It's hard for us to imagine the kind of impact that this technology must have had when it
first emerged in the 1890s.
We live in an environment where there are moving images just constantly around us.
It's a banality, it's just a sad fact of life that we spend too much time staring at screens.
But in 1897, this was startling and new and completely revolutionary.
It was a different way of looking at the world, and suddenly the world was coming to you in
ways that people just could not have imagined.
That you could go to Europe, that you could meet the crowned heads, that you could go
to see elephants in India...
It's not so much being seduced by a story...
it's the thrill of seeing in itself.
Here's an image of the three royal children.
This would be the future Edward VIII, George VI, and Princess Mary, which was shot by the
British Biograph Company in the year 1900.
This is an amazingly close, intimate view of these almost god-like creatures
and the royals of course were the rock stars of their day.
These were the people who were known internationally.
These were figures of immense power and prestige.
Just to see them in person was something that really very few people could even dream of
doing.
These living, almost mythological figures that are suddenly within your grasp.
The Biograph Company sent camera crews around the world, as the Lumière company had.
They set up a separate division in England, and that's the division obviously shot the
sequences of Queen Victoria.
We apparently have moving images of her, and this one is a much better shot than the other
ones.
This clip becomes particularly interesting in the year that is the bicentenary of her
birth.
We can see her here on her last visit to Ireland, nodding in queenly fashion and wearing a very
classy pair of queenly sunglasses.
And in a moving image, you get so much more, even something as brief as this, of the personality,
the presence of this woman.
This is the embodiment of the British Empire.
Here she is.
An immediate connection with a figure that everyone would have known, who had certainly
been photographed, but only when you see her like this
when she's moving, when she's alive, when she's in the middle of a scene do you really
get a sense of being in the same world with her.
Really connecting to that living being that was Queen Victoria.
So, this is the can of film that contains the Queen Victoria footage.
It's very heavy.
There's a lot of film here.
So, what we have here for comparison's sake is our 68mm nitrate print, our Mutoscope and
Biograph print, next to a standard 35mm Edison print of an 1896 film.
And it just shows you the real scale difference.
I mean, it's kind of like the IMAX of its day, right?
You were absorbed by the content.
The 68mm film proved not to be all that practical.
The reason they had adopted it in the first place was because Edison had the patent on
35mm, and when William Kennedy Dixon left Edison to form the Mutoscope Company, which
became the Biograph Company, he essentially had to reinvent the same process he had already
invented for Edison but in a way that didn't violate Edison's patents.
A lot of these early films were presented as if they were an act in a vaudeville performance.
You know, after the singer, after the dancing bears, after the comedian, you would have
a selection of film views.
Views of a, say, a waterfall, a train rushing into the camera, children playing.
No narrative continuity whatsoever, just the novelty was seeing these images moving on
a larger-than-life screen.
By the time this particular process, the 68mm Biograph camera, entered the scene, this allowed
just a multiplication of the quality of the images.
These films actually were photographed at 30 frames a second, which creates a very smooth
movement, all very much in contrast to what the Edison and Lumière films were like.
So this really, it struck people as something close to miraculous at the time.
So this Queen Victoria reel and the 35 other 68mm nitrate prints and negatives we have
came to us in a big acquisition in 1939, just a few years after the Department of Film had
started in 1935.
It came to us with all that survived of the Biograph Company, and it was being stored
in an old film studio up in the Bronx, and it included these 36 reels of 68mm nitrate,
and tons and tons of production paperwork and correspondence.
It tells the full history of the company, and it's a real asset to researchers and film
historians today, just for, not just the Biograph Company, but early cinema in general.
"A hundred years ago, a peculiar toy was invented in France..."
The Victorians were obsessed with moving image toys, and there were a lot of mechanical devices
that were invented, beginning in the early 19th century, that created the illusion of
movement.
This happens around the same time of the development of photography, and it took a few decades
for photography and moving images to line up.
Popeye: "Oh yeah?
Well I'll think it over young fella.
This one's on the house!"
There were a few different ways in which an audience could experience a motion picture
at this point.
One of the earliest was through a hand-cranked machine called a mutoscope.
Images were copied to sort of an index card size format that were flipped through a rotating
drum, keeping the illusion of continuous movement.
"In 1896, the first moving pictures projected on public screens were plotless incidents,
about a minute long, that amazed and scandalized their audiences."
When we're able to start projecting movies at the theater, you share that experience
with a large number of people, and that amplified the emotional response to these films.
And suddenly, that spectacle of a train rushing toward you, legendarily, audiences, you know,
gasped and fainted and thought they were going to be run over themselves by these giant freight
trains.
There turns out to be very little confirmation of that in the actual newspaper reports of
the time, but you can still understand the sense of excitement in seeing these gigantic,
incredibly sharp lifelike images being projected.
We're used to seeing these films in very badly duplicated versions, almost invariably shown
at the wrong speeds, so we have a condescending idea of these films...just looked silly, looked
ridiculous.
But when you actually can see them the way they were made to be seen, they are startilingly
good.
It really could have been shot two days ago, in terms of the crispness and the quality
and the stability of that image.
It really is quite, quite striking.
They certainly had their issues at the time.
You had a problem with static electricity, with the way the film passed through the camera.
We can see little traces of that in the Queen Victoria film.
Looked like little lightning bolts around the side, and that was caused by static electricity
passing across the mechanism that needed to be there to pull the film down to create the
next shot, and it took them quite a while to figure out how to solve that.
But those issues aside, essentially, this is the process we know today.
So when it's projected at the proper speed, with a good, bright lens, from a good print,
you're gonna see some pretty startling and very beautiful results.
"George!
George!
Stop the machine!
Stop the machine!"
"This film's so old it just breaks up in your fingers."
"Can't you patch it together again?"
"Not a chance."
Film preservation didn't become much of a movement until I would say the 1930s.
The Museum of Modern Art was the first museum in the world to start collecting film as an
art form.
Suddenly it seemed to be important to people to hold on to these old movies even though
they had no more commercial value.
So in 1996, the Museum moved its collection to a beautiful new film preservation facility,
the Celeste Bartos Film Preservation Center which is located in Hamlin, Pennsylvania.
It's incredibly thrilling for me just to be in the presence of these original artifacts,
that this is the actual film that passed through D.W.
Griffith's camera.
This is an actual printing negative for "The Great Train Robbery," 1903.
These are the real things.
People have the idea that movies are just infinitely reproducible, but it's not true.
There are original artifacts.
A lot of films were lost over the years because they were stored poorly.
Nitrate film stock isn't very stable, and if it isn't kept at a nice cool temperature,
it disintegrates.
Courtney: "This is what nitrate decomp looks like."
"No!
Yeah, that's the bad one."
"Oh my God, it smells so bad."
We have ways of stopping deterioration on nitrate film, but sometimes we get material
that's just too far gone to do much with.
These images are a strong reminder that nitrate is an organic material, and films can die.
I think it's worth returning to these images to remind us that movies used to be analog.
They saw things in front of the camera on a one-on-one relationship.
This was the world.
It was an image you could trust.
It was an image of physical substance, of reality.
Nowadays we tend not to trust images, because we know how easily manipulated they are.
Digital cinema very often reproduces things that never existed, never will exist.
But there's an ontological impact, just a reality to these images that I still find
tremendously moving.