THIS MONTH IN FILM HISTORY
Now a Regular Column in Editors Guild Magazine!
by Kevin Lewis
 Photo courtesy of Bob Mackler |
On April 23, 1896, Thomas Alva Edison presented the first publicly projected motion pictures in the United States at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall at Herald Square in New York City. The building was demolished a few years later in 1901-02 for the construction of R.H. Macy’s Department Store, still on the present site. The films were projected by the Vitascope, which was based on the Phantascope, and was developed by C. Frances Jenkins and Thomas Armat, but patented by Edison. Earlier movie presentations were shown in “peep show” Kinetoscope machines in amusement parlors, the first of which was opened at 1155 Broadway in New York, not far from Herald Square, in 1894.
(France’s Lumiere brothers actually beat Edison to the punch by about four months; they showed the first publicly projected movies on December 28, 1895 in Paris using their own projection machine, the Cinematogragh. The famous onrushing train in the station was shown that night.)
Editing was not a factor in the movies shown on that historic night in New York; they were one-shot, under-a-minute, straight-angle films, called “actualities” depicting New York street scenes, vaudeville performers and nature scenes. But the movies did approximate the emotional and physiological impact of edited footage in the basic movie-going experience. Before a dazzled, cheering audience, the films changed abruptly from two pink-and-blue-dressed women (tinted or hand-colored film) performing an umbrella dance, to angry sea waves breaking on a sea coast, proving that shifts in mood and subject would be acceptable to audiences. In just a few years, complex editing would be the norm, as shown in the still innovative The Great Train Robbery (1903), produced by Edison.
Ironically, 110 years after that first theatrical exhibition, filmmaker Steven Soderburgh’s latest film, Bubble, was released simultaneously in the cinemas, on DVD and via high-definition cable, in an effort to shut the longtime traditional “window” between theatrical and ancillary releases of a movie.
Editor’s Note: “This Month in Film History” will be a regular historical column in Editors Guild Magazine. Next up for the MAY-JUN 06 issue: the premiere of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad.