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.
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