Review History Captured on Film

Doctor Omega

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10




The Roundhay Garden Scene

The Roundhay Garden Scene was recorded at 12 frames per second and runs for 2.11 seconds.

It is the oldest surviving film in existence and the first moving picture ever made using film and a camera, noted by the Guinness Book of Records.

This sequence was filmed by Louis Le Prince in October 1888 using paper base photographic film and his single-lens combi camera-projector.

According to Le Prince's son, Adolphe, it was filmed at the home of Joseph and Sarah Whitley in Leeds, England on October 14, 1888.

Louis Le Prince was an inventor who created the first moving pictures using film and a single-lens camera.

His films were created several years before the work of competing inventors such as Auguste, Louis Lumière and Thomas Edison.

Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration in the United States because he mysteriously vanished from a train on September 16, 1890.


 
Doctor Omega

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
To give this footage some morbid historical context....

It was filmed during the Jack the Ripper murders....


https://www.imdforums.com/threads/so-who-do-you-think-was-jack-the-ripper.179/


.... a fortnight after the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes and less than a month before the murder of Mary Kelly.


Not that I am suggesting that there are clues to be gleaned from this footage in relation to the Whitechapel Murders - although no doubt someone will end up writing a book suggesting that the either the killer - and/or Mary Kelly - is in the clip somewhere! :emoji_alien:
 
Carol

Carol

Member: Rank 5
Doctor Omega said:
It was filmed during the Jack the Ripper murders....
Click to expand...
IN Leeds, 200 miles away - so I think the term we're striving towards might be "alibi"?

But you're right to draw parallels - the Ripper murders feel like the dark ages, but overlapped the birth of cinema. Like an episode of QI which pointed out that hundred, if not thousands, of people who attended the last public hanging in London commuted there by Tube.
 
Doctor Omega

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
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This meditation on cinema’s past from Decasia director Bill Morrison pieces together the bizarre true history of a long-lost collection of 533 nitrate film prints from the early 1900s. Discovered buried under the permafrost in a former Canadian Gold Rush town, their story conjures the forgotten ties between the fledgling film industry and Manifest Destiny in North America.

Located about 350 miles south of the Arctic Circle, Dawson City was settled in 1896—the same year large-scale cinema projectors were invented—and became the center of the Klondike Gold Rush that brought 100,000 prospectors to the area. Soon after, the city became the final stop for a distribution chain that sent prints and newsreels to the Yukon. The films were seldom, if ever, returned. By the late 1920s, over 500,000 feet of film had accumulated in the basement of the local library. Much of it was eventually moved to the town’s hockey rink, where it was stacked and covered with boards and a layer of earth. The now-famous Dawson City Collection was uncovered in 1978 when a new recreation center was being built and a bulldozer working its way through a parking lot dug up a horde of film cans.

Morrison draws on these permafrost-protected, rare silent films and newsreels, pairing them with archival footage, interviews, historical photographs, and an enigmatic score by Sigur Rós collaborator and composer Alex Somers. Dawson City: Frozen Time depicts the unique history of this Canadian Gold Rush town by chronicling the life cycle of a singular film collection through its exile, burial, rediscovery, and salvation.


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Doctor Omega

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
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A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.
 
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Doctor Omega

Doctor Omega

Member: Rank 10
So if my theory is correct, either Mister Whitley or Mister Le Prince were the scourge of Whitechapel, on account of them being in the same country at the time of the murders. Much like the foundation of all the other Ripper suspect claims.

I feel a book coming on..... :emoji_head_bandage:
 
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