The Dawn of Motion Pictures

Most recently, we've been exploring the beginning of photography, which is extremely interesting in and of itself, both historically and technologically. However, more interesting to me is what that led into: the earliest of motion pictures. Beginning as nothing more than a series of still photos strung together into a sequence, this practice quickly evolved into something much more closely resembling modern video (analog video, of course). There really is something about century-old video that speaks in ways that photographs of the same vintage cannot. It's one thing to simply look at the faces of people from long ago, but to actually see them in motion is almost haunting. Even more haunting than this early video is the beginning of audio recording. In class, we watched what is the oldest known synchronized audio/video recording, the Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Oddly enough, this past summer I had taken an interest in early film, and had discovered this same short film clip online. Viewed as just an old video clip, it isn't impressive, but when you know exaclty how important it is to the history of multimedia, it takes on a whole new air.