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)
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