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.
