ThiefHott Too much of everything

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Michael_Elliott Newark Athlete (1891) Men Boxing (1891) Newark Athlete is just a brief fragment from the Edison studio, which was apparently just a set up test to check the conditions on the camera. The thing only lasts a few seconds so needless to say the studio wasn't trying to make anything special out of it but thankfully the thing survives so film buffs such as myself can view the early history of film. Men Boxing on the other hand seems to be the studio actually trying to put something fun on film. Two men, both wearing boxing gloves, throw a few punches at one another while smiling for the camera. Some think this once again was just testing the camera but since it contains a tad bit more I'm going to guess the men making it thought this could be something real.

José Luis Rivera Mendoza (jluis1984) During the years from 1890 to 1892, there was a period of constant experimenting in Thomas Alva Edison's headquarters, as the team led by Scottish inventor Williak K.L. Dickson was working constantly in an idea that would revolutionize entertainment. That idea was the Kinetoscope, a project that Dickson had been developing since Edison told him about the "motion pictures" that other pioneers had began to make (French inventor Louis Le Prince being the first in 1988). Dickson took Edison's ideas beyond and conceived a machine able to show motion pictures through a hole, the Kinetoscope. Many experiments were done in order to discover the best way to produce movies, and what started with the raw experiments codenamed "Monkeyshines", by 1891 it would be a reality: Dickson was now able to produce motion pictures. The tests continued, each time with better quality, and this short, "Men Boxing", is another of those early American films.Directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise, "Men Boxing" shows a scene of a boxing match between two workers at Edison's laboratory. However, this is not a documentary movie like the ones Dickson would make for Edison in the future, the two fighters are only pretending to be boxing in a fake boxing ring (as usual, the movie was shot in Edison's laboratory), in order to test the camera. The scene allowed Dickson and Heise to test the amount of lighting necessary to achieve high quality images, as well as the recording speed the camera needed to capture the different movements of the boxers. While an entirely technical experiment (like most of the early films, this movie wasn't made to be shown to the public), it's interesting to see the two actors having fun in their roles of boxers, almost joking as the entire short seems to be done with a healthy dose of good humor.When William K.L. Dickson showed his "Dickson Greeting" short to the world, Kinetoscope was born and the era of motion pictures as entertainment was inaugurated. Soon, the Kinetoscope (or "peepshow machine") became widely popular thanks to Dickson's short films that depicted vaudeville acts and folkloric dances from around the world, as well as the short documentaries done for the devise. Like "Monkeyshines" or "Newark Athlete", the short experiment titled "Men Boxing" was a key factor in the success of Dickson's Kinetoscope, as this movie almost has the quality that the inventors desired. Charming and fun, this little experiment, while still incomplete, already shows how fun and entertaining the new medium would be. 7/10

Snow Leopard This experimental Edison Company movie also contains a touch of good humor. It is one of a number of surviving examples of the camera tests that followed the well-known "Dickson Greeting" film, designed to see, among other things, how well the new motion picture camera could capture movements of various kinds. It accomplishes this, and it adds a brief suggestion of wit at the same time.The footage shows two men in a boxing ring, but they actually do little serious boxing. The purpose was not entertainment, but rather to test the camera, by taking footage of different movements and then also playing it at different speeds in the completed film. The simulated boxing ring in the Edison studio, the contrast between dark and light areas in the camera field, and the different behavior of the boxers, are all part of the camera test.Nevertheless, the early Edison film crews seemed to have had a sense of humor, and the contrast between the serious-looking boxer on the left and the very non-serious cutup on the right makes it more interesting to look at than a mere technical shot would have been.

James M. Haugh The Wizard of Menlo Park and the inventor of the electric light bulb, Thomas Alva Edison, moved his laboratory facilities (in late 1877) to a new location in West Orange, New Jersey. At about this same time he completed work on his invention of the phonograph. Beginning in 1878, Edison marketed the phonograph as an "entertainment novelty" and soon turned it into a popular consumer product.At this new facility, Edison started a lucrative project (he thought) to automatically extract the metal from iron ore during the milling process - he would loose his shirt on this project which never was successful.Encouraged by the work of others, particularly Eadward Muybridge (Muybridge had developed a method of taking pictures in quick succession, with multiple cameras, and then projecting them rapidly to simulate motion), Edison notified the U.S. Patent Office that he was: "experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear..." Initial experiments involved micro-photographs wrapped around a drum - after all, the photographs were intended to provide a visual stimulus to accompany the sound which would be played by a phonograph using a cylinder as its source. This system did not work.By mid-1889, Edison turned the project over to an assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Dickson was a natural for the job since besides being a chief experimenter, he was the plant photographer at West Orange. Dickson continued with the film-on-a-drum theme with limited success. Edison was touring Europe to bask in the warm glow of adulation for his electric-light invention. While in Paris, he was influenced by Dr. Etienne Jules Marey and his invention of a camera gun which shot pictures at a rapid rate and recorded the results on a band of film. Meanwhile Dickson had built a studio at West Orange. The Black Maria was a strange building; mounted on a railroad-turntable type of mechanism, coated in tar paper, and with a roof that opened to allow the sunlight to enter and fall on a small stage that had a black backdrop. When Edison returned from Europe he shifted Dickson's effort to focus on developing a method to advance a roll of film rapidly but intermittently past a single lens.Other work interfered with motion picture experimentation until 1891 when Dickson, and another Edison man - William Heise, developed a method of running 3/4 inch film strips horizontally past a lens. The camera was dubbed a Kinetograph. By late 1892, an improved Kinetograph with a vertical feed system and using 1-1/2-inch-wide film (35mm) was developed; and used to take this movie of men boxing. They are on the stage-with-the-black-backdrop in the Black Maria.