Newark Athlete

An athlete swings Indian clubs.

There is not much to say about this because it is very brief, very damaged and not much happens -- a pair of clubs spin a couple times. I suspect this was an important early film test, but it is in such awful shape today that it pretty much negates whatever value it has as historic.

I have to wonder how Edison and Dickson went about choosing their earliest subjects. Why a man with clubs? For how brief the film is, he could have been jumping rope or swinging a bat. It really makes no difference because he is not given enough time to really exhibit any skill.

This clip is fun to watch for about a minute, then it's loses its novelty. Nevertheless it's fascinating to see the technology that started the film industry 130 years ago.

With "Newark Athlete" of 1891, the experimentation with the Kinetograph improves. Having already come to the success of good picture quality with "Dickson Greeting" and the Duncan trilogy the same year, Edison was now finally able to test motion abilities. In the previously mentioned "Dickson Greeting" the movement made by the hat which motion pictures pioneer William Kennedy Dickson passes from one hand to the next is slow and smoothly done; here, a different type of motion is tested. The movement of the Indian clubs that the young athlete swings is quick-moving and different from that of the previous test, and, like before, it is successful in achieving its goal.

Oddly enough, it is not known who the athlete of the title is. Even without his name, I find it already pretty strange that Edison would go to the trouble of hiring a athlete from Newark (if that's really were he came from) to come down and perform the camera test. He could just as easily have gotten one of his factory workers to mimic the role (as he did with "Men Boxing") but no. Additionally, like the other camera tests from 1890-1891, it's possible none of them originally had titles and were merely given labels for the sake of the Kino DVD set (hence the '[' at the beginning and end of the titles on the menus). How then were they able to identify this young man as being from Newark?

Lastly, I would like to point one more thing out. The Edison set disk has a different camera test from the ones available online. The test available on disk is very short, damaged and only shows a very small movement from the athlete. The library of congress film available online is a different story and features an entire swing from the clubs (and also has darker lighting than the other). I guess it is possible two tests of the same subject were taken, thus creating two different film fragments to be projected.

Newark Athlete (1891)

Men Boxing (1891)

Newark Athlete is just a brief fragment from the Edison studio, which was apparently just a set up test to check the conditions on the camera. The thing only lasts a few seconds so needless to say the studio wasn't trying to make anything special out of it but thankfully the thing survives so film buffs such as myself can view the early history of film. Men Boxing on the other hand seems to be the studio actually trying to put something fun on film. Two men, both wearing boxing gloves, throw a few punches at one another while smiling for the camera. Some think this once again was just testing the camera but since it contains a tad bit more I'm going to guess the men making it thought this could be something real.

Made in May or June, 1891, this is an experimental film shot by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and William Heise at Edison's Black Maria studios. Edison had just shown the 'Dickson Greeting' film to the ladies of the National Federation of Women's Clubs. For Dickson and Heise, it was back to the lab to continue working on films, and to get some of them eventually fit for public viewing.

What remains of this film today is in fairly poor shape and the action appears to be cut-off. It might have just been a test of what different types of motion looked like when shot by their Kinetograph camera and viewed through the Kinetoscope peephole viewer. As such, it was likely one of many experimental films which were important to gradually get a sense of what types of motions are interesting to watch on film.