Today, we ride the wrong horse. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
1893 was quite a year. We'd
had been at peace for some time, and we were
flexing our creative muscle. My father was born
that year. So too was Thomas Edison's first motion
picture studio, the Black Maria. It was a
black shed, open to the sun and mounted on a pivot
so it could be constantly turned to catch the best
light. Out of it came his first movie, The
Record of a Sneeze. And that's all it was -- a
brief scene of a man sneezing.
Edison had just patented his Kinetograph
(for photographing a series of images) and his
Kinetoscope (which allowed a viewer to
watch the flickering images through a peephole).
Then others began developing machines to project
those images on a screen. And we've all gone to the
movies ever since.
But now I find a new wrinkle. While all this was
going on, photographer Alexander Black was
developing a so-called picture play. It came out
the same year as The Sneeze. The title was
Miss Jerry, and I learned about it from an
1896 Scribner's Magazine article by Black.
When I first saw the article, it took me a moment
to understand what it was about.
Black tells how he used his camera to produce
plays. He made fine pictures, no grainy sequence of
a man sneezing, here. Then he arranged sequential
tableaux of scenes from the play. These were to be
projected at a rate of around four per minute, by a
magic lantern. A narrator meanwhile told their
story.
Black made no attempt to create any illusion of
motion. Yet he did provide sequential
movement through the play's action. The
result was a lot closer to our movies today than
Edison's Sneeze was. Black dealt with real actors
and real stagecraft. He talks about the problem of
directing a play so as to capture the unfolding
dramatic content without the intervening motion.
And yet, as Black finished his article, we were
moving from that peepshow of a sneeze, to projected
movies of far more exciting stuff -- a kiss, a
belly dance, a prize fight. In one movie about
The Execution of Queen Mary, Edison
created an early special effect by stopping the
camera long enough to sever the queen's head.
So Black is forced to add these somewhat defensive
words:
Pending the perfection of the [new moving
pictures], the ordinary camera [still] gives freest
expression to the processes of the picture
play.
Then he adds a really prophetic remark. He says,
With whatever medium, [we shall still find]
problems in the storytelling. If you love the
movies as I do, you know that sad truth lingers.
By then Black knew he'd chosen the wrong horse in
1893. But I look at his lovely photos and wish I
could watch one of his picture plays. Of course we
all feel that way about so many of yesterday's
short-lived technologies. Oh to ride a Zeppelin, a
Panama Clipper or a Clipper Ship. Wouldn't it've been
something to've experienced the first five days on
the maiden voyage of the unsinkable
Titanic!
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
A. Black, The Camera and the Comedy. Scribner's
Magazine, Vol. XX, No. 3, November, 1896, pp.
605-610.
For more on Black see: http://www.mcn.org/b/nufstuff/ab/abhome.html
For more on the history of movies, see:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhist.html
http://edison.rutgers.edu/mopix/earlproj.htm
The full text of Black's 1896 comment, without
the ellispes I used on air, goes as follows:
Pending the perfection of the vitascope, the
cinematograph, and kindred devices, the ordinary
camera, in partnership with the rapidly dissolving
stereopticon, gives freest expression to the
processes of the picture play, not only for a
greater clearness and steadiness in pictorial
result, but because of the wider range of selection
possible to the portable camera. And, with whatever
medium, we find, as I have suggested, problems in
the story-telling function that is imposed upon the
pictures.
