*Trigger Warning: This newsletter includes an old photo of a dead man. It may be disturbing for some of you, so I thought that I should warn you.
Roundhay Garden Scene is a film by Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince shot in 1888. It lasts only two seconds and is the oldest surviving film. That doesn’t mean that it was the first film ever, earlier ones are known to exist, but they were destroyed or lost.
The film is a single fixed shot in which we see some family members and friends of Le Prince walking, so it is also the earliest example of home and documentary filmmaking. Everything seems a bit naive, like when someone buys a video camera for the first time and records any casual everyday scene. However, the unnatural movements of the four characters indicate that this is not a casual scene. There is something absurd about it that might remind us more of Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks than of any real person walking.
What makes Roundhay Garden Scene so fascinating is its hauntological condition. Hauntology is, in a nutshell, the paradoxical state of the spectre, of what is present and absent at the same time.
All the characters, as well as the camera operator, are dead. One of the protagonists— Le Prince's mother-in-law—died only ten days after the film was shot. The film is a ghost showing ghosts.
The black mass that intermittently appears on the right side of the frame seems to threaten to swallow the characters, an unintentional metaphorical exercise that would link to the celluloid as a threat of Peter Tscherkassky's Outer Space, although in Roundhay Garden Scene the characters retain the candour of unconsciousness.
On the other hand, the film's two seconds running time passes so quickly that it is just a trail. You can only really see the film if you loop it over and over again, and repetition is always something hypnotic that brings us closer to the spectral world.
However, the most hauntological detail about Roundhay Garden Scene is that it exists in its non-existence. Officially, cinema was invented 7 years after the making of this film.
Although it is often said that cinema was invented by the Lumière brothers in 1895, the truth is that cameras, projectors, and films, even sound films, existed before then. The reason why the 28th of December of 1895 has been established as the date of the invention of cinema is that is when the first commercial screening took place. This could lead to a long discussion about whether the official history of cinema is not rather the history of film as a public spectacle.
Le Prince's own personal history, and especially his hauntological death, could be the subject of one of those public spectacles. I don’t know why we still don’t have any TV show about Le Prince’s mystery. What is the mystery? I'll tell you now, it has everything: conspiracies, trials, murders...
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince
Le Prince was born in Metz, France, in 1841. His father, a commander in the French army, was a friend of Louis Daguerre—one of the fathers of photography. As a child, Le Prince often visited Daguerre’s studio, where he probably first came into contact with photography.
When Le Prince was a bit older, he studied painting in Paris and Bourges, and later he took a postgraduate degree in chemistry at Leipzig, Germany. Despite his scientific studies, he started his professional career as a painter and photographer.
In 1866, a college friend named John Whitley offered him a job in his engineering firm, Whitley Partners, located in Leeds, UK. Le Prince accepted. First, he worked as a designer and then took charge of the valve department. He married Whitley's sister, Elizabeth, who had also studied art. Their mutual interest in art led them to open a school of applied arts in 1871, where they gained some fame for their work transferring photographs onto ceramic, glass, and metal objects.
In 1875, Le Prince became aware of Muybridge's photographic experiments and began to investigate the possibility of creating a camera capable of capturing moving pictures, years before Edison and the Lumières had even considered the same idea.
In 1882, he moved to New York to represent Whitley Partners in the USA. After fulfilling his obligations—selling the patent rights to one of Whitley’s products—Le Prince began working as an agent for Monitor and Merrimac Panorama, a group of artists who created giant circular panoramas of famous battles.
Meanwhile, his wife worked as an art teacher at the New York Institute for the Deaf. Le Prince befriended its director, who allowed him to use his workshop. Thanks to this support, in 1886 he managed to complete his first film camera, a highly complex machine consisting of 16 lenses. Its main problem was that each lens shot from a slightly different point of view, so the films were a jumble of choppy frames.
A couple of years later, he built a second single-lens camera/projector, this time in the UK. He shot Roundhay Garden Scene using this camera, on 14 October 1888.
Le Prince spent a couple of years improving his camera/projector. In 1890, he was in the UK and asked his wife, who was in New York, to find a place there to exhibit his invention and his motion pictures. Before reuniting with his family on the other side of the Atlantic, he decided to visit his brother in Dijon, France. He arrived in Dijon as planned, but he disappeared soon after on a train to Paris, where some friends were waiting for him.
Le Prince boarded the train, his brother and his niece were there and saw him, but no one saw him getting off in Paris or anywhere else, and there was no evidence of any altercation inside the train. His luggage was never found. Despite several investigations by the British and French police, nobody uncovered any clues, not a single one. He vanished into thin air.
As there was no corpse, the police couldn’t be sure if Le Prince was dead or if he just sneaked away for some reason. His family was convinced that he had been murdered by one of his competitors, probably Edison. The race to patent cinema was huge and there was an ongoing war to see who was the first one.
After seven years in this spectral limbo, the police finally decided to declare Le Prince officially dead. However, the war for the cinema patent didn’t end there. There was a second murder mystery in the family.
In 1898, Adolphe, one of Le Prince's sons, acted as a witness in a trial against Edison in an attempt to prove that he was not who invented the cinematograph. Edison was really powerful and he won the trial, but eventually, the decision was overturned by the court of appeal, which forbid Edison from establishing a monopoly. A bit later, Adolphe was found shot dead. His murder was never cleared either.
Adolphe was one of the characters in Roundhay Garden Scene, and the protagonist of this other short film—Accordion Player—shot in the same year.
In 2003, a photograph of a drowned man who resembles Le Prince was discovered in the Paris police archives. Nobody knows if this is really Le Prince. The photo was found by a television crew who was working on a documentary about him, so they were probably under the influence of suggestion.
We may never know what happened to Le Prince, what we do know is that he was making films before the Lumière brothers and Edison, but for some strange reason most people think that it was Edison or the Lumière who invented cinema.
A documentary about film riots
I watched this film last week: A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021). It’s a documentary, but it’s rather experimental and I guess that it mixes reality with fiction. Although it starts from an intimate point of view, it’s focused on a wave of student protests that took place at the Film and Television Institute of India. The director is Payal Kapadia, an Indian woman who studied at that film school.
It’s available on Mubi, but it’s also being shown at many film festivals.
Ok, that’s it for this rainy Autumn morning!
Please share this post if you find it interesting. If you want to add something, you can write a comment. I’m also on Twitter.
I’m mainly a filmmaker and digital artist, you can find more about my own work at null66913. If you want to support this newsletter, or my artwork, with money, you can do it by buying some of my films or albums at my shop, or maybe you prefer to invite me to tea or hot cocoa. This “Buy a Coffee” thing is funny, not everyone drinks coffee.
Have a nice week :)