First Light: The Birth of Cinema, 1894-1901
November 12, 2011
Northwest Film ForumSeattle, WA
A selection of pioneering short films from the US, France and Britain, all made at the very dawn of cinema.
The program included “actualities”released in the 1800s by the Edison Company and the Lumière brothers, Gold Rush era scenes shot in Seattle and Canada by Robert K. Bonine, early trick films by Georges Méliès, and culminating with James Williamson’s Fire! (1901), one of the very first films to use multiple shots edited together to tell a narrative.
Also shown were short documentaries about magic lanterns and the Library of Congress “Paper Print” Collection.
All titles were shown from 16mm film prints.
Kinetoscope peepshows introduced the world to moving pictures, but it was when they could be projected that these new “movies” changed the world. This special program features selections of these very first films, presented with musical recordings and selected live narration, and shown from rare 16mm film prints...no video.
Our program includes pioneering films from America, France, and Britain by Thomas Edison, the Lumière brothers, American Mutoscope, Georges Méliès, and James Williamson — including “actuality” footage from the Klondike gold rush of 1897-1898. Also showing will be two short documentaries about the development of pre-cinema magic lanterns and the “paper print” collection of the Library of Congress, which preserved thousands of films made between 1894 and 1912.
Pictures that move have become a bland, even disposable staple in our daily sensory diet. But these particular images, by their very age, now engender nearly as much wonder as they did for our great-great-grandparents, more than 110 years ago. Like comfortable time travellers we see people, places, and ways of being — all long since lost or irrevocably transformed — move and breathe before our eyes as though they were still among us. Their human simplicity and even mundanity are, once again, a miracle.
