It’s been quite a year. No, I’m not referring to spike proteins and booster jabs and all that stuff. I am, of course, talking about the commemoration of the centenary of the death of William Friese-Greene. On the centenary of his birth, in 1955, two opposing things happened. One group of people wished to hold him up as a Great British Hero, THE inventor of moving pictures – an epithet that no individual is entitled to. Another group were frustrated and annoyed by what they felt was embarrassing jingoism and mythologising, and sought to paint Friese-Greene as a figure of no importance, a scient ..read more

Friese-Greene really is busting out all over. Two years ago, when I was invited to give a talk about William Friese-Greene at the rather wonderful Cinema Rediscovered festival, I proposed that since Friese-Greene’s reputation was basically trashed on the centenary of his birth, it would be appropriate to use the 2021 centenary of his death as the basis for a reassessment. What has happened since then has been beyond anything I could have hoped for. Bristol Ideas took the ball and ran with it, and despite all the disruptions of the pandemic, managed to successfully obtain support from the Natio ..read more

Tomorrow, 5th May 2021, marks exactly 100 years since William Friese-Greene died. Since then, he’s pretty much spent a third of the time raised up on a pedestal and the rest of it crushed under one. I’m hoping that what’s happening to commemorate this centenary will point the way to a fresh perspective (details at end of post). I blame the way he died. In 1921, at 65 years old, impoverished and living in one room, by rights he should have passed away forgotten and alone, perhaps remembered by a handful of folks. Instead, he decided to attend a fiery meeting of film distributors, where – since ..read more

Spare a thought for the most famous inventor in the world, as today we celebrate 125 years since his first public film show. Edison, chilling Thomas Edison had put together a team that, after several years, had perfected a camera that could take a rapid series of pictures on a strip of new material – celluloid roll film – cut to 35mm wide and perforated with guide holes down the edge. They’d built a peepshow viewing machine to watch these 17-second mini-movies, the Kinetoscope, which had proved popular but ultimately not that profitable, or actually loss-making, for those involved. Everybody w ..read more

Pettifogging. He said I was “pettifogging”. Suddenly I knew how it must have felt to be get a slapped wrist from Charles Dickens. Secretly though, I was delighted. I love the word and hadn’t heard it used in years. It was a classy way to be criticised. You see, “pettifogging” means focussing on trivial or irrelevant detail – often in an attempt to win an argument. It’s a pejorative, applied to dodgy lawyers in years gone by. Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad, for instance, is a modern pettifogger writ large. Am I really that guy? It was my article for Sight & Sound about the complex story o ..read more

A lot or bugger all? Or something in between? Those of you who read my blog posts about the 125th birthday of cinema last year will not be surprised to hear that I am sceptical, to say the least, about the mythological status attached to the Lumières’ first show on December 28th 1895 in Paris. Now I have something in print about it, which we’ll get to. Programme for the first Lumière show in London with ad for their photographic plates Oddly enough, I’m not even swayed by the recent statement of Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Cannes Film Festival and the Institut Lumière – that put out a ..read more

In Part 1, Louis Le Prince came unstuck with stickiness whilst shooting his first films on paper negative in October 1888. A solution was on its way, in the form of Eastman/ Kodak Transparent Film, but that solution was over a year away. Did Le Prince find a viable alternative in the meantime? Read on… Ad for Vergara/Froedman film October 1887 We’ve looked at some of the early products made with celluloid-type substances, when there was much speculation about how useful it could be for photography, but a usable material remained out of reach. 1887 was the year that began to change. In Dublin i ..read more

Louis Le Prince: the forgotten inventor who’s impossible to forget. But did he shoot on celluloid? I shan’t summarise yet again the oft-told story of moving picture pioneer Louis Le Prince, since there is such a substantial Wikipedia entry about him. Indeed, I think he gets more space and detail than any other early movie inventor, bar Edison, beating out even the Lumière brothers. Not bad for someone who experimented with creating moving pictures on a film at an early date then disappeared, never having shown his work to anyone outside his immediate circle, or spoken to a journalist about it ..read more

One of the best pieces of advice I have received in recent years was given to me at the Royal Institution in 2017. I had chosen to attend a one-day workshop about “The Magic Lantern and Science” and whilst the recreation of a Victorian illustrated lecture in that legendary venue was delightful, my main purpose was to reconnect with some experts in pre-cinema and early cinema, to pick their brains. Jeremy Brooker, master of the lantern I had recently returned to my research into William Friese-Greene after a dozen years away and was feeling somewhat lost as to how to proceed, in terms of making ..read more

In Part 1 we heard how the Lathams were behind a movie camera that left those of Edison and the Lumière Brothers looking very limited. Now we find out what happened when they beat those two firms to the screen… The Plan Comes Together So, the Lambda camera had advantages over both the Edison and Lumière versions – but what was the benefit? Well, it meant they could put much longer, larger loads of film in and therefore shoot without stopping. Instead of 17 seconds of a dance, you could see the whole thing. Instead of a truncated round of boxing in a miniaturised ring, you could film several ro ..read more