Happy 125th Birthday, Cinema! Part 2
20 May 2020
The forgotten and erased story of the real beginning of cinema. Part2: The first films show. … More Happy 125th Birthday, Cinema! Part 2
Category: Moving Pictures
Happy 125th Birthday, Cinema! Part 1
20 May 2020
The forgotten and erased story of the real beginning of cinema. Part 1: the team assembles. … More Happy 125th Birthday, Cinema! Part 1
Sci-Fi Movies Before Celluloid
28 Apr 2020
Years before H.G. Wells introduced us to his time traveller and marauding Martians, another writer was predicting what science might bring us in the future, for good or for ill. Once read on both sides of the Atlantic, he’s now all but forgotten. His name was Robert Duncan Milne and he was seeing moving pictures before there was even a strip of celluloid. … More Sci-Fi Movies Before Celluloid
WAS THIS THE FIRST COMMERCIAL EVER MADE?!
25 Nov 2019
New research has revealed the first advertising film in the world, seen in London in 1896. … More WAS THIS THE FIRST COMMERCIAL EVER MADE?!
That Eureka Moment – 5
21 Feb 2018
“When are you going to get to the point?” is an entirely justifiable cry to escape from you, my dear, (im)patient reader. Well, I have been working on something rather special, just for you. So I hope it will seem worth the wait. To quickly recap the story so far and what we know: Between … More That Eureka Moment – 5
That Eureka Moment – 4
3 Jan 2018
To some it would have been the most boring place in the world, but to me it was Aladdin’s Cave. It was March 1996 and I was in the deepest, dimly-lit reaches of the astonishingly extensive archives of the Cinémathèque Française. My guide down these subterranean corridors of cinematic archaeology was the relatively recently-appointed new … More That Eureka Moment – 4
That Eureka Moment – 3
20 Dec 2017
There are some photographs of Friese-Greene’s early film experiments that seem to have been wilfully ignored by historians writing about the beginnings of cinema. My guess is that this is because explaining and dating them is problematic – and because to attempt to do so might disrupt the status quo of academic opinion around Friese-Greene; … More That Eureka Moment – 3
That Eureka Moment – 2
15 Dec 2017
You can’t keep a good man down – and when you’re talking about a compulsive inventor, that goes to the power of ten. At the end of the first part of this post, in late 1891, Friese-Greene had been reduced to a level he hadn’t been at since he first set up in business in … More That Eureka Moment – 2
That Eureka Moment – 1
13 Dec 2017
Every story of an inventor needs its “Eureka!” Moment where the forces of the universe combine with sleepless slog to generate the breakthrough that he/she has been striving for. … More That Eureka Moment – 1
