Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge

Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince filmed this epic the very same year he gave us Roundhay Garden Scene. Instead of his family walking in circles he filmed, as the title would suggest, traffic crossing Leeds bridge. And when I say traffic I don't mean cars, trucks and buses. I mean people walking a couple of guys who were lucky enough to have horses and carriages.

Since Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince was the ONLY director to release any films in 1888 it proves he was the best director of his era. He didn't need big actors or loads of effects or a computerized ape. Just a camera and a bridge. And he was the man who gave birth to cinema. Not literally, that would be hideous.

How interesting, moving images from 1888. This film only plays for two seconds and could be considered as the second film ever made, after 'Roundhay Garden Scene' from the same year and same director.

That director is Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, who mysteriously disappeared in 1890 after making only these two short films. Le Prince is the first great name when you talk about motion pictures, even though Lumière and Edison are much more famous. Seeing his two films, both two seconds long, gives a special feeling. Basically you are watching the birth of cinema. It is the same feeling you get while watching early work from Edison (his kinetoscopic record of a sneeze), Lumière (the arrival of a train) and Méliès (the first science-fiction narrative). You should try it!

By the way. The two seconds shows the Leeds Bridge full with pedestrians, horses and carriages.

Motion pictures are seemingly easy to define, but when faced with questions of the firsts in their invention, the once simple and intuitive definition becomes muddled. After all, people of the 19th Century were accustomed to such optical toys, such as the Zoetrope, that when rotated presented the illusion of moving images. The projection of animated drawings precedes that of animated photography, introduced as early as the 1840s by Leopold Ludwig Döbler and in the 1850s by Franz von Unchatius. Émile Reynaud took the projected animation further with his Théâtre Optique--patented in 1888--with elaborate animation drawn onto a film-like material and screened commercially from 1892 to 1900. As early as 1879, Eadweard Muybridge used his Zoopraxiscope projector for drawings based on his chronophotography. Ottomar Anschütz reproduced photographic motion on discs for the public beginning in 1887. Étienne-Jules Marey had invented cameras using paper and celluloid roll films in the same period as Louis Le Prince, i.e. from 1888-1890. Others, like Georges Demeny, Woodsworth Donisthorpe, William Friese-Greene, and William K.L. Dickson were also working on the invention of motion pictures around the same time.

Le Prince began experimenting with motion pictures in the 1880s, and by 1886, he applied for patents on a movie camera and projector. At first, he and his assistants--who included James William Longley, Fredrick Mason and his son, Adolphe--concentrated on the misguided notion of a multiple-lens camera and projector, but on 14 October 1888, Le Prince was able to take a series of photographs on sensitized paper film with a one-lens camera. According to Christopher Rawlence, Le Prince first photographed "Accordion Player" and then "Roundhay Garden Scene". They were photographed at about 12 frames per second, which it is now known, is rather slow for the illusion of movement. Le Prince photographed this film, "Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge", at about 20 frames per second, which is a more appropriate speed for motion pictures. Most say it was filmed only a couple weeks after the Roundhay films, but Rawlence suggests it wasn't until the summer of 1889.

These are some of the earliest motion pictures ever made, if not the very first. Yet, Le Prince was far from perfecting (or even making it functional) his projector: the deliverer of the films. The only outside witness to Le Prince's experiments in film projection was the Secretary of the Paris Opéra, who witnessed the working of one of Le Prince's projectors for the purpose of authorizing his French patent. That was on 30 March 1890. He was planning to demonstrate motion pictures to the American public when he mysteriously disappeared--last seen on 16 September 1890.

There's an intriguing theory that doesn't have any evidence to support it, which Le Prince's widow believed and largely created, that Thomas Edison conspired to murder Le Prince with the motive of claiming authorship of motion pictures. Adolphe died not longer after having testified in a legal dispute over such authorship against Edison. Christopher Rawlence's book "The Missing Reel" goes into the details of this suspicion. Moreover, it's a good read, of the paranoia and secrecy surrounding the inventor, and it's rather cinematic in construction. Rawlence originally intended to make a screenplay out of the story, and he did make a small Channel Four Film in 1989 with the same title as the book.

Back to the film of Leeds Bridge: it is the greatest testimony to Le Prince's experiments extant today. It is a traffic scene, with the novelty merely being the movement--thus achieving a more lifelike representation than still photographs. It may also be noted that the traffic scene is undirected; the action appears that it may well have happened the same way without the camera's presence--a hidden camera. This is in contrast to Le Prince's earlier films, which are directed and staged. And, although this film is (now) only 20 frames, the overhead view from atop a building of the traffic and its position diagonal to the framing makes "Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge" somewhat more interesting than other early film experiments. Traffic scenes would also prove to be a popular subject in early film, such as in the Lumière actualitiés.

This earliest filmmakers could not have anticipated the immense commercial and entertainment and cultural and artistic importance their invention would have upon the future. This is especially the case with these films by Le Prince because they were not commercially distributed (nor ready to); their influence is limited, unlike the films of the Edison and Lumière companies. Moreover, their influence has only begun recently with their reconstruction and availability on the Internet. The one exception, perhaps, is that Donisthorpe was in Leeds and may have heard of Le Prince's experiments, which would explain why Donisthorpe began experimenting again with motion pictures around that time. With the assistance of his cousin William Carr Crofts, he made his own experimental film of London's Trafalgar Square around the year 1900.

Nevertheless, this film, along with Le Prince's other three surviving films, including a man walking around a corner, Adolphe playing an accordion, and the scene at Roundhay Garden, are breathtaking for their historical value. It's special that we are today able to witness the beginning of a new art--even the beginning of it before it was an art.

(Note: This is the first in a series of my comments on 10 "firsts" in film history. The other films covered are Blacksmith Scene (1893), Annabelle Serpentine Dance (1895), The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (1895), La Sortie des usines Lumière (1895), L' Arroseur arose (1895), L' Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat (1896), Panorama du Grand Canal vu d'un bateau (1896), Return of Lifeboat (1897) and Panorama of Eiffel Tower (1900).)

Even though "Traffic Crossing the Leeds Bridge" and "Roundhay Garden Scene" are remembered as the first true movies ever shot, it is even more amazing how well they've aged. Despite being 130 years old this year, the prints of both appear to be crisp, detailed and very beautiful. Even though the entire clip of this film lasts only two seconds, the detail seen in those two seconds is remarkable. Pedestrians, horses and carriages, buildings etc. are all caught in this wonderfully framed short by the father of the motion picture, Louis le Prince.

In 1888 the city of Leeds, in England, became part of history of cinema as the place where the first movies were made. It was the place where a French inventor named Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince successfully tested his invention for the first time and created the first moving images in history. Of course, history often credits either Thomas Alva Edison or the Lumière brothers as the inventors of cinema, and not without a reason, as they were the first who made public exhibitions of movies; however, it was Louis Le Prince who shot the first movies a couple of years before Edison and the Lumières. Sadly, Le Prince would die under mysterious circumstances shortly after this monumental achievement (in 1890), and so, being unable to offer public demonstrations, his name was soon forgotten when film was presented by other inventors. Despite this tragic turn of events, it's never late to give the proper credit to Louis Le Prince as the father of cinema.

In the first movie ever, "Roundhay Garden Scene", Le Prince captured his wife's family on a day at the garden, as they walked and moved in order to test his camera. For his second experiment, Le Prince went to Leeds Bridge, and shot a 2 seconds of the traffic crossing the bridge. The carriages pulled by horses are captured by Le Prince's camera in what could be considered as the very first documentary in history, as it shows another typical day at the Leeds bridge. Obviously, Le Prince's intention was to capture real moving objects to prove that his invention was not fake, so what better way to do it than filming the traffic? Despite its extremely short runtime, this movie is quite interesting as it's a small glimpse to life in the late Victorian era, almost like a time machine to a past that now, more than 100 years later feels very distant.

Watching this movie (as well as "Roundhay Garden Scene") today is a strangely mystifying experience, as while in its short runtime barely nothing happens, the fact that before this movie there wasn't anything, that this was the very first time a movie was made, gives the film an almost supernatural atmosphere. The experiment was successful and cinema was born. It's a tragedy that Le Prince didn't live to see how his invention would grow, and never witnessed his invention becoming an art form and a new way of entertainment. While he never saw the magic of Georges Méliès's movies, or the narrative methods of Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Griffith, Le Prince showed the bridge. Edison, Lumière, and the rest of the pioneers would follow him and change history for ever. 10/10