Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: When were the first films publicly shown?

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Posted by Michael Schaffer (Member # 1204) on 10-07-2003, 03:47 AM:

We all know that the first apparatus to watch a moving image was Edison`s Kinetoscope and it is commonly said that the Lumière Brothers were the first to show movies publicly on a screen in Paris in December 1895. But a guy named Kladanowsky showed moving pictures in Berlin in November 1895, and I read somewhere that there were public screenings in New York in May 1895. So where and who was the first?

Posted by Ron Keillor (Member # 1790) on 10-07-2003, 04:13 AM:

quote from Laurent Mannoni: "The Great Art of Light and Shadow:Archaeology of the Cinema" (translated by Richard Crangle):
"Whether the Lumières liked it or not,it was (Max) Skladanowsky who organized the first public commercial showing of films in Europe. This took place in Berlin, on 1 November, 1895."
As for the first showing of any kind,... "Edison gave the first official demonstration of his machine in more or less its final form....9 May, 1893 at the annual meeting of the Department of Physics at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science."
The book is a very thorough history of projected images from the earliest uses of the camera obscura up to the capture and first projection of them. The years 1890-96 get very detailed attention.

Posted by Dick Vaughan (Member # 540) on 10-07-2003, 04:19 AM:

there are a series of fact sheets on Early Cinema on our website.
the one regarding the Lumieres is no 7

See http://www.nmpft.org.uk/insight/info/5.3.45.pdf

Posted by Thomas Hauerslev (Member # 566) on 10-07-2003, 04:57 AM:

The first film ever shown was of course in 70mm.

http://www.in70mm.com/news/2003/louis_de_rochemont/ldr.htm

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 10-07-2003, 06:27 AM:

This is a frequently occurring question.

The first public performance of motion pictures was the Living Pictures exhibit in September, 1895 at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. Charles Francis Jenkins ran Annabelle the Dancer & other Kinetoscope films on the Armat-Jenkins machine.

That tent was also the first movie theatre.

There's a description of how the exhibit went over (it flopped) in Terry Ramsaye's _A Million and One Nights_, an excellent period history of the technical, then commercial development of motion pictures.

Kinetoscopes, & movies previously, were non-projecting single-viewer peep-show devices. Edison's inability to develop a practical projection machine resulted in his licensing a later Armat machine with an agreement to put the Edison name on it & Armat to not disclose its origin. Edison HATED it.

I think the New York exhibition you're thinking of was 1896, not 1895: the famous April 23, 1896 exhibition at Koster & Bial's music hall.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 10-07-2003, 08:25 AM:

I don't know if it was the first, but the Latham brothers first projected 70mm for paying customers on May 20,1895 in New York City. This is well documented, and before the Lumiere show.

Edision's kinetoscope was a single viewer peep show machine, using 35mm 4 perf film. The Latham brothers owned a kinetoscope franchise. The most popular films of the time were boxing matches, one round in each machine. The problem was that everybody just put money in the last machine, to see who won. Since magic lantern slide projectors were common at the time, they decided that they would make more money projecting an entire fight in a "theatre" type setting. They contacted the Edision company about building a projector, but were rebuffed. Edision's buisness model was based on selling the Kintoscopes. If one projector took the place of 20 Kintoscopes, he would make less money. The Latham brothers, being determined, hired guy named Kennedy (no relation to the polititions), who was Edison's chief engineer and the actual inventor of the Kintoscope, to moonlight and build them a projector behind Edision's back. They picked 70mm for the films size, because Edison held the patent for 35mm.

The Latham brothers did not last very long in the motion picture business. Their most lasting contribution to the industry was that the "invented" and patented the upper and lower loops, which in the book "Dictionary Of Film", are still officially called Latham Loops. Edision eventually aquired the patent when he formed the Motion Picture Patents Trust Company.

There is a very interesting book called "A Million And One Nights" by Terry Ramsaye. It is a history of the motion picture business up though 1926, when it was published. All the player in creating the industry were still alive at the time, and the author hunted them all down and interviewed them. The first editions were hand signed by Edision, even though he is not portrayed very nicely in the book.

/Mitchell

Posted by Bruce McGee (Member # 131) on 10-07-2003, 09:34 PM:

I bought a copy of "A Million And One Nights" by Terry Ramsaye after reading about it on one of the film forums. Interesting stuff. I read every word and really enjoyed it.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 10-08-2003, 01:25 AM:

Agreed, it does look like it's May 1895, NYC.

Terry Ramsaye *does* put the Latham machine exhibition first:
"May 20, 1895, the Griffo-Barnett fight went on exhibition to the public at 153 Broadway. It ran its flickering way about four minutes of screen time."

There was also an earlier demonstration of the Latham machine, not to the public:
"On the afternoon of Sunday, April 21, 1895, Woodville Latham gave a demonstration of his projection machine to reporters."

Film size was closer to 70mm. From the development:
"Since he wanted a larger picture to let more light through to the screen, Latham had to abandon the use of Edison's little Kinetoscope films and plan the building of a bigger camera, an amplified edition of Edison's Kinetograph."

The machine used at the May 20, 1895 exhibition:
"This machine differed from the previous projection efforts of Dickson's experiments in Room Five at Edison's laboratory in only one detail, the size of the film. One frame of the Latham picture contained approximately twice the area of one frame of the Edison film."

"The Latham machine was still merely an enlarged Kinetoscope arranged to present a picture by transmitted light on the screen, instead of viewing through a lens set in a peep hole. It was in truth not much of a contribution to the art of the motion picture. It is of historical significance to-day only because it was an expression of the effort toward the screen, and because it did for peculiar reasons, to be later revealed lead to a significance for the name of Latham out of proportion to the mechanical and scientific attainment of the Latham effort."

Mention is also made that it ran the film from reels, instead of a spool bank like the Kinetoscopes. Also, earlier the Edison machine is described by Edison, recollecting 1891 in 1924:
"This screen was five feet square. Geneva stop was probably badly made, as the picture was quite unsteady."

The New York Sun reported on the Latham's May 20, 1895 exhibition:
"The whole picture on the screen yesterday was about the size of a standard window sash, but the size is a matter of expense & adjustment."

That's about a yard or less, it can only be speculated as to the reporter's skill of estimation of area.

Ramsaye notes later in the chapter:
"Meanwhile the problem of screen projection was not so nearly solved as might be surmised at theis point. The pictures which the Latham machine projected were highly imperfect and unsatisfactory."

By 1925 standards, to boot. The one Edison's man (Dickson) was working on in the shop was not acceptable for use, etither. It looks like the Lathams' was sort of a public showing of a prototype that Edison would not have yet deemed acceptable.

It was Armat who developed the first practical, acceptable projection device.

Posted by Leo Enticknap (Member # 534) on 10-09-2003, 01:57 AM:

He never got as far as a public show, but another name worth mentioning as a footnote is that of Louis Augustin Le Prince, a French engineer who settled in Britain and spent a lot of the 1870s and 80s trying to develop a working movie camera and projector at his workshop in Leeds, West Yorkshire. This being before the first cellulose nitrate film was sold in 1889 (i.e. there was no flexible and transparent film base available), his system consisted of a multi-lens camera and a projector which worked on the same principle as a Carousel slide projector, inserting and removing glass slides in wooden mounts. If I remember correctly he got it to work at 12fps, but the shutter mechanism was seriously flawed and much else besides. His camera just about worked, though, and in 1888 he successfully 'filmed' a street scene on Leeds Bridge. Link to moving images.

Le Prince mysteriously disappeared on a visit to France in 1890 and was never seen again. Link to biography; Book on Le Prince.

Posted by Ron Keillor (Member # 1790) on 10-09-2003, 03:54 AM:

There is a Wim Wenders film Die Gebrüder Skladanowsky (1995) - no source shown in imdb; but a DVD can be obtained from France. (French title: Les Lumière de Berlin. )

Posted by Scott Norwood (Member # 30) on 10-09-2003, 04:37 AM:

They're shoing films in public venues now? Damn. I'll have to go check that out.

Posted by William Hooper (Member # 71) on 10-09-2003, 06:51 AM:

The glass plate camera is cool.

I should have pointed out that the technical difference between the Latham/Dickson (Edison) machines & what Ramsaye called Armat's first, successful, practical, etc. projection machine was... the Armat machine had an intermittent. The other projectors, like the Kinescope, just ran the film constantly past the light & lens, with a shutter of a disc with a slot cut in it to put up an image as it sped past. The Armat machine was reviewed by the press as not having imperfections they had seen before from projection devices - jerkiness, blurring, etc. Imagine the ghosting on those intermittent-less machines!

Ramsaye points out that it is odd that ecah of the inventors of the projectors took the longest time to come up with solving the problem with an intermittent - because each of the intermittent-using projector-inventors had *already* been using an intermittent in cameras they had constructed to take pictures for their projectors! The inventors themselves remarked how odd it was that it took so long for them to make the connection. And some - like Latham & Dickson at Edison - never did. Sitting there taking their *pictures* with a camera they'd constructed themselves, incorporating an intermittent movement.

Posted by Mitchell Dvoskin (Member # 751) on 10-09-2003, 07:48 AM:

What is interesting is that Edison patented the intermittent, but only for use in motion picture cameras. It never occured to them to also use one in a projector until Armat demostrated his projector. Although Armat had a patent on the idea of an intermittent in a projector, I believe one of the reasons he sold out cheaply to Edison was because he did not have the resources to fight Edision over the patent, which would likely have occured.

/Mitchell

Posted by Christian Appelt (Member # 1067) on 10-09-2003, 06:40 PM:

Ron,

that Wim Wenders-produced short film is a big, fat lie.

The brothers Skladanowsky (former Magic Latern operators) built a camera and projection apparatus with what they could manage, but their films had a frame rate of less than 8 fps, so they should be classified as chronophotography like the previous efforts of Eadward Muybridge, Ottmar Anschuetz and others. The Skladanowsky brothers were great autodidacts in a Gyro-Gearloose way, but their approach to cinematic technology was a dead-end street.

There are some fine books by Deac Rossell on that subject, a book on the Skladanowsky brothers exists, unfortunately in German only...

Posted by Ron Keillor (Member # 1790) on 10-09-2003, 08:55 PM:

Thanks, Christian. There were no links to the mention of the film or any easily accessed reviews. I came across it only while looking for something else and that name stood out.

Posted by Tim Reed (Member # 137) on 10-12-2003, 02:57 PM:

Something else that history overlooks is the fact that W.K.L. Dickson was the actual father of motion pictures, having devised the Kinetograph (camera) for Edison. Edison contributed no invention to that device or the Kinetoscope, having been heavily absorbed in his mining equipment activities during those years.

Posted by Jeffry L. Johnson (Member # 453) on 10-14-2003, 08:00 AM:

"First Photographs : people, places, and phenomena as captured for the first time by the camera". Gail Buckland. Macmillan. ©1980. ISBN 0-02-518070-3.

Motion picture show. At an amazingly early date, 1870, an audience sat in the dark and watched a couple waltz—two people dancing who were not there in person. We know all about this thing called moving pictures, but back then, fifteen hundred people in one evening paid good money just to see if it really was possible. The Scientific American of June 5, 1915, in an article highlighting great events in the history of photography, described what happened:

To Henry Heyl of Philadelphia must be assigned the credit of having given the first motion-picture exhibition in the modern sense of the term. That was in 1870. His invention, the "Phasmatrope" was first exhibited in Philadelphia at the American Academy of Music, February 5, 1870 before an audience of more than 1500 persons. [Previously, if pictures were made to 'move', only one person could view them at a time.] The related photos were small glass plate positives of selected subjects reduced from wet plate negatives, taken from successive poses, by an ordinary camera. The "phasmatrope," was a revolving skeleton disk around the periphery of which the glass positives were removably placed to register accurately as they intermittently came into the lantern rays. During the intervals between the rests of the disk a vibrating shutter cut off the light. The rotation of the disk was in absolute control by the operator so that the movements of the figures (two waltzers) were kept in perfect synchronism with an orchestra of 40 musicians. Hence, we have not only motion pictures but the correlation of sound with motion. Mr. Heyl went even further. He threw upon the screen a figure of a gesticulating "Brother Jonathan" [Uncle Sam]. The pantomimic gestures and lip movements of the moving photographs coincided with the voice of a reader who supplied the audible words.