Newark Athlete

In compare with other Edison (Dickson) installaments, this footage for me is poorest (eventually better than Monkeyshines). Quality is bad and in comparison with Men's Boxing it doesn't show any progress, quite to the contrary. Good things that film brings to me is increasing of my general knowledge. Until now I have no idea what Indian clubs are and what is their purpose. Second thing about that movie is that this movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". It is currently the oldest film chosen to be in this Registry.

This movie is a very short and simple experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film. Guess it sounds more complex than it really was.

Basically all it shows is an 'athelete', who to me just seemed to be a random young boy, swinging a couple of Indian Clubs.

The movie doesn't have the best visual quality and it seems to end perhaps just a second before it was really supposed to. It doesn't even have a halve swing now but more of a quarter swing. Also judging by the quality I'm not sure of it if this was a good successful experiment from Edison and workers but then again at that time of course all experiments were useful and contributed to the development of future movie making, this one included.

6/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

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.

Between the years of 1888 and 1889, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison became very interested in developing a device able to show "motion pictures". It was known that a french inventor named Louis Le Prince had made a movie in Leeds, England, in 1888; and Edison wanted to know how to make his own. Soon the idea came to him and he began working on his devise, however, he lost interest in it as he couldn't see any potential in the invention. Fortunately, one of his collaborators, Scottish inventor William K.L. Dickson decided to take the project and in 1890 he developed what would later be known as the Kinetoscope, a devise that showed short movies through the window of a cabinet. However, the movies Dickson made wasn't of a good quality, so he spent the following years trying to make something as good (or better) than what Le Prince had achieved. Many experiments were done, and by 1891, Dickson and his team were almost there.

After the moderate success of his "Monkeyshines" experiments, Dickson knew he was able to capture images and reproduce them in his Kinetoscope, now all he had to do was to improve the quality of his movies. 1891 would be a year of constant experimenting, in hopes of showing the invention at the Chicago's World Fair. And among the films that Dickson was able to make during those years was this experimental movie codenamed "Newark Athlete". This movie depicted a man, apparently an athlete (although he could had been one of Edison's workers) as does some exercises swinging the clubs he has in each of his hands. The man raises the heads of clubs and keeps moving them for as long as the movie lasts, obviously hoping that his movements were being captured by the camera.

Like most of Dickson's experiments, there was no plot or theme in the film, as this movies weren't meant to be shown to the public. The main purpose of the film is to check if the camera was able to capture the movements of the athlete, and to measure elements such as lighting, the quality of the lenses, the film and the recording speed. When compared to the "Monkeyshines" films, this movie shows a notorious improvement in the quality of the film, as the image not only moves at a fluid speed, it's almost as clear as Dickson intended. It wouldn't take him too long before he was able to make short films the way he wanted, and soon in that year he would make the first Kinetoscope movie shown to an audience: "Dickson Greeting", where he was welcoming us to the era of Kinetoscope. 6/10

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.