece where Aristotle first noted persistence of vision – still seeing the image of the sun despite no longer looking at it.
Animation based on the June 19, 1978, The Horse in Motion: Sallie Gardner series of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge.
So why is Roundhay Garden Scene significant? Because of an important technicality: it was shot on a single-lens camera (LPCCP Type-1 MkII). For The Horse in Motion, Eadweard Muybridge used numerous cameras. Animations for the Phenakistiscope were a series of drawings presented in a loop (not much different from an animated GIF). Although Louis Le Prince shot Man Walking Around a Corner in 1887, it was done using a 16-lens camera (LPCC Type-16). Therefore, as far as the oldest surviving film as we would define it is concerned, the honor belongs to Roundhay Garden Scene.
The film was shot mid-October 1888 in the garden of Le Prince’s father-in-law in Roundhay, Leeds (West Yorkshire, United Kingdom). It features Adolphe Le Prince (Louis and Elizabeth’s son), Sarah Whitley (mother-in-law; died 10 days after the footage was shot), Joseph Whitley (father-in-law) and Annie Hartley (believed to be the friend of Louis and Elizabeth).
In terms of technicality, it was recorded on 1885 Eastman Kodak paper-based photographic film at 12 fps. The 20 surviving frames at the National Science Museum total 1.66 seconds at 12 fps, whereas the digital version produced by the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (now National Science and Media Museum) in Bradford contains 52 frames and a runtime of 2.11 seconds at 24.64 fps.
The film seems to focus on demonstrating movement, with each person performing an action. One can imagine Louis putting everyone on the spot by asking them to just move around to test his invention. It’s chaotic, if not somewhat awkward (think back to a time somebody prompted you to immediately perform an action). Despite the random movements, the film showcases a basic understanding of framing a shot in a way in which all actions are recorded successfully.
Louis Le Prince was set to showcase his camera and works in the United States when on September 16, 1890, he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris and vanished. Theories regarding his disappearance include fratricide over their mother’s will, secret homosexuality and escaping to start a new life, a murder orchestrated by Edison to prevent Le Prince from patenting and dominating the moving picture scene, and suicide due to debt and apparent failure of experiments in film. His disappearance remains a mystery.
Despite this, these 2 seconds remain, over 130 years later. The people in it have passed away, yet they move in front of us, as if we’re simply glimpsing through a time portal. We see film in the process of being born. It would take a couple of years until it learned to walk.
(Further from the original: Denis Shiryaev has upscaled and colorized Roundhay Garden Scene in an impressive video that can be viewed here.)
Wikipedia contributors (2021a). ‘Eadweard Muybridge’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 November. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge [Accessed: 16 November 2021].
Wikipedia contributors (2021b). ‘Louis Le Prince’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 15 October. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Le_Prince [Accessed: 16 November 2021].
Reel Lessons 