Art & Soul: Who actually made the first film?

It is widely believed that the inventors of what we now know as moving pictures and film were Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers. They won all the headlines for their ingenious discovery and entered history as the inventors of a tool that has dominated the entertainment world for over a century.

However, the beginnings of film are not to be credited solely to these figures. They certainly won the patent war, but there is more to this story than inventiveness.

— Alexandra Dantzer

His chief preoccupation was with “persistence of vision”, tricking the eye into perceiving successive still images as continuous movement. It was this idea that separated Le Prince from Muybridge, Marey, and his other rivals in the field of instantaneous photography — not to capture a fleeting moment in order to examine it more closely, but to stitch it to its neighbours, seamlessly; not to stop time, but to simulate its flow. The question was how.

— Paul Fischer

FOR as long as one’s memory can throw itself back, Thomas Alva Edison’s (1847-1930) name was always up there in the pantheon of inventors of the world, men of doubtless genius. He is the one who gave us, or at least had much to do with, the light bulb, the X-ray machine, the voice recorder, the rechargable battery, the motion picture. His life was the story of a man who rose from complete obscurity — selling candy on the street as a child and newspapers in railway carriages — to great fame and sprawling businesses: the ‘Magician of Menlo Park’ who took out something like 1,093 patents for inventions in his own lifetime. But that there were cracks in the image one was hardly aware of, and that his ethics were not beyond question is something that would have tested one’s credulity if one were to go by the authorised edition of his iconic life.

But this seems, suddenly, to be the season for bringing icons down from their pedestals. For, from different directions, some of the great inventor’s claims are being questioned, challenged. The most vocal, and the most engaging, of these centres around the question: who made the first film? Edison, according to his own claim, or a Frenchman whom I had never heard of till now: Louis Le Prince. A strikingly handsome man, born in 1841, standing 6 feet 3 inches tall in his socks, Le Prince was the son of a respected officer of the Legion of Honor who had many interesting friends. Among them was Daguerre, the photography pioneer. It is from him that the young Louis received lessons in photography and chemistry. On his own he learnt painting; as he grew up, he moved from France to England, married there, and started, along with his wife, a school of applied art in Leeds. Photography befriended metal and ceramic in the hands of the artistic couple. But it was photography that came to dominate Louis’ life, for the idea of making photographs move, somehow, had a magnetic appeal for him. He built himself a 16-lens camera and began experimenting with film stock.

What, he must have asked himself, is the difference between a series of still photographs taken in quick succession — like Edward Muybridge had done in 1878 of a racehorse in motion — and a bonafide film that ran continuously and created ‘movement’ within itself? From a 16-lens camera to a single-lens one, he kept moving. By 1885, he was ready. Or nearly. But the few-seconds long shot sequence that was to make history — celebrated now as the ‘Roundhay Garden Scene’ — was shot only three years later. The moment has been described by writer Paul Fischer. “On the morning of October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince set up a heavy wooden box in the family garden.” Asking four members of his family to slowly move about, in a circle, “Le Prince turned the brass crank of his camera and began filming. The surviving footage is so mundane that it takes a mental adjustment to recall that for its early viewers it would have been nothing short of a miracle: the world’s first motion picture”.

There was great excitement at home and in a small circle of friends in America where part of the family had settled. There was now the question of when and where the new invention would be ‘presented’. Le Prince, as accounts go, had promised his friends in Paris that he will see them before the event. He took a train in Dijon for Paris and was seen boarding by some. But then he disappeared, never to be seen again. Neither he nor his luggage was ever found. The police in France, the Scotland Yard in England could not trace him, or anything of him.

Was he robbed and murdered by some cab driver whom he hired after de-boarding? Was his brother, with whom he had some dispute over inherited property, involved? Was he upset over rumours that had started floating around that he was gay, and took his own life out of anticipated embarrassment? Or was, somehow, a rival inventor — who else than Thomas Edison in the view of some — involved in the disappearance?

There are no conclusions; nothing is certain. But shadows of suspicion and conspiracy hang in the air. In 1888, Edison is believed to have written: “I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear, which is the recording and reproduction of things in motion…” He, with his working colleagues, put in an application for a patent in August 1891 for what he called a ‘Kinetograph’. Le Prince’s family fumed, filed cases and fought them bitterly, but to no avail. In 1894, Edison’s company formally launched the machine for public viewing.

Two footnotes. A few years after Le Prince’s death, his son, Adolphe, who was fighting a case on behalf of his father’s invention, met a mysterious end. The 29-year-old was found fatally shot while duck hunting in New York. The case went unsolved. And, second: the city of Leeds in England has put up a memorial plaque at the site of Le Prince’s workshop, describing him as ‘the pioneer of cinematography’, who ‘produced what are believed to be the world’s first moving pictures… in 1888’.