The IMDB Canon, Vol. 13: The Arrival of a Train (1896)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 6,966
Number of user reviews: 37
User score: 7.4

The Arrival of a Train is one of the great founding myths of film history, the hilarious tale of the dumb 19th-century rubes jumping out of the way of the train, because they couldn't tell that it wasn't a real train, because they were so dumb. This anecdote is widely disseminated even among people who have no idea who the Lumiere brothers are, and who may not be aware that it refers to a real film. Somehow, everyone has heard of it. "Jumping out of the way of the train" is practically the verbal shorthand for people not understanding new technology. And it's held that status for a long, long time: the "aaaahhh-the-train!!" legend is referenced on film as early as Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show (1902), though it is not clear if Uncle Josh invented it or was itself inspired by the story.

If film was a nation, this would be its equivalent of Washington and the cherry tree, or Canada burning the White House, or Ham seeing his dad in the buff. The story is false, but it might be necessary--and when I say "necessary", keep in mind that I do not mean "desirable", but only that it is a pre-condition for shaping a society's collective unconscious. It is a story that even small children can understand, one that demonstrates in a simple example the power of a new medium, the experience of watching a film in a world that had no such concept. Tales like these are passages in the grand narrative of "progress", the kind that says everything gets better, humanity will overcome all obstacles, and anyone who says otherwise is dragging us down. Inevitably, these sorts of narratives have contributed to the development of every kind of chauvinism imaginable; nationalism, sexism, racism, classism, you name it. Technological development has an intoxicating effect on the society that experiences it; the sudden empowerment felt by shrinking and taming the world almost invariably results in collective narcissism. I'm not sure if technology is inherently cruel, or just human nature, but what I am sure of is that there are few better (or more pervasive) ways to assert one's superiority over others than by flaunting one's ability to understand and use technology. Those who cannot keep up with new developments are, themselves, outmoded. The course of history proceeds inexorably toward ever-more-powerful humans, the ubermensch eidos always being just out of grasp on the horizon, tirelessly sought by the technocrats. The technically-illiterate are, in this model, degenerates, societal offal, doomed to be trampled over in the perpetual race toward mastery over nature. Once the ideology has developed this far, it is only one step further to suggest that, maybe, the Uncle Joshes of the world should just die already. Do you want them to stop you from becoming an immortal cyborg?

Regardless of your answer to that question, there is still more to discuss about the Lumieres' film: namely, its content. The Arrival of a Train is informed by all of the aforementioned techno-fetishism of the nineteenth century, but it also exemplary in its fusion of technology and content in service of an ideological goal. It is the most striking use of the third dimension in film to date. Sure, other films had given limited impressions of depth, but no film up to now has featured the dramatic foreshortening so prominently displayed here. It is an ideal proof-of-concept for the medium. It is a triumph built upon a triumph, an ejaculation of futurism: the locomotive, that mighty symbol of nineteenth-century technology, itself recorded by even more cutting-edge tech. Although humans are visible, they are clearly subordinate to the unstoppable course of the mighty train, which dominates the film not just metaphorically, but physically, in that it literally takes up a huge portion of the screen, its size exaggerated through perspective, so that the humans beside it become insignificant insects in comparison. The Arrival of a Train marks a new era, in which machinery towers over man, guides him, controls him, caresses him. This is not a world in which the unaugmented meat-puppets will survive; no, the key to thriving in this epoch is to embrace the intercourse of steam and steel, the orgasmic stimulation of mind and body by the world's technological wunderkinds. Meld with the machine, it says, let it become you, engulf you. Such is the call--or dare I say, the mating song--of industrial machinery. In a techno-utopian world, you're ether a JG Ballard, or an Uncle Josh. Your pick.


Other connections: Not satisfied with the mere looming effect of the original 1896 train footage, Louis Lumiere remade and re-exhibited the film in 1935 with a stereoscopic 3D camera


Other most-voted titles of 1896:

2. The Kiss (William Heise | 2,151 votes)

3. The House of the Devil (Georges Melies | 1,643 votes)

4.  Démolition d'un mur (Louis Lumiere | 1,620 votes)

5. The Messers. Lumière at Cards (Louis Lumiere | 968 votes)

6. The Conjuring of a Woman at the House of Robert Houdin (Georges Melies | 937 votes)

7. A Nightmare (Georges Melies | 749 votes)

8. Feeding the Doves (James H. White | 635 votes)

9. Childish Quarrel (Louis Lumiere | 631 votes)

10. A Terrible Night (Georges Melies, 630 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 12: Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory (1895)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 4,332
Number of user reviews: 23
User score: 6.9

Here it is, one of top contenders for being the canonical "first movie ever", the grand debut of the wildly successful Cinematographe that would soon make film into a lucrative business. As Edison did two years earlier across the Atlantic, the Lumiere brothers decided that low-born laborers were the ideal image to be reflected back onto a public audience. Yet, despite this similarity, Employees Leaving the Lumiere Factory feels even more radical, more daring. I believe this difference to be due to the Lumieres' disposal of artifice: where Blacksmith Scene featured actors pretending to be workers, Employees features actual workers--and female workers, at that!--who ostensibly have no foreknowledge of being recorded. This is about as far away from "the movies" as this project will come, their reactions to the camera indicating their utter lack of planning, or even consent to be filmed (another first for cinema: enforced method acting.) The Lumieres had every intention of capturing "real life" exactly as it was, hence their coinage of the term "actualité" to describe films such as this (though, the existence of multiple versions of the film call into question just how "real" it actually is--were there multiple takes, or did the Lumieres film them on separate days, or what?)

There are two opposing interpretations of the Lumieres' focus on the working class, and its consequences for the development of film. The first is to interpret Employees as the birth of social realism in film, a method for increasing class consciousness and effecting action by utilizing film's power to enlargen, embolden, and perspectivize the social relations underpinning everyday life. See how the workers are eager to leave the frame, is this the leisurely stroll of a bougie bureaucrat? No! Who could think that walking speed could signal a group's socioeconomic status so well? What a showcase of industrial capitalism, and its acceleration of workers' lives, its ever-escalating demand to speed up, speed up, speed up! Faster! Faster! Not fast enough! FASTER! No longer does an audience have to actually work at a factory to see its influence on workers' behavior; film promises to transport them there, to shove the reality in their face. When the masses receive a proper education on the plight of the factory slave, change is inevitable, revolution a step away! Or so goes that line of thinking (note my indication of irony through the use of exclamation marks--a troublesome association of excitement with naivete, as if stone-faced cynicism is somehow wiser--but that could fill another post by itself.) The converse argument, though, sees the technological power of the new medium lying not with the workers, but with the owners and their middle-class collaborators, who pay admission to peep into the lives of the poor from the safety of a comfy theatre. This phenomenon would be known later as "class tourism", that exploitative, voyeuristic behavior whereby the bourgeoisie simulate the travails of the hungry and destitute, perhaps spurring them to guilt, but never to action. Such often accompanied by appreciation of the "aesthetic" or some other mystification, which is used to distract from the work's social import.

Some call Employees the first documentary film, but I object to this label, if only because it is so much more of a document than later films in that genre (cf. "reality shows".) There is no narration here, no editing, no cuts, no text, no interviews; the director truly attains a near-invisibility here, his only intervention being to point the camera at a particular location and record it exactly as it happens. This rawness is the source of the film's aforementioned dilemma, wherein it can be viewed as either revolutionary or conservative. This is a tension that will not be resolved anytime soon, or ever. The debate over the proper purpose of film--i.e., whether its purpose is to allow flights of fancy or to inspire change in the world--is one that I previously discussed in Vol. 1, for Passage de Venus, but feels much more potent here. Perhaps it is the multitude of people present--this is a real sense of a class acting collectively, not even comfortably in the past (i.e., Blacksmith Scene), but in the here and now, and in far greater numbers than in previous films. It is a sharp reminder that these are all real people, with their own hopes, obligations, and dreams, too busy living their lives to worry about some guy shooting a film. It is both unsettling and empowering to know both that there are others in the world, and that one is indebted to them. While they work (and this is a present tense for as long as the film exists), I sit here and write a blog post, recording my thoughts for (almost) no one but myself. But this nagging feeling of unfulfilled obligation need not be a call to arms. Viewing the Lumiere brothers need not lead to mass strikes. But that is a response to a strawman; my actual argument is less radical. I argue that if one does not want to don a rhetorical hairshirt and acknowledge the selfishness of most film viewing--after all, no revolution was ever started by sitting on one's ass and watching a movie--then one should at least be aware of the ideological work being done through one's consumption, to at least make that consumption active and critical.

Other connections: Although often called the first commercially-released film, Edison had actually already screened Blacksmith Scene and a few others films in 1894 for a fee. However, the Lumieres' films marked the first time that films were projected onto a wall, rather than viewed through a peephole, and so invented the techno-economical model upon which the film industry would operate.


Other most-voted titles of 1895:

2. Tables Turned on the Gardener (Louis Lumiere | 3,096 votes)

3. Baby's Dinner (Louis Lumiere | 2,051 votes)

4. Annabelle Serpentine Dance (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 1,402 votes)

5. The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Alfred Clark | 1,259 votes)

6. The Photographical Congress Arrives in Lyon (Louis Lumiere | 1,091 votes)

7. Barque sortant du port (Louis Lumiere | 776 votes)

8. Transformation by Hats (Louis Lumiere | 769 votes)

9. The Sea (Louis Lumiere | 741 votes)

10. Cordeliers' Square in Lyon (Louis Lumiere | 617 votes)

116 titles listed for the year altogether.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 11: Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,376
Number of user reviews: 18
User score: 6.8

Here is an excellent example of a movie that has become significant for completely different reasons from what its creators intended. The title of the film, Dickson Experimental Sound Film (directed by, once again, William K. Dickson, in Edison's lab), identifies the introduction of sound as its key innovation, and really, why should I not do the same? After all, I have gone to pains to discuss the pioneering features of every previous entry in the Canon, and the introduction of bloody SOUND has to be one of the most important developments in cinematic history. But the whole sound thing is only the second-most-discussed aspect of Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Part of the reason for this displacement is that the film's use of sound is, frankly, just not that interesting. There is no attempt at synchronizing lip movements to speech, and, in fact, the only speech in the film is barely audible, and is spoken before the footage begins to roll (the first words of cinema: "Are the rest of you ready? Go ahead!"). Once the camera comes on, the sole sound accompanying the film is the rhythmless wailing of a mediocre fiddler. When sound film caught on over 30 years later, both inventors and filmmakers alike assumed, correctly, that the spoken word would be the "killer app" for sound. Hence the preponderance of musicals in the early sound days; The Jazz Singer, The Broadway Melody, Hollywood Revue of 1929, and so on. But in this first attempt, the inclusion of speech seems an afterthought, or even an accident; the focus is on the dancers, with the music--ostensibly the reason for the film's existence--relegated to background noise. Oh yeah, and both of those dancers are...get ready for it...men. Light those powder kegs.

Though often interpreted as the first LGBT film--and indeed, the film was virtually unknown until Vito Russo advanced this argument in The Celluloid Closet in 1981--this line of analysis is generally spurned by more contemporary critics, who will be quick to retort that dancing between men was just what they did back then, nothing to see here (especially nothing gay!) But despite this critical backlash against queer film theory, seemingly every review and every online comment of the Experimental Sound Film remarks upon its homoerotic undertones. Why is it so important to clarify that it was perfectly normal for men to dance with each other in the 1890s, and that it was most definitely NOT!!!! intended in any way as a gay thing? First, I am not sure why "intention" matters at all here, nor why the audience's* nonchalance toward male-male dancing matters. If anything, their blindness to such homoeroticism would only put into sharper focus the unconscious ideologies guiding their consumption. Dancing (and especially the hand-in-hand slow dancing seen here) is, by its very nature, an intimate activity. There need not be sexual acts performed onscreen for the residue of homosexuality to be present; Eve Sedgwick introduced the term homosociality for this type of male-male bonding, which is typically accompanied by a strong disavowal of a romantic element. This reflexive distancing from homosexuality (whether knowingly or not) leads to the odd discursive pattern surrounding the film, wherein even scholars go out of their way to downplay the film's homoerotic content. The argument goes as thus: the dancers in the film may both be men, and they may be touching and interacting with each other in exactly the way a couple would, and pretty much everyone sees that and feels the need to comment on it, but don't mention any of that queer stuff, because it's not there, so shut up.

Now, I may be a little too harsh on the critics who brush off the LGBT angle of Experimental Sound Film. I imagine that few of them are raging homophobes. But isn't the fact that people can support gay rights, have gay friends, etc., and still want to erase the possibility of LGBT content film history, itself a phenomenon worthy of discussion? This simultaneous awareness and dismissal of gay-related content in film would continue (and still continues) to be a running theme in the development of cinema, sometimes enforced by censorship, and sometimes not--it has been the constant coping mechanism for filmmakers throughout the history of the medium, allowing them to indulge in the fetishistic consumption of the ideal male image while divorcing that fetish from sexuality, and thus, from cognitive dissonance. Certainly, women are fetishized also, but typically as objects only, as if they were simply well-made flesh puppets for sexual gratification--indeed, a hypersexualization, consequent of and compensatory for the disavowed male-homosexual desire at the heart of so many film narratives. Yes, it is true that women are objects defined solely by their relations with men in many films, but even this objectification is a facade, used to deflect homosexuality into homosociality. Men want more than a puppet; if their romantic gratification was attainable by merely possessing another person's body, wouldn't something like Carmencita, the first appearance of a sexy lady on film (and title #0000001 on IMDB), be a more fitting entry for this year, one that would foreshadow the heteronormative gaze of Hollywood for the next century and more? If so, then the fact that the Canon's entry for 1894 consists of two men slow-dancing in each other's arms should indicate that Hollywood's gaze is more than heteronormative; it is also, I argue, homosocial. And I further argue that the emergence of such a gaze is the very root of what makes the Experimental Sound Film interesting, since for all of the technical advances on display here, for all its prescient use of the aural dimension of film long before it was viable, the thing that sparks debate is the possibility that (omg!) it might have a whiff of the gay.

*the notion of an "audience" for this film is hypothetical, since it was never publicly shown.

Other connections: The Kinetoscope used to make the Experimental Sound Film wasn't very popular, probably because it was almost impossible for the primitive mechanism (which was simply a cylinder phonograph attached to a camera) to synchronize sound to onscreen action. Not until the 1920s would a reliable and feasible method be developed to match lip movements to spoken words.  


Other most-voted titles of 1894:

2. Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (William K. Dickson | 1,283 votes)

3. Carmencita (William K. Dickson | 1,222 votes)

4. Sandow, No. 1 (William K. Dickson | 824 votes)

5. The Barbershop (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 775 votes)

6. Annie Oakley (William K. Dickson | 757 votes)

7. The Boxing Cats [Prof Welton's] (William K. Dickson, William Heise | 704 votes)

8. Buffalo Dance (William K. Dickson | 588 votes)

9. Glenroy Brothers [Comic Boxing] (579 votes)

10. Annabelle Butterfly Dance (William K. Dickson | 550 votes)

IMDB lists 94 titles for the year altogether.

 

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 10: Blacksmith Scene (1893)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 1,441
Number of user reviews: 18
User score: 6.2

The IMDB Canon has thus far consisted of back-room experiments, private curiosities; in the early 1890s, the only people who were aware of film at all were those directly involved in their production or had connections to the people making them. The glamour of stars, the wonders of special effects, the phantasmagoria of the darkened movie theatre; none of these things yet existed, and so, the layman had little reason to pay attention to what was then an unproven technology. All of that changes in 1893. After a few years' worth of research, development, and experimentation, Edison felt that film was ready for the masses, and he was right. 1893 is therefore the last year of its kind, the last year before the medium would flourish and the beginnings of what we now call the film industry emerge. And what was the subject matter deemed most appropriate for the medium's public debut? Manual labor. The picture drawn by Blacksmith Scene is not a promise of escapism, not a glossy world of intrigue and melodrama, but one of sweat, toil, and hard work. For all that film is associated with the Hollywood mode of production, in which film serves as an "apolitical" (scare quotes most definitely intended) distraction from the dingy world of work and stress, Blacksmith Scene presents an entirely opposite vision. Where the film industry would evolve into a rejection of reality, Blacksmith Scene is a reminder of it, for it depicts a world in which there is nothing but labor, in which life is simply the medium through which people do work. The characters--and Blacksmith Scene is generally considered the first film with characters, though earlier entries in this project indicate it's not quite that simple--are not narcissistic wish-fulfilling supermen onto which the audience projects themselves, but precisely the opposite, characters that prompt an audience to think, "I'm glad I don't have to do that for a living."

And they didn't; not quite as shown in the film, anyway, as Blacksmith Scene is not a depiction of what blacksmithing was actually like in the 1890s, but instead a look back on what were, even then, the "old days". Blacksmith Scene is the first period piece on film, a pretense of historicity that, as with all depictions of the past, has ideological ramifications. The film signifies the past through its depiction of social relations; this is a workplace more communal, less rigid than the industrialized factories of the Second Industrial Revolution. It is a time when workers are united in the common pain and exhaustion of the forge, with alcohol the only medicine able to numb the gruelling drudgery of their lives. The film hearkens to a world in which the separation between "work" and "life" was not yet clearly defined, and yet, despite their blase (or perhaps naive?) acceptance of the centrality of work to existence, there is nevertheless a sense that the workers seen here are aware of themselves as a collectivity (e.g., the sharing of the bottle.) This obviously had currency for an audience that was observing daily the agitations of the burgeoning labor movement (at this time, making such ridiculous demands as a 12-hour workday), but I feel there is even more at work here (pun intended.) As with Eadweard Muybridge's experiments, there is a techno-utopian promise within Blacksmith Scene, though in a different way. Both Sallie Gardner and Buffalo Running promised to tame the natural world by making the invisible subtleties of movements visible and thus accessible to human perception, implying that the same technique could be used on virtually anything else that moved, that film could empower human beings far beyond their natural capabilities. But Blacksmith Scene, in contrast, anchors itself in the past so that the present is its own future. It presents an older, even more difficult mode of work, one that an audience is glad to escape, even when they have not escaped at all. For the past is never really past; its bleeds into the present, shapes it, determines it. The only way to steer the present into the future is to learn the past, its trends, its paths, and consciously change them. Blacksmith Scene is the first film that encourages consciousness of the past, and so, if not exactly a socialist manifesto, at least suggests the possibility of film as a tool for change. In that sense, Blacksmith Scene demonstrates an ideological duality; while it can be viewed retrospectively as smug presentism--i.e., "look how far we've come!"--that message is accompanied by a Newtonian counter-impulse, one that asks, "How far is there left to go?" And the answer is, even 124 years on, "a long way yet."


Other connections: Contrary to my claim in an earlier post that Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory was the first commercially-released film, Blacksmith Scene seems to have preceded it by a year, being first shown for paid admission in April 1894, alongside a few other early films from the Edison lab. That's what I get for falling back on received wisdom. Also, despite my perception of the workers in the film all being wizened veterans, one of the actors, Charles Kayser, was only 15 years old, and lived until 1966.


Other most-voted films of 1893: IMDB lists just one other title for 1893, that being Horse Shoeing by William K. Dickson, with 36 votes. This will never happen again.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 9: Pauvre Pierrot (1892)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 772
Number of user reviews: 11
User score: 6.6

With many of the previous entries, I have strained to find some kind of historical importance for even the most innocuous films, some way in which they foreshadow the later development of the industry. Sometimes, even I feel that I'm reaching a bit; I mean, yes, Passage de Venus could be considered the first sci-fi film, in a kinda-sorta-if-you-squint-really-hard sense, but when we're looking at experiments that old, that primitive, and that far removed from the myriad valences that would eventually signify the term "sci-fi", is such a label productive to analytic discourse? To use the word "sci-fi" would require considerable qualification--so much so that it might be better to omit altogether.

But sometimes, no hyperbole is required. Sometimes there are films that really are that far ahead of the pack, so innovative that they introduce whole new concepts to cinema.
 
For example, today's entry. I don't have to add any qualifications when I call Pauvre Pierrot the first animated film. No reservations, no "in a sense", no "foreshadows"; Pauvre Pierrot is a straight-up cartoon. There has been nothing else like it up to this point, not in its use of a painted background, not in its use of color, not in its hand-drawn character animations, and not in its considerable but necessary runtime  (4 minutes), as this is also the first film with a narrative. Yes, aside from the other cartoons that Emile Reynaud showed at the same time (it's not clear which is the absolute first), Pauvre Pierrot is the first film with fictional characters. Now, granted, the characters here are simply well-worn commedia dell'arte archetypes, but this is still the first time that we've seen anything resembling storytelling, in the familiar sense. This is not just a slice of life, not just an experiment, not just a dry run for a new technology--this is a film that is actually attempting to create an alternate world, a fantasy world. It is the first film (that I'm aware of, anyway) that invokes suspension of disbelief, for it makes no claim, scientific, technical, or otherwise, on "reality"--it is a story fabricated from director Emile Reynaud's imagination. In its attempt to create fantasy, it feels more real than practically everything that has preceded it; this is a work in which characters think and react, have personalities, motivations. Where previous films were akin to looking through windows at people waiting to be seen, Pauvre Pierrot introduces the fourth wall to cinema. These characters do not care if the audience sees them or not; they don't know the audience exists. They are contained entirely within their own world, one apart from ours and yet accessible through it.

The content of this early narrative, is, as might be expected, primitive, unfolding entirely in pantomime (intertitles hadn't been invented yet), though it is still much more developed in narrative sense than any prior film in this series. Harlequin arrives for a tryst with Colombine, Pierrot's entrance forces them to hide, Pierrot sings, and Harlequin scares Pierrot away. That is it. There is still a long way to go before complex stories will be told in film. Likewise, the animation more resembles a series of superimposed cutouts (which they effectively are) than the smooth movement that would become the norm in later cartoons; this is, after all, 40 years before the 12 basic principles of animation were codified. However, Reynaud's work does look ahead to Disney's invention of cel animation by using a single background and drawing only the characters again for each frame--this is the breakthrough that would later make color animation affordable. And, it bears repeating: the fact that any kind of animated film this old exists at all, and that it's perhaps the earliest film of any kind to tell a story, is bloody mind-blowing.


Other connections: Reynaud never found much success in his lifetime. His custom-made Praxinoscope, which was both fragile and extremely labor-intensive to make films for, was soon made obsolete by the Lumiere brothers' Cinematograph. He fell into mental illness in the 1910s, threw most of his life's work into the Seine, and died penniless soon after. His works were virtually forgotten until the 1950s, and really, they still aren't very well-known. Due to their obscurity, his works do not appear to have influenced any other early animators (J Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay, etc.)


 Other most-voted titles of 1892:

2. A Hand Shake (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 262 votes)

3. Fencing (William K. Dickson | 243)

4. Le clown et ses chiens (Emile Reynaud | 142 votes)

5. Un bon bock (Emile Reynaud | 86 votes)

6. Boxing (80 votes)

7. Le prince de Galles (Louis Lumiere | 57 votes)

8. Wrestling (William K. Dickson | 41 votes)

9. Man on Parallel Bars (William K. Dickson | 34 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 8: Newark Athlete (1891)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 984
Number of user reviews: 10
User score: 4.9

Newark Athlete is not an exciting film. A boy goes through a basic exercise routine for a few seconds, and that's it. I cannot even fill up this entry with production information this time, because it's the second consecutive William K. Dickson production from Edison's lab. What I could do instead, though is discuss Newark Athlete's role as a cultural time capsule that captures the 1890s fitness craze that was exploding in popularity at the time it was filmed. The bowling-pin-like objects in the Athlete's hands are Indian clubs, which were so popular and so widespread as exercise equipment that they became Olympic events in 1904 and 1932. Although the title may raise one's hopes that, like Sandow or Carmencita, it is a priceless preservation of a 19th-century celebrity in their prime years, this is not the case. The eponymous Athlete's identity remains unknown, and was probably an "athlete" only in the sense that he was a young person who was into the contemporary Indian club fad. The interest of the film, then, lies in capture of a particular pop-culture moment: it is the first film in this project that feels distinctly "of its time", in the sense that it depicts an event with cultural currency in a way that the capricious movements in earlier films (Monkeyshines, Roundhay Garden Scene, etc.) do not. Where Le Prince's films reflect nothing but the state of technology used to make them, Newark Athlete shows a socio-cultural moment.

And another thing. Despite the Athlete's fairly unimpressive routine (the 4.9 IMDB user score might be the lowest in this whole project), the fact that it is a routine opens up the possibility of yet another first for this project--that is to say, the idea of a performance. While I have referred to the people in previous films (Roundhay and the like) as "performers", those were, in truth, improvised motions more than anything else. The nature of those motions was irrelevant, subordinate to the technical goal of capturing any kind of movement, period. That is not to say that technical concerns are not a concern in Newark Athlete--it was never released to the public, and was created solely to test improvements in film technology since Monkeyshines--but there is a sense that the boy takes his role as athlete seriously, that he is attempting to inhabit a persona other than just "boy". (Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life seems a relevant text here.) So, while we have not reached the point where films tell stories, the Athlete's routine may nevertheless be considered a rudimentary script, and his role a rudimentary "character". If it feels weird that we're on Vol. 8 of this series and films still aren't even close to forming narratives yet, well, it'll keep feeling weird for several years hence. With Newark Athlete, as with the previous films in this series, the entire medium of film is an experiment, barely in the beginning of its infancy, and not in any way commercialized yet. The contemporary equivalent would be, oh, I don't know, quantum computing, perhaps?


Other connections: It's more Dickson/Edison, so everything from yesterday still applies, and since the boy's identity is lost to history, nothing new to say there, either.


Other most-voted films of 1891:

2. Dickson Greeting (William K. Dickson | 854 votes)

3. Men Boxing (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 541 votes)

4. La vague (Etienne Jules-Marey | 154 votes)

5. Je vous aime (Georges Demeny | 82 votes)

6. Duncan Smoking (William K. Dickon and William Heise | 56 votes)

7. Monkey and Another, Boxing (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 53 votes)

8. Two Fencers (Etienne Jules-Marey | 51 votes)

9. Duncan and Another, Blacksmith Shop (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 46 votes)

10. Duncan or Devinold with Muslin Cloud (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 43 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 7: Monkeyshines, No.1 (1890)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 849
Number of user reviews: 10
User score: 5.2

Monkeyshines is, as most films from this era are, a trailblazer, a crucial step in the development of the medium. But in this case, it is not the technical achievement, nor the subject matter of the project in which it makes it mark. No, the notability of Monkeyshines stems mostly from the location of its production: the United States of America. It's true, this is the first appearance of the good ol' US of A in this project, the country that would come to dominate both the world film industry and the selections in this list. I would be willing to bet that at least 95 out of 100 movies that the layman has seen are American productions. Unless one lives in one of the handful of countries that have a strong domestic industry (India, China, France, Turkey), "Hollywood" is practically synonymous with film.

But we are not talking about Hollywood yet. No, Monkeyshines hails from a period where Southern California was almost nothing but barren desert, Los Angeles an oil boom town of 50,000 people. The initial center of American film production was not the studio, but the laboratory--that is, a specific laboratory on the opposite side of the continent, in West Orange, New Jersey, owned by one Thomas Edison.

Although Monkeyshines is generally agreed to be the first American film, ever, one of its creators, William B. Dickson, was a Scotsman. If you've never heard of him, that is because Monkeyshines is associated, first and foremost, with Edison. This curious displacement marks another first in film history, that being the question of who gets to claim authorship over the film. While scholars would later emphasize the director as the supreme auteur defining a film's vision, things were less clear in the early days. Cinema differs from other media, such as novels, in that collaboration is the norm and the person with the most creative control may not be the person who brings the work to fruition directly--that is to say, the person behind the camera is not necessarily the artful wellspring from which a film gushes forth. And in the case of experiments such as Monkeyshines, who could blame someone for giving Edison the credit? He bankrolled the development of technology that made it possible, and owned the facility in which it was made, after all. And it is not as though Monkeyshines is some treasure trove of ingenuity; it consists entirely of a lab worker (sources differ on which one) waving his arms around for a few seconds in an attempt to make some kind of motion show up on the exposed film. The idea of film as an artform is still some ways off; for now, it is conceived primarily as a technological novelty, the 1890s equivalent to, say, what virtual reality headsets were in 2010. Dickson may have set up the scene in the studio and filmed it, but to call him a director feels, in some way, anachronistic. He is more of a technician, an inventor; technical feats are his interest more than content, at least in these early experiments. But does that even matter in an era where the development of viable film cameras was the overwhelming motivation behind virtually all filmmaking? Obviously, the question of who deserves to be identified as the singular Great Mind behind a given film will not be resolved here, and, in fact, will become only more complicated as the medium matures.

I haven't yet discussed one of the most common talking points regarding Monkeyshines, which is its ghostly quality, its performer appearing less as a human being and more as a restless apparition. Yet I do not find Monkeyshines nearly as disturbing as other early films, such as Roundhay Garden Scene, perhaps for the very reason that it lacks the humanity so evident in Le Prince's film. In Dickson's effort, humanity is inaccessible, for the human was not the proof-of-concept of the film; simply capturing any kind of motion was the goal, and a human happened to be a convenient tool for that purpose. Unlike Roundhay, Monkeyshines feels only as accessible as it should; the nineteenth-century remains beneath a shroud, reduced to an incoherent blob. There is no sense, as there is in Le Prince, that this is the last fragment of real people who once actually lived. The person in Monkeyshines registers in my mind as exactly what it is; an indistinct blob on a filmstrip.

Other connections: Monkeyshines, No. 1 was only the first of the many, many short films that Dickson shot in the Edison lab; IMDB lists 326 cinematography credits for him between 1890 and 1903, with the majority of those produced just in the years 1899-1903. We will be seeing more of him in the near future. Dickson's lesser-known collaborator, William Heise, also directed around 175 films, but his role in the early history of cinema seems virtually ignored in the historical record, The Kiss aside.

Other most-voted titles of 1890:

2. Monkeyshines, No. 2 (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 594 votes) - Usually shown together with No. 1.

3. London's Trafalgar Square (William Carr Crofts and Wordworth Donisthiorpe | 410 votes)

4. Monkeyshines, No. 3 (William K. Dickson and William Heise | 183 votes)

5. Mosquinha (Etienne-Jules Marey | 87 votes)

6. Traffic in King's Road, Chelsea (William Friese-Green, 30 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 6: Leisurely Pedestrians, Open Topped Buses and Hansom Cabs with Trotting Horses (1889)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 170
Number of user reviews: 0
User score: 6.2

One of the pleasures of writing about the early films in the IMDB Canon is that it forces me to write about works that, ironically, are too obscure or uninteresting for anyone else to care about. Case in point: William Friese-Greene's Leisurely Pedestrians, a film so unknown that it has no Wikipedia article, and even the director's Wiki-biography mentions it only in passing. This is clearly not a canonical work in the small-c canonical sense. It has received only 170 user votes, the second-lowest of any film I'll be covering (ahead of only Buffalo Running) Moreover, it is the one and only entry in this project with zero IMDB user reviews.

There is not much to say about Leisurely Pedestrians on the level of content. It is best described as an inferior clone of Louis Le Prince's Man Walking Around the Corner, depicting, much as that film did, a man walking through an urban setting. But where Le Prince's experiment succeeded in creating an illusion of motion, Friese-Greene's is effectively a slideshow. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, even spectators at the time were unimpressed by the lack of smooth movement in Friese-Greene's films. The significance of Le Prince's film is direct and obvious; viewers now, as then, see the movements of his performers as movements, without any need to reference the limitations of the device used to make it, without any need to think about the essential lie at the heart of film that makes dead images come to life. For Le Prince, movement is a fait accompli; with Friese-Greene, the true nature of the medium becomes a distraction. There is nothing but stillness, deadness. Paradoxically, this also means I can watch Leisurely Pedestrians without the uncanny anxiety that Roundhay Garden Scene inflicts upon me, for in Friese-Greene's work, there is no dissonance between the fact of death and the sensation of life. Everything about Leisurely Pedestrians is simply dead. 

A film like this flies in the face of everything my project is supposed to stand for. This series is supposed to cover the most popular, the most enduring films on IMDB! It's supposed to be about separating the wheat from the chaff, and then determining how the wheat became the wheat. So, what do when one of the entries is clearly chaff, by any standard? What to do with a film deservedly ignored for failing even that most basic requirements of a motion picture, that is, to produce motion?

I argue that this very fact of obscurity, of clear subordination to similar but superior film, is itself another milestone in the early history of cinema. It is the first failure of cinema. Or--dare I go one step further--the first bad film. Sure, Passage de Venus comes only slightly closer to producing motion than Leisurely Pedestrians, but that film was made in 1874, when it had no competition. Friese-Greene, on the other hand, arrives after Le Prince, who produced a superior demonstration, with almost the same subject, two years earlier. There is a phenomenon known as twin films, wherein two movies with similar premises come out around the same time and thereby become ripe for comparison. Usually, one of the movies is much more successful than the other. If you allow for the two-year gap between them, Man Walking Round the Corner and Leisurely Pedestrians form the first such pair in film history, with Friese-Greene's film being the lesser half. With this series, I aim to avoid fetishistic platitudes such as, "This movie is so popular because it's just so good!"; I intend to theorize a movie's reception, arguing how it became popular, rather than evaluating the amount of disembodied "goodness" present within it. But with Lesiurely Pedestrians, I'm going to break from this principle, because I feel this movie just kinda sucks, and that's why no one watches it.


Other connections: Pretty much the only success in Friese-Greene's film career was when he sent a newspaper report on his camera to Thomas Edison across the pond, who then passed the clipping on to be published in Scientific American. However, following his death in 1921, his son Claude continued to improved on his father's work, and became a successful cinematographer until his own death in 1943.


Other most-voted films of 1889:

Only one other title listed on IMDB for this year, also by Friese-Green: Hyde Park Corner, with 69 votes.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 5: Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 3,959
Number of user reviews: 39
User score: 7.6

Roundhay Garden Scene is the kind of film that throws me into an existential panic. I wish I could say I was exaggerating, but I do truly feel that there is something deeply disturbing in these foggy, faded images from a bygone generation. Perhaps it is the simple knowledge, pointed out in so many Youtube comments, that all of the people depicted in this brief footage are long-dead. I mean, the footage is 129 years old; even their children would be dead by now! But it's not as if the cast members needed that long to die; in fact, the reason that Roundhay can be almost precisely dated to October 14, 1888 is that one of its principal performers, Sarah Whitley, died only 10 days later. She was the first person, ever, in the history of the world, to continue moving from beyond the grave. Her husband, Joseph, also featured in the film, died in 1891. This film is the only mark that these two lives left on the world, the only reason they have not been completely forgotten. When was the last time anyone mentioned Sarah or Joseph Whitley outside the immediate context of Roundhay Garden Scene? As they say, you die twice: the first time when you stop breathing, and again when someone says your name for the last time. I guess the Whitleys just lucked out. Who knows what other people narrowly missed being captured by Le Prince's camera, and so are lost forever to the ether of time and space? I'm thinking too much about this. Or am I?

For there is still the strange fate of Le Prince himself to consider. In 1890, not long after creating his first batch of films (among them Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge and Accordion Player), he boarded a train in Paris with a briefcase full of his work, intent on travelling to America to show his invention to the world. He was never seen again, despite an extensive police investigation (recent evidence suggests Le Prince drowned, somehow.) His disappearance remains one of the great unsolved mysteries of film history, not only for its spooky appeal, but also for the implications it would have on the development of the film industry; who knows how things might have gone if Edison had not been able to take credit for Le Prince's work? Everything may have changed. Or perhaps not. Either way, the chilly air of death and mystery surrounds Le Prince and his films; it is as if one is viewing a parade of ghosts, directed by a man who became, himself, a ghost.

But is even this explanation adequate to explain why Roundhay Garden Scene unsettles me where the earlier entries of this series did not? Perhaps it is, indeed, the humanity of Roundhay that gives it a potency beyond that of, say, Buffalo Running. As with Man Walking Around the Corner, Roundhay's content is entirely human, entirely within a mundane environment, and cognizant of the three-dimensional potential for movement on film. Whereas the earliest experiments in film (Sallie Gardner and the like) took an almost-clinical interest in the pure mechanism of movement, seeking to reduce it to science and process it into ossified knowledge, Le Prince's film is lively and spontaneous. There is no academic (or aesthetic) mission guiding Roundhay's filmic event; the performers move as they wish, and Le Prince simply points the camera in their general direction and captures their whim. In doing so, Le Prince sets yet another precedent for future filmmaking: that is to say, Roundhay marks the beginning of improvization on film. He brings no particular purpose to his project beyond showing movement; the means by which that movement is created is determined not by the mind of a scientist, or technician, or auteur, but by the actors themselves. It features people walking jauntily, haphazardly, erratically--a far cry from the dry directness of purpose in previous films. For the first time, the performers have been put in control of their own representation on film. This may, too, be part of the reason I find Roundhay a ghoulish piece: the juxtaposition of the playful and morbid, chaos and void--it reminds me of the ephemerality of choice, and the permanence of obligation, that is to say, the obligation for it all to end. And I don't like that.

No fault to Le Prince, though.


Other connections: As mentioned yesterday, Le Prince's disappearance before he had the chance to exhibit his invention doomed him to obscurity for decades afterward. This is as good a place as any to also mention the much higher vote total for Roundhay than for previous entries in the IMDB Canon, indicating its widespread de facto status as the first film ever--though, as indicated by previous entries in the series, that is an oversimplification.


Other most-voted films of 1888:

This is the first competitive year of this series, featuring five titles. The other four are as follows:

2. Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (Louis Le Prince | 1,982 votes)

3. Accrdion Player (Louis Le Prince | 615 votes) - another uncanny, ghoulish early clip.

4. Pferd und Reiter Springen uber ein Hindernis (Ottomar Anschutz | 69 votes)

5. Brighton Street Scene (Williams Friese-Greene | 35 votes)

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 4: Man Walking Around the Corner (1887)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 568
Number of user reviews: 5
User score: 5.1

So far in the IMDB Canon, the number of votes a film has received--that is to say, my entire mode of measurement--has been completely irrelevant, since no year has yet contained more than a single film. Furthermore, most years thus far have contained no films at all; going forward from 1883's Buffalo Running, 1884, 1885, and 1886 are, once again, all empty. But these are the last empty years that will appear in this project. From this point onward, the isolated experiments have come to an end; the arrival of one Louis Le Prince marks the epicenter from which the medium of film would explode over the next decade. The same phenomenon as with the two Muybridge entries, but in reverse: Man Walking Around the Corner is the ignored experiment, while Roundhay Garden Scene is his masterpiece--or, at least, his most widely-recognized technical achievement ("masterpiece" feels like an odd word to use for a film 2 seconds long.) So, I'll save my overall thoughts on Le Prince for tomorrow.

There are few films shorter, simpler, or more primitive than Man Walking Around the Corner. It stretches the definition of film altogether, being more a fragment of a fragment, a few photographs stitched together into a sequence after the fact, producing not even a flip-book's worth of movement. If not for the title, it would be difficult to discern what, exactly, the film depicts, as the "man" is a mere blob moving against a grey substrate. Several viewings will likely be required to make out the subject and context of the film. Nevertheless, it does mark an important milestone in the history of film, in that a human is the subject and central focus. No longer are we looking at the movements of planets or the subtleties of animal gaits, but at the actions of people. This fact alone may give it greater resemblance to something that a modern viewer would recognize as a film. Granted, only a single person is visible--don't expect any depiction of social relations here--but merely having human content front-and-center is enough to set it apart from the scientific and technological aims of Le Prince's predecessors. Furthermore, the film places its subject in a definite environment; Le Prince does not seek to make his subject independent of place, as Muybridge did with his horse and buffalo pieces, but places him in a definitely urban setting, in front of some manner of building. Man Walking Around the Corner therefore marks the introduction of spatial awareness into film, the first film in which depth and dimension exist. Passage de Venus and Sallie Gardner were technical feats, yes, but they were utterly flat, effectively two-dimensional representations of objects, almost engravings as much as films. With Le Prince's work, there can be no mistake; this is planet Earth, our world, and this is an actual human moving within its spaces. With no obvious mission behind his film other than to observe a regular person--there is no tracking of planets here, no dissection of a horse's gallop--Le Prince, intentionally or not, introduces social realism into film. No, there is nothing here that can be called social commentary yet, but observation of the common folk moving through everyday spaces can be viewed as commentary in and of itself, for it asserts that the lives of the plebs, and the spaces they inhabit, are as worthy for recording as any other subject. Observation leads to knowledge, and thus to power--to observe the world is a prerequisite for changing it. Insofar as this principle applies to the history of film, Man Walking Around the Corner is the first sentence of the first chapter of a thousand-page book.

Other connections: Despite now being recognized as the grandfather of film as we know it, Louis Le Prince was unknown in his lifetime, owing to his abrupt disappearance in 1890 before he could publicly exhibit any of his films (more on that tomorrow.)

Other most-voted films of 1887: Once again, there is not a single other IMDB entry for this year, but this will be the last time I have to say that.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 3: Buffalo Running (1883)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 128
Number of user reviews: 2
User score: 6.2

The third installment of IMDB's canon finds itself in a bit of a quandry. After 4 whole years (1879, 1880, 1881, 1882) without a single IMDB entry, one finally appears in 1883, and, well, Eadward Muybridge is back. Moreover, he is doing much the same thing that he was in the previous entry, recording another animal's gait, this time a buffalo's. The buffalo (or, more accurately, the American bison) was racing toward extinction at this time, being the target of widespread (and government-sponsored) culling campaigns, their population reaching its lowest point around 1890; by 1883, most younger Americans would know the buffalo only from stories of the frontier, the rare animals being as exotic to their 19th-century imaginations as panda bears and Bengal tigers are to us. But Muybridge's purpose is not one of preservation, not a means of saving a doomed animal; it may, in fact, be precisely the opposite, the final conquering of a savage beast, the ultimate symbol of a once-wild nature cowering before the might of man. Many of the same points I made yesterday are applicable again here; the filming of the buffalo shrinks and tames the animal, allowing the viewer to safely examine, and thereby dominate it. I could again argue that the film a prosthesis for the eye, enhancing its abilities beyond its natural limitations and transforming the viewer into a kind of cyborg, empowered by the promise of film technology to pacify the natural world, unlock its mysteries, and what have you.

But that would be redundant, and really, redundancy may be the more important aspect of Buffalo Running. For how else to explain the much lower level of interest from IMDB viewers for this film than for Sallie Gardner? Not only have the total votes declined from over 900 to a mere 128, but the average score, also has declined from 7.3 to 6.2. Does this disparity really indicate a gulf in the craftmanship between Muybridge's films? Did he lose his touch in between 1878 and 1883?

I argue no. The difference between Sallie Gardner and Buffalo Running is best explained by that nebulous but always-present factor in film critique: impact. Impact is best defined as, well, the level of importance that a film attains by being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, that importance is defined by the level of influence it exerts on other films; other times, by the amount of retroactive praise it receives from critics; yet others, by being unusual or the first of its kind in some respect. Buffalo Running achieves none of those things; Muybridge is virtually always discussed in the context of Sallie Gardner. History remembers him as the "horse photographer guy"; his other experiments have resigned to obscurity, and indeed, Buffalo Running is so forgotten nowadays that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Hence my insistence on discussing impact here, as, despite the inadequacy of the term, it is perhaps the only term that captures all of the valences relevant to a movie attaining the #1 spot for a given year on IMDB. Somehow, years later, a movie has to attract more votes than any of its contemporaries. Some will get there by making a lot of money at the box office and coasting on residual popularity from there; some by retaining a cult following for many years, long after the year's immediate zeitgeist hits faded away; some for being historical and/or technical milestones, particularly in the earlier years; and likewise, some will reach the top by being critical favorites from older eras to which viewers are unlikely to have much exposure beyond the most canonical classics. And Buffalo Running gets there not for any of those reasons, but because it's the only one to choose from. It will be the least-voted-on film in this entire project. The IMDB Canon has thus (ironically) canonized a film completely obscure and ignored, a film that would have continued to be ignored if not for this very act of arbitrary canonization.

Other connections: Muybridge, as discussed yesterday, directly or indirectly pretty much everyone involved in the early film industry and the early modernist art scene.

Other most-voted films of 1883: Buffalo Running, as with the previous two entries, wins by default, with an even lower vote total this time.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 2: Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 919
Number of user reviews: 3
User score: 7.3

Eadweard Muybridge's experiment to see whether or not all four of a horse's legs leave the ground during a gallop is conventionally presented as the immediate prehistory of film, the first pictograph in the evolution of a filmic language's alphabet. Everyone who has cared to read on the topic knows the result; the horse does, indeed, briefly suspend itself in the air with each stride, and with this breakthrough, motion pictures found their purpose and blah blah blah, Star Wars.

What interests me about Sallie Gardner is not the anecdote that forms the introductory paragraphs to every history of film ever written; I am interested instead in its role as the successor to Passage de Venus (note that IMDB lists no entries in 1875, 1876, or 1877), with which it shares a number of traits, being both brief records of natural events unadorned by narrative, editing, or narration. But, these surface similarities aside, the two films are sharply opposed in their aims and effects. Whereas Pierre Janssen's purpose was observation--he used his "photographic revolver" to record and preserve an exceptional event that could otherwise be observed in real time--Muybridge's goal is virtually the opposite, aiming to discover the truth behind a commonplace event invisible to the human eye. It was with Sallie Gardner that film began to augment the eye, enhance it, enable it; the horse's gallop is everyday, but the anatomization of that gallop is possible only with the new technologies afforded by film. This is what Walter Benjamin views, 58 years later, as the empowering dimension of film; its ability to reveal the secrets of the mundane, to defamiliarize the everyday through manipulation of size and speed. For Benjamin, the goal of film should be to politicize art; that is, to spur mass action through the revelation of routine social injustice and inequality. But Muybridge has no socialist (or otherwise political) aims; he just wants to win a bet. His singular focus is reflected in the complete isolation of his subject; in Sallie Gardner, the horse and horse alone is what matters, while the human content (the rider, Domm--the first person ever filmed) is utterly irrelevant. So, while Muybridge follows Janssen's lead in eliding humanity from film, he does elevate the pertinence of both the quotidian and the living, in contrast to the far-away, dead cosmos that was Janssen's fixation. But that is not to say that Muybridge's approach is necessarily better; merely that his aims are different, that his focus on living things is compatible with his use of technology to extend the capabilities of the human viewer, who--while ignored as the subject of the film--is empowered, as spectator, to tame the horse with nothing but a gaze.

Sallie Gardner may be best, viewed, in this sense, as the first cyborg fantasy in film. I do not mean that it features cyborgs, but rather, that it turns the viewers themselves into cyborgs, by encouraging them to leave their limited bodies behind in favor of the liberating might of technology. This demonstration of power, is, after all, the entire point of Muybridge's experiment--it is the avenue by which the viewer gains mastery over nature, unravels its mysteries, dominates the beings within. While Sallie Gardner may be a record of the past, its purpose is not to ensure archival of the past, as with Passage de Venus, but to promise a future--a future in which not only does the viewer not have to wonder, "Do all of the legs leave the ground or not?", but in which that same technique can be applied to every other kind of rapid motion. The futurity of Muybridge's film is embedded into its very structure; the "truth" of the film is invisible during the filming of the event (i.e., the galloping of the horse in real life), and can be seen only when the film itself is examined. The film thereby becomes "truer" than the original event, for the original event is no longer the point--the point is, instead, the film's manipulation of that event for the benefit of the viewer. Hence the film's encouragement of the viewer to trust in technology, to trust in its ability to create a new event from an old one, an event that can occur only when one watches the film. This new event exceeds nature, creates reality--as aforementioned, a cyborg reality. Sallie Gardner may thus be viewed as the first example of techno-utopianism in film, the first example of its intoxicating ability not only to procure new knowledge from the world, but to transform that world, and thereby subjugate it, in an ever-more-elaborate phantasmagoria of sight and sound.

Other connections: Eadward Muybridge was an absurdly influential individual. He was, of course, one of the key influences on William Dickson, who invented the movie camera as we know it, and Thomas Edison, who effectively started the American film industry. But that's not all; Muybridge's experiments with multiple exposures also directly inspired Marcel Duchamp's early work, so yes, Muybridge pretty much invented Dada too, and was therefore one of the main progenitors of modernism in art.

Other most-voted films of 1878: Not yet. Sallie Gardner is the only IMDB entry for the year, and 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1882 are all completely empty.

The IMDB Canon, Vol. 1: Passage de Venus (1874)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 442
Number of user reviews: 3
User score: 7.0

In this series, I am primarily concerned with articulating the reasons for canonization of each entry--that is, I aim to answer the question of why a particular film became the most-voted film for a particular year. Yet at the very outset of this project, I encounter a problem, as Passage de Venus resists utterly any attempt at qualitative evaluation (i.e., critique) in the familiar sense. It lacks, first of all, anything else to compare it to, being the only IMDB entry for 1874, and for several years after. It is an outlier, an anomaly, an experiment born into a world that had no concept of film, a world in which the 20th century was yet a distant dream. In 1874, Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States; the telephone, the light bulb, and the doorknob were not yet invented; automobiles were limited to a few steam-driven experiments; Richard Wagner, Brigham Young, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli, Jesse James, Billy the Kid were all still alive; the germ theory of disease was not yet codified; heavier-than-air flight was in the realm of fantasy. Hence, our journey through the IMDB user-determined canon of film begins in a world before film existed, unless one is to consider this particular curiosity, a mechanical novelty from French astronomer Pierre Janssen, a film. For although the trivia page for Passage de Venus credits it with a spate of firsts--oldest film listed on IMDB, first documentary ever made, first chronophotographic sequence, first step in the development of movie cameras, and so on--it may be more accurately classified as an early experiment in time-lapse photography. If considered the first film--and I henceforth refer to it as a film, if only out of convenience--it was ahead of the curve to a ludicrous degree, preceding the first commercial exhibition of a film (Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory in 1895) by 21 years. To watch Passage de Venus is to watch primordial soup of cinema beginning to coalesce into a chain reaction, not quite yet movement, but something resembling it. The film's interest is, of course, primarily historical; it precedes (by many years) the idea that film can tell a story, or even that film can record the movements of human beings.
  
Passage de Venus defies the usual narrative of the early history of film in several ways: first, it was created not in the core countries (France, UK, US) that would dominate the early film industry, but in Japan (albeit by a European), which, in 1874, was only 6 years removed from the Meiji Restoration that ended the shogunate and began the country's transition away from feudalism. Second, Janssen had no intention of commercializing his work; he was not an entrepeneur--as Le Prince or Edison or the Lumieres were--but a scientist, devoted to the acquisition of knowledge, rather than money. Third, the film is utterly unconcerned with the capture of living subjects. The "director"'s concern is not with humans or with any other animal, but with the movement of a big rock--that is to say, Venus, which appears a black spot moving gradually downward across a lighter curved object (the sun) in a sequence of 47 photographs, captured over 72 seconds with a "photographic revolver" of Janssen's own design. It may be viewed as the beginning of film's detachment from not only social, but Earthly concern altogether. Likewise, it can be viewed as the earliest progenitor of speculative cinema, wherein film looks upon other worlds beyond our own, under the justification that Earth is too dull, mundane, or otherwise not worth looking at. Yet to view Passage de Venus as the vapid predecessor of the fantasy or sci-fi genres would be to misrepresent its purpose, for unlike the frivolous and/or mundane curiosities that characterize many other early films (Roundhay Garden Scene, Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, and the like), Janssen's film is the result of a scientific mission to record a rare event. Passage de Venus may be millions of miles away from the concerns of the common folk, but it is nevertheless a real event, not just in the sense of lacking the pretense of fiction, but in its utter lack of manipulation. There is no montage theory at work here--we are decades away from Vertov--no concept of editing, or post-production, or narration. The event captured is simply that, an event, in its most utterly raw and untampered form. It is an event at once both completely true and utterly remote, grounded on Earth but pointed away from it.

And this is where Passage de Venus retains its relevance to film criticism, as alien as it may be to latter-day conceptions of the medium. This scientific curio, the very earliest manifestation of what could be called "film", demonstrates the central tension that will dominate the analysis, critique, and scholarship of the medium over 140 years hence; that is to say, the push-and-pull between realism and escapism, spectacle and contemplation, instruction and delight, aesthetic and politics, social context and formal mastery. When is it acceptable to eschew social context in the name of art, and to what degree are they separable? Passage de Venus, obviously, has no answer to this question, yet its purpose is embryonically ambiguous, both divorced from political relevance and completely real, presaging the conflict between message and form that will gradually develop as the medium matures. Janssen, for his part, was well aware of the potential of rapid photography to capture Earthly subjects, but his design lacked the necessary speed and exposure time to capture the fine details of motion that later film pioneers, such as Eadward Muybridge, would perfect.

Other connections: By the way, Janssen also discovered helium. Oh yeah, and he was also one of the earliest collaborators with the Lumiere brothers, appearing in two of their experimental films in 1895, prior to their first public exhibitions.

Other most-voted films of 1874: Nope. Passage de Venus is IMDB's only entry for 1874, and there are no entries at all for 1875, 1876, or 1877.