Monkeyshines, No. 1

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.

Being made in 1890, "Monkeyshines, No. 1" is the first true film ever created in the United States (or at least believed by many to be the first, just as "Roundhay Garden Scene" by Louis le Prince is believed to be the world's oldest celluloid film). In many ways, it's nothing particularly exciting when it comes to content. It did not, like "Men Boxing", begin any new film genre at the time; nor did it attempt to show a display of skill like "Newark Athlete". Instead, like all of the films in the Monkeyshines trilogy, it merely served as a test for the Kinetoscope camera that Edison was hoping to use in the future to publicize the motion picture. As such, it is no surprise that the result of this test is not a big achievement. More changes had to be made to the invention before it could capture true motion on film in the ways we are accustomed to.

Instead of a clear view of the action and definite motion like movies are today, the footage that makes up "Monkeyshines, No 1" is very difficult to decipher. The character seen to move before the lens is blurry, phantom-like and not at all detailed. Nor is the movement he performs very easy to watch. It is apparent the person was doing something with his arms. Waving? Gesticulating? From a horror buff's point of view, he looks more like some strange morphing being who can change shape at will. That's how hard it is to understand this experiment.

But there was hope. Edison obviously wasn't satisfied with the results of his invention yet, and needed to alter the Kinetoscope yet in order to change the look. The results of his later proceedings were the other two Monkeyshines films, 2 and 3. Number 2 already appeared much improved over number 1, and number 3 (which is either lost or unrestored) probably also showed some new details. Slowly, these camera tests continued to be made and improved upon until the great inventor finally debuted his invention in 1893, with "Horse Shoeing" and "Blacksmith Scene", which would publicize the motion picture industry for the first time in America.

(Note: It has been debated who the actor is. Some say John Ott, some say G. Sacco Albanese. Both were workers at Edison's factories).

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.

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.

In 1888, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison had an idea that would serve as the basis to what we now call "movies", that idea was the Kinetoscope and soon a new source of entertainment would be created by the wild imagination of Edison's team. According to history, Edison heard rumors about the invention of motion pictures (they were indeed invented in 1888 by Louis Le Prince in Leeds, England) and quickly his mind began to craft his very own devise to achieve the same effect. Edison figured out that the images had the illusion of movement because they were sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter, and soon put the conceptual idea on paper; however, it wouldn't be Edison who would transform Kinetoscope from an idea to a reality, the man in charge of the project would be one of Edison's most rusted workers, a Scottish man named William K.L. Dickson. The series of short films codenamed "Monkeyshines" were Dickson's first attempts to produce motion pictures.

The "Monkeyshines" films were three experimental movies shot in the Edison laboratories in order to test Kinetograph, a camera invented to shot the movies that would appear in the Kinetoscope. With the collaboration of William Heise (who would become a prolific director of Kinetoscope films), Dickson shot one of Edison's workers in front of the camera doing gestures and movements. As actual experiments of their work, this movies do not have a plot or a theme, and only consist of Edison's workers moving in front of the camera to see if their images were captured. Due to age and the poor quality of this early experiments, it is impossible to know who appears in each movie, although it is often considered that G. Sacco Albanese is the one appearing in "Monkeyshines, No. 1". (some say that it is actually John Ott, but the debate continues)

While it was never released to the public (Dickson's second movie, "Dickson Greeting" has the honor of being the first American movie to be shown), "Monkeyshines, No. 1" is indeed the very first movie shot in the United States, marking the birth of the Kinetoscope and the beginning of the age of cinema as entertainment. After this monumental invention, Dickson would dedicate his most of his work in improving his machine (including an attempt to add sound!) although he also started making the kind of short films the people wanted to see in what was now known as "The Peep Show machine". While not exactly real cinema, William K.L. Dickson's amazing invention would be another big step ahead in what would culminate in 1895, with the Lumière brothers' invention of the Cinématographe. 7/10