| Incident at Clovelly Cottage | |
|---|---|
 Frames from the film | |
| Produced by | Birt Acres, Robert W. Paul |
| Cinematography | Birt Acres |
Release date |
|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | Silent |
Incident at Clovelly Cottage, also known as Incident Outside Clovelly Cottage, Barnet, shot by Birt Acres and produced by Acres and his collaborator Robert W. Paul in March 1895, was the "first successful motion picture film made in Britain". [1]
In 1894, Robert Paul was asked to make a copy of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscope device, in which motion pictures were viewed by one person at a time through a peephole. [2] He initially refused, but after he discovered that the machine had not been patented in Europe, he purchased one of the devices and set about manufacturing a replica which he sold in Britain and France. [3] [4]
The only films available to show on Paul's Kinetoscope replicas, however, were those made by Edison who restricted distribution to his own customers. [2] Paul was therefore obliged to make his own films and to produce a camera on which to shoot them. The result was the Paul-Acres Camera, developed jointly by Paul and Acres using ideas from both. It was the first motion picture camera made in Britain and took pictures on 35mm film [5] at a rate of 40 per second, the same as Edison's Kinetoscope, and the same gauge film as used in modern cinema films.[ citation needed ]
In February 1895 [6] Paul and Acres made a short film known as Cricketer Jumping Over Garden Gate, featuring their mutual friend, and Acres' assistant, Henry Short in cricket whites performing that act. [7] It was not shown commercially and is described by John Barnes as a "trial film" [6] and by the British Film Institute as an untitled "test film". [8] It is notable for the relatively crude perforation of the sprocket holes which differ from the even perforation of Incident at Clovelly Cottage by which time Paul had refined his technique sufficiently to send a clip to Edison seeking an exchange of films produced to the same standard. Edison refused. [2] It is held by the Cinématheque Française in the Will Day Collection, CNC. [6]
Incident at Clovelly Cottage was shot by Acres [9] on the Paul-Acres Camera and produced by Acres and Paul in March 1895. [3] It has been described as the "first British film" [10] and the "first successful motion picture film made in Britain." [1]
The plot is unknown as the film is lost with only a few frames surviving, but from the surviving material we know it featured a woman with a pram, thought to be Acres' wife with their infant son, [11] and a man in white who was identified by Acres as Henry Short. [12] It was filmed outside Acres' home of Clovelly Cottage, 19 Park Road, Chipping Barnet in England. The house still exists and once had a commemorative plaque but that has since been removed. [11]
Contemporary positive frames from the film are in the Kodak Collection in Bradford and the Barnes Collection, St Ives, Cornwall. An additional contemporary sample, sent by Paul to Thomas Edison in March 1895, is in the archives of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in the United States. [6]
Acres and Paul's next film was The Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race , completed on 30 March 1895. This and other films were shown on Kinetoscopes that Paul set up at Imre Kiralfy's Empire of India Exhibition at Earls Court. Films were not projected onto screens for a mass audience, however, until early 1896 when Paul and Acres separately demonstrated projectors after their partnership ended in acrimony the previous year. [3]
The Lumière brothers, Auguste Marie Louis Nicolas Lumière and Louis Jean Lumière, were French manufacturers of photography equipment, best known for their Cinématographe motion picture system and the short films they produced between 1895 and 1905, which places them among the earliest filmmakers.
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson was a British-American inventor who devised an early motion picture camera under the employment of Thomas Edison.
35 mm film is a film gauge used in filmmaking, and the film standard. In motion pictures that record on film, 35 mm is the most commonly used gauge. The name of the gauge is not a direct measurement, and refers to the nominal width of the 35 mm format photographic film, which consists of strips 1.377 ± 0.001 inches (34.976 ± 0.025 mm) wide. The standard image exposure length on 35 mm for movies is four perforations per frame along both edges, which results in 16 frames per foot of film.
The following is an overview of the events of 1895 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
The following is an overview of the events of 1894 in film, including a list of films released and notable births.
A movie camera is a type of photographic camera that rapidly takes a sequence of photographs, either onto film stock or an image sensor, in order to produce a moving image to display on a screen. In contrast to the still camera, which captures a single image at a time, the movie camera takes a series of images by way of an intermittent mechanism or by electronic means; each image is a frame of film or video. The frames are projected through a movie projector or a video projector at a specific frame rate to show the moving picture. When projected at a high enough frame rate, the persistence of vision allows the eyes and brain of the viewer to merge the separate frames into a continuous moving picture.
The Kinetoscope is an early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic approach that would become the standard for all cinematic projection before the advent of video: it created the illusion of movement by conveying a strip of perforated film bearing sequential images over a light source with a high-speed shutter. First described in conceptual terms by U.S. inventor Thomas Edison in 1888, it was largely developed by his employee William Kennedy Laurie Dickson between 1889 and 1892. Dickson and his team at the Edison lab in New Jersey also devised the Kinetograph, an innovative motion picture camera with rapid intermittent, or stop-and-go, film movement, to photograph movies for in-house experiments and, eventually, commercial Kinetoscope presentations.
Frederick Paul Ott, skilled machinist, was a key employee of Thomas Edison's laboratories from the 1870s until Edison's death in 1931. His likeness appears in two of the earliest surviving motion pictures – the well-known Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze and the little-seen Fred Ott Holding a Bird – both from 1894.
Cinematograph or kinematograph is an early term for several types of motion picture film mechanisms. The name was used for movie cameras as well as film projectors, or for complete systems that also provided means to print films.
The Black Maria was Thomas Edison's film production studio in West Orange, New Jersey. It was the world's first film studio.
Vitascope was an early film projector first demonstrated in 1895 by Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. They had made modifications to Jenkins' patented Phantoscope, which cast images via film and electric light onto a wall or screen. The Vitascope is a large electrically-powered projector that uses light to cast images. The images being cast are originally taken by a kinetoscope mechanism onto gelatin film. Using an intermittent mechanism, the film negatives produced up to fifty frames per second. The shutter opens and closes to reveal new images. This device can produce up to 3,000 negatives per minute. With the original Phantoscope and before he partnered with Armat, Jenkins displayed the earliest documented projection of a filmed motion picture in June 1894 in Richmond, Indiana.
Birt Acres was an American and British photographer and film pioneer. Among his contributions to the early film industry are the first working 35 mm camera in Britain (Wales), and Birtac, the first daylight loading home movie camera and projector. He also directed a number of early silent films.
Actuality film is a non-fiction film genre that uses footage of real events, places, and things, a predecessor to documentary film. Unlike documentaries, actuality films are not structured into a larger narrative or coherent whole. During the era of early cinema, actualities—usually lasting no more than a minute or two and usually assembled together into a program by an exhibitor—were just as popular and prominent as their fictional counterparts. The line between "fact" and "fiction" was not as prominent in early cinema as it would become once documentaries became the predominant non-fiction filmmaking form. Actuality as a film genre is related to still photography.
Robert William Paul was an English pioneer of film and scientific instrument maker.
Herman Casler was an American inventor and co-founder of the partnership called the K.M.C.D. Syndicate, along with W.K-L. Dickson, Elias Koopman, and Henry N "Harry" Marvin, which eventually was incorporated into the American Mutoscope Company in December 1895.
The decade of the 1890s in film involved some significant events.
The Derby is an 1895 British short black-and-white silent documentary film, produced and directed by Birt Acres for exhibition on Robert W. Paul's Kinetoscopes, featuring the end of the 29 May 1895 Epsom Derby viewed from a raised position close to the finishing line with the main stand in the distance. A photograph of Acres filming the documentary has survived, which shows that the camera used in the production was relatively portable. The film was long considered lost but footage discovered in the Ray Henville collection in 1995 has been identified by the BFI as being from this film.
Rough Sea at Dover is an 1895 British short black-and-white silent film, shot by Birt Acres.
The history of film technology traces the development of techniques for the recording, construction and presentation of motion pictures. When the film medium came about in the 19th century, there already was a centuries old tradition of screening moving images through shadow play and the magic lantern that were very popular with audiences in many parts of the world. Especially the magic lantern influenced much of the projection technology, exhibition practices and cultural implementation of film. Between 1825 and 1840, the relevant technologies of stroboscopic animation, photography and stereoscopy were introduced. For much of the rest of the century, many engineers and inventors tried to combine all these new technologies and the much older technique of projection to create a complete illusion or a complete documentation of reality. Colour photography was usually included in these ambitions and the introduction of the phonograph in 1877 seemed to promise the addition of synchronized sound recordings. Between 1887 and 1894, the first successful short cinematographic presentations were established. The biggest popular breakthrough of the technology came in 1895 with the first projected movies that lasted longer than 10 seconds. During the first years after this breakthrough, most motion pictures lasted about 50 seconds, lacked synchronized sound and natural colour, and were mainly exhibited as novelty attractions. In the first decades of the 20th century, movies grew much longer and the medium quickly developed into one of the most important tools of communication and entertainment. The breakthrough of synchronized sound occurred at the end of the 1920s and that of full color motion picture film in the 1930s. By the start of the 21st century, physical film stock was being replaced with digital film technologies at both ends of the production chain by digital image sensors and projectors.
