Monkeyshines, No. 1

I have endearing respect for all these early attempts at filmaking and yet they do not all possess the same amount of interest. With Monkeyshines (whether Nos. 1 or 2) I hardly know what it is I am looking at.

Not much of anything, this "film" is a ghostly image of (probably) G. Sacco Albanese, a worker at the Edison Laboratories. It was shot by William Heise and W.K.L. Dickson, the co-inventor of the Kinetoscope, along with Thomas Edison.

The film is only a few seconds long, and it is hard to distinguish what, of anything, is going on. Of course, with being the first American motion picture, and one of the first ever, it has significant historical merit.

I rated it a 2 of out 10. Only its historical value gives it more than a 1.

Monekyshines, No. 1 (1890)

Monkeyshines, No. 2 (1890)

These two films by Edison, as well as a third one I haven't seen, are believed to be the very first to be shot in the United States. None of the three were meant to be seen by the public as Edison was just trying to test the cylinder of the Kinetograph format. William K.L. Dickson and William Heise are created with trying this experiment in June of 1889 or the last week of November 1890, experts debate which date is correct. Needless to say, outside a historic level, there's nothing much here to see. A few images flicker in front of our eyes and on the whole I'd say No. 2 is better as we can actually see the figure. The first test is pretty brutal and hard to figure out exactly what you're looking at.

This and the other "Monkeyshines" features are historically important as the remains of the Edison Company's earliest efforts to create moving pictures. The briefness of the footage of the "Monkeyshines" features hardly could reflect the many hours of intense work, thought, and trial-and-error sessions that must have gone on, but they do preserve a picture of where things were at.

The footage itself now looks weird and surreal, which was of course not at all the effect that Edison and his associates were striving for. The film actually shows one of the Edison Company workers simply goofing around for a few moments, making as many movements as possible, as the camera filmed him. The images are all indistinct, resembling specters or ghosts, and the footage has suffered many scratches and other damage over time, giving it a truly bizarre appearance that would be extremely difficult to duplicate intentionally.

Edison's original conception for moving pictures was an adaptation of his highly successful phonograph, that is, he planned to use a cylindrical approach rather than the projection format that we are familiar with. The distortion and blurring of the images reveal some of the inherent difficulties in the process, and eventually this would point them in the right direction.

In a way, it's appropriate that the record of these experiments now looks surreal and shadowy. Edison and the other pioneers of his era went through a shadowy phase in which the idea for lifelike moving pictures seemed so close, yet not quite attainable. It must have been a tantalizing and occasionally frustrating feeling for them to view the "Monkeyshines" movies and see what they had and had not yet achieved. For anyone today who is interested in the development of motion pictures, these early results can be an equally tantalizing look at the past.

From Shadow Plays to the Phenakistoscope, to the phantasmagoria of the 18th Century 'Magic Lanterns' or the spinning slits of the Phenakistoscope invented by Joseph Plateau, and the simultaneous independent invention, in 1833, by the Austrian Simon Stampfer (Stroboscope). In 1867, the Zoetrope lantern astonished the world till Muybridge's Zoopraxiscope device of 1879. The Zoopraxiscope's photographic rudiments inspired legendary inventors to invent. Thomas Edison came up with the Kinetoscope and the designer W.K.L.Dixon (sometimes spelt as Dickson) worked for Edison in the USA and then in 1894 moved to England where he helped develop the Mutoscope machines. Thus, finally, we arrive at Dickson's 'The MonkeyShines'. Dickson is significantly a part of Film history because these film shorts were widely acclaimed as The first 'movie shows', or moving picture shows. However, The Lumiere brothers in France, Auguste and Louis, produced what is arguably the first real cinema show with the presentation of their Lumiere Cinematographe to a paying audience at the Grand Cafe in Paris on 28th December 1895. The only real brouhaha between these two landmark moments in history being the issue of pioneering and the attributing factors of being billed as the 'inventors' of modern film and cinema.