Man Walking Around the Corner

The last of the four known Le Prince film that survived till our days is Man Walking Around the Corner, a a title that pretty much lets you know everything you'll see. This few frames have received much less attention than the other three Le Prince films, and therefore is know to less people despite being available at Youtube and other pages in the internet. This lack of attention is a shame, specially because it may be responsible of the fact that this is the only Le Prince film that has not enjoyed a professional restoration. This causes that the only way to watch the film is in a very blurry copy and not the quite clear images available for the other three films are missing here. Every copy I've seen is dark and is hard to notice what happens in the screen, while the shadow of a person walking is noticeable to be honest you can't quite see if it is turning around in a corner or just going straight, I'll take the title of the film as true and suppose the corner is indeed there, but it would be nice to see it clearly Let's hope a professional restoration of the film is made shortly so we can appreciate this early film correctly, it shouldn't be a lot of work, after all the movie is just a few seconds long and it would be worthy considering this man invented cinema and this is one of the earliest works in film history.

Stuff like this happends all the time (walking around a corner). What people probably didn't notice: the pigeon peaking from the storm drain. Not too much is known about that! But burt canyon (a young tester) has been doing the research. Hes been in a hotel room 134 days filling it with post-its that all say: 'hidden reasons.'

It may have been 9 years since the last movie, but Louis le Prince was a good director and had a great debut film

Louis Le Prince, motion picture pioneer, took 16 photos, one each from a different lens on his special made camera, of a man rounding a corner in Paris. The 16 images were combined to produce the effect of a motion picture one second in length of the man turning the corner. The following year Le Prince would develop a one lens camera that operated on a similar principle and make what is now considered the first film - "Roundhay Garden Scene".

Le Prince would disappear mysteriously on his way to America in 1890, never to be seen again. The book "The Missing Reel" deals with the mystery and what might have happened to him. The documentary "The First Film" discusses Le Prince's work in the invention of motion pictures.

The trivia on the IMDb... entry is as good a word as any, I suppose ... says this is not a film. It was shot on a device of LePrince's devising which used sixteen lenses. By triggering then in order, he got an image over a span of time... sort of. The positions of the lenses differed, which meant that the series, when viewed, jumped around.

This tentative groping towards an explanation forces us either to define what a film is narrowly, or to understand the organic process that led to what we call a film now. The former leads us to pettifog over details that are often irrelevant, and the latter provides us with no clear answer to the question of what film is. Do we in the 21st century, who frequently watch "movies" shot on digital cameras, processed in computers and viewed on our computers even watch films?

I prefer to think as film as a recorded moving image which we view, one produced by a process which, in its commercial forms, includes films, movies, television, and other related items. It did not arise suddenly, but evolved out of earlier technologies, which include flip books, magic lanterns, phantasmagorias and such nineteenth century devices as praxizooscopes and kinegraphs.

If you accept that attitude, then the question of whether this is a film becomes irrelevant. It may not be a film by some technical definition, but it an important artifact in the development of that art.