Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze

One story has it that, in 1877, railroad tycoon Leland Stanford and a pal were having drinks on Stanford's California stud farm, when one or the other of them wondered aloud whether or not a galloping horse ever had all four hooves off the ground.

Stanford directed his chief researcher to find out. In turn, the researcher hired Eadweard Muybridge (real name: Edward Muggeridge) a landscape photographer of note, to set up 24 cameras with trip wires along a track. A horse ran through the wires, tripping the shutters of the cameras, and the resulting photographs showed that, indeed, all four of the horses' hooves were off the ground for quite a while. When viewed rapidly in sequence, these photos were the precursor to "motion pictures".

What was needed of course, was film that moved through the camera, and several people created cameras and projectors (sometimes the same device) that did this, but all had various shortcomings.

Thomas Edison directed his employee, a Scotsman named W. K. L. Dickson (who would later go on to found Biograph Pictures), to study the inferior machines then in use, and come up with something better. He did, sort of, and he (under Edison's name) came up with the kinetograph (the camera), the kinetoscope (the projector) and the kinetophone (the projected film). None of these technologies were actually new, but Dickson's advances in each device resulted in a system that simply produced better looking presentations.

On April 14, 1894, at a theater on Broadway in New York City, several of Dickson's films were presented together, at an admission fee of 25 cents. The show included short films of a dancing bear, some Vaudeville pratfalls, and, . . . "Fred Ott's Sneeze", which became the very first copyrighted motion picture.

In this film, Fred Ott, an employee of Thomas Edison, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. It's not a particularly dramatic sneeze. In fact, if I hadn't known it was a film showing a man sneeze, I wouldn't have been sure what he was doing. It looked more like an artificially vigorous yawn after a nose scratch.

The film was made sometime in the first week of January, 1894, and was projected through Edison's Kinetoscope, a projector that only one viewer could use at a time by looking through a peephole at the top of the device. The film was actually not initially meant to be shown as a film to audiences. Rather, it was shot for publicity reasons, to generate a series of still photographs for a Harper's Weekly article. Edison and company, led by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, had been gearing up for commercial production of films since late 1891. Fred Ott's Sneeze was an important promotional idea which was to help with this.

The film is significant for featuring the first medium close-up shot of a performer, now one of the most common types of shots used in film and television.

Best known as Fred Ott's Sneeze, W.K.L. Dickson's short Kinetoscope should most likely be classified as some sort of documentary, although Mr. Ott's exaggerated wind-up and release come off as a little less than authentic. The novelty of moving images stunned and amazed those who saw these early subjects following their creation at Thomas Edison's famous Black Maria studio. And even though it is not the oldest film listed in the database, it was the first film to have a copyright filed on its behalf. Lasting only a few seconds, the movie itself holds a kind of rare and inexplicable fascination for lovers of film. Difficult to put into words (you could have watched the complete work a number of times in the span it takes to read this), I always feel like I am seeing the cinema's equvalent of Eve biting into the apple.

This ultra-short feature has historical significance in addition to its novelty value. As one of a number of surviving features that the Edison Company made not for exhibiting commercially, but as experiments or for other purposes, it is part of the interesting historical record of the very earliest stages of motion picture development.

Made just a couple of months before Edison's Kinetoscopes were opened for public viewing, this feature was originally filmed for a magazine article, in which the individual frames could illustrate the way that the Kinetoscope would produce the effect of motion. Naturally, for such a purpose they did not need or want more than a few seconds of film.

One thing that is interesting about the earliest movies is their choice of material. A good many of the Edison Company's movie subjects, whether commercial or experimental, are either offbeat or provocative. This contrasts with, for example, the early Lumière movies, which featured so many aesthetically pleasing and even lyrical sights. This subject is one of the offbeat ones, recording Edison employee Fred Ott in the act of sneezing.

For its original purpose this was a suitable subject, since the action would all be contained within a narrow camera field, and it would last only a very short time. Now, so many years later, it is useful in a different way, as a record of one of the many steps on the way to commercially-made movies. It should also be noted that the footage, very short and simple though it is, succeeds in recording motion clearly and smoothly.

This film was purely made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's weekly, so it wasn't even supposed to be even ever shown as a motion-picture in the first place. It must have been a real blast for Edison and Co. to make this movie and I'm sure it good a good laugh out of people at the time.

To me the sneeze itself really didn't seemed real, also because of the reason that of course in those days they couldn't shoot for several minutes straight, in order to wait for Fred Ott to finally sneeze. But who knows, maybe that really is how people sneezed over 100 years ago. It was a very highly sophisticated looking sneeze. A real gentleman's sneeze.

The movie isn't looking of the greatest quality but this is of course all due to the fact that this film was never meant to be shown as a motion-picture in the first place.

The film is historically interesting for a couple of reasons 1. It of course is the first ever recorded sneeze, as if that is really historically significant. 2. It was the first ever motion picture to be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office and 3. It's the first film to feature a close-up of a persons face. So without really knowing at the time, and without those intentions I would guess, this movie has become part of film-history.

8/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/