The Earliest Film You've Seen

[happyfilmluvguy]

The movie industry has been around for about a hundred years now, but moving images in general have been around since the return of the century.

What is the earliest moving image or actual film which you have seen in full or close to full? A short clip from a film is nice, but I'd like to know what films you have seen in their completion.

Too many early films have been lost, some found later at a garage sale or in an attic, or only some of the celluloid print survived, but not in it's entirely. It had to be cut down.

Here's a neat site I've looked at for some years. It lists many silent films that have been presumed lost. SILENT ERA

 

[CharlieH.]

Well, my oldest film records are -
On television - Carmencita, from 1894. Basically it's a view of a dancing girl, made by William Dickson.
Up close and personal - My grandparent's 1956 wedding. First time I ever handled a movie. 8mm to be precise.

 

[LadyStardust]

These are my very favorite kind, and I'm always on the lookout for new clips and compilations to see. The earliest footage I've seen is the Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) which is just about 4 seconds worth of a couple ladies and gentleman walking around a garden. The earliest certifiable films I've seen are A Trip To The Moon & The Great Train Robbery. What I like most about early cinema is it is so simple, but they transcend that, and truly sense the excitement of the people who were involved in such innovation at the time. And a great deal of them, while not complex or involved, are terribly clever, endearing, and imaginative. To any others interested in early cinema, I would highly recommend the Kino set The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, and also the set of early Thomas Edison films.

 

[Tomasso]

My high school film study instructor collected old shorts, especially those of D.W. Griffith. I don't remember the titles, though some were very provocative, but I'd say that some were from as early as 1908. I do recall my first viewing of "Birth of a Nation", now that was an eye opener.

 

[Doctor Strange]

I'm a longtime silent film fan, going back to the late 60s. I have owned a Super 8 print of The Great Train Robbery (1903) for many years, and I have piles of Chaplin shorts - Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel & Hardy, and Charley Chase too. And I've seen 1890s films by the Lumiere Brothers and Edison, early 1900s films by George Melies and others. And I've seen lots of DW Griffith - some early shorts, Judith of Bethulia (1912), Intolerance...

Despite all the silent films that are lost, there are loads of mind-blowing early films still out there! (And note that quite a few films that were presumed lost years ago when I first became interested have since been found. Gives you hope!)

 

[HadleyH]

Lumiere, Pathe ,all those experimentals French shorts .
And of course the DWGriffith ones. I like The New York Hat with Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore(1912),there is an earlier one with Mary Pickford, The Lonely Villa(1909) this one also her first film appearance.
I would really like to see them all, may be one day...

 

[Tony in Tarzana]

Not the earliest, but an amazing example of film technology is "Down to the Sea in Ships" with Clara Bow. It features amazing footage shot on whaling ships, which must have been quite a feat in 1922. Here's the IMDB page: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013085/

 

[Fletch]

I have seen a clip called The Arrival of a Train, but there were a whole bunch of those made circa 1900. Apparently people in the audience were prone to think they were about to be run over, and a great to-do would ensue.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I've seen a whole bunch of those novelty shorts from around 1899-1902 -- trains, people leaving the Lumiere Bros. factory, and even a fascinating short filmed by a camera mounted on an NYC subway car around 1904. None of these have any kind of plot, but they're still fascinating.

I've also seen a number of the Melies trick-films -- Trip To The Moon being the most famous, but another one sticks in my mind featuring a very worked-up guy in a devil suit who was made to appear and disappear thru the magic of primitive trick photography. In the print I saw, the devil was hand-tinted red for a very impressive presentation.

I started watching silents when I was seven years old -- probably one of the few people around who sat thru all of Intolerance at such a young age. I don't remember how much of it I *understood,* but I was very impressed with the spectacle. PBS ran a lot of silents in the early '70s, hosted by Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, and this series was where I first saw Chaplin and Keaton.

 

[Doctor Strange]

Lizzie, I recall that PBS series quite vividly too. While I had already seen many short comedies and horror flicks (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Phantom of the Opera, etc.) in museum or personal-collection living room showings by then, it served as my introduction to many classic silent features, including Intolerance, Orphans of the Storm, and The Thief of Bagdad.

It was called "The Silent Years" - http://imdb.com/title/tt0066713/

 

[jake_fink]

For those interested in this era of film, if you haven't already read it, Kevin Brownlow's book The Parade's Gone By is a fantastic piece of work.

It was reissued a few years ago and searches at ABE, Ebay or other booksellers should turn up decent, fresh paperback copies.

 

[Doctor Strange]

That's a great book. Brownlow also did another one called "Hollywood: The Pioneers" that's worth looking out for. I also recommend Walter Kerr's "The Silent Clowns" - still the best single book on the silent comedians.

 

[Novella]

The earliest footage I've seen is the Roundhay Garden Scene (1888) which is just about 4 seconds worth of a couple ladies and gentleman walking around a garden.

Me too. That and the short clip Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge, also from 1888. They're both floating around on the internet somewhere. Other than that I've seen a lot of Edison's early clips. It's been awhile, but I think it was this set that I rented.

Way before Marilyn Monroe:

 

[Tomasso]

So that's where Billy Wilder got that bit.

ooooooooooooo

 

[LadyStardust]

Novella, the clip you posted the screencap from, I've seen that one also, I found it absolutely delightful! The boxset you listed, I don't think I've seen it before, the one I'm more familiar is this one:

It seems like the one you mentioned is an even more comprehensive collection of more of his movies.
I forgot to mention, but there's one early clip that I'm especially fond of, entitled "The Whole Damn Family" which was a popular comedic song at the time, and it is essentially just a characterization of that. It's wonderfully funny!

 

[Doctor Strange]

There is a nice group of viewable Edison films over at the wonderful Library of Congress site:

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edmvhm.html

 

[Smithy]

I have seen a clip called The Arrival of a Train, but there were a whole bunch of those made circa 1900. Apparently people in the audience were prone to think they were about to be run over, and a great to-do would ensue.

That's the earliest one I've seen as well. We saw it in class at uni for a film studies paper I was taking.

Amazing to think that people ran out of the cinema!

 

[Marc Chevalier]

Amazing to think that people ran out of the cinema!

Not so amazing at all. Your rational mind tells you that it's only an image, but your deeper, more powerful, unconscious mind rebels.


I remember the first time I saw a modern 3-D movie. I found myself automatically (and embarrassingly) leaning back when an image "came" at me.

.

 

[BuddyJ]

I was a Film and Video Studies minor in college, so we watched a ton of the Edison and Lumiere films. But I got the most enjoyment out of a German Expressionism class I took. The professor was a Lugosi scholar by the name of Gary Rhodes and he passed his love of the topic onto his students. My favorite is The Golem (1915), although I remember one about a man meeting his doppelganger to be quite good too.

 

[Novella]

Novella, the clip you posted the screencap from, I've seen that one also, I found it absolutely delightful! The boxset you listed, I don't think I've seen it before, the one I'm more familiar is this one:

It seems like the one you mentioned is an even more comprehensive collection of more of his movies.
I forgot to mention, but there's one early clip that I'm especially fond of, entitled "The Whole Damn Family" which was a popular comedic song at the time, and it is essentially just a characterization of that. It's wonderfully funny!

Oh yeah, I think that was the boxed set I watched! I remember "The Whole Damn Family," that was definitely a good one.