Julius Neubronner, born in Germany in 1852, was the son of Wilhelm Neubronner. Wilhelm carried on the family-run pharmacy and had
introduced rapid medicine delivery by way of carrier pigeon (Google books). Julius continued the family practice, including pigeon-delivery. As a young boy, Julius was interested in the then-newly invented cameras, and his hobby and his career merged when a once-punctual pigeon took was waylaid a month. Interested to find the source of the delay,
Julius placed a miniature camera on the pigeon to see where it went. The effort was successful, and he improved upon the design,
patenting a panoramic pigeon-carried camera that resulted in
novel photos. Julius is also distinguished as an early German experimenter in amateur silent film.
His recordings, including
daily life,
historic events, and
film magic, were
restored in 1996 (Google Quickview; original PDF).
posted by filthy light thief
on Jan 9, 2012 -
15 comments
The Burton Holmes Archive has information about Burton Holmes, the travel writer who became the first person to make filmic travelogues. More importantly, they also have a lot of
film clips by Holmes and his associate,
André de la Varre, who was also a great travelogue maker himself. Watching these clips is not quite time travel, but it is as close as we can get. Take a look at
Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1926,
Lake Michigan in 20s,
Cairo in 1932 and
the 1955 Rio de Janeiro carnival. The later films have sound and narration, but I prefer the silent ones.
[Burton Holmes previously, André de la Varre previously, and the Travel Film Archive, which runs Burton Holmes site, previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 26, 2011 -
5 comments
Finnish YouTube user
Ishexan has uploaded seven English subtitled movies in parts:
Broken Blossoms (
1919),
Aelita (
1924),
The Gipsy Charmer (
1929),
The Tragedy of Elina (
1938),
The Activists (
1939),
The Wooden Pauper's Bride (
1944), and
Sampo (
1959), which is based on the epic poem
The Kalevala. The films are mostly Finnish, though
Aelita is a silent Russian sci-fi film, and
Sampo was a joint Finnish and Soviet production. More film clips inside (mostly Finnish documentaries and "dorky musical numbers").
[more inside]
posted by filthy light thief
on Apr 30, 2011 -
12 comments
The
benshi of Japan were live narrators of silent films.
"To many 'silent' cinema fans in Japan,
benshi were a major attraction. It was usually the film that drew people to the theater, but it was often the
benshi which determined which theater a person would attend.
Benshi were huge cultural stars of the time, with
benshi earning as much, if not more, than many actors."
[more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Feb 27, 2011 -
17 comments
He invented or popularized a startling array of the fundamental elements of film: the dissolve, the fade-in and fade-out, slow motion, fast motion, stop motion, double exposures and multiple exposures, miniatures, the in-camera matte, time-lapse photography, color film (albeit hand-painted), artificial film lighting, production sketches and storyboards, and the whole idea of narrative film.
By 1897, in a studio of his own design and construction – the first complete movie studio – his hand forged virtually everything on his screen. Norman McLaren writes, "He was not only his own producer, ideas man, script writer, but he was his own set-builder, scene painter, choreographer, deviser of mechanical contrivances, special effects man, costume designer, model maker, actor, multiple actor, editor and distributor." Also, his own cinematographer, and the inventor of cameras to suit his special conceptions. Not even auteur directors such as Charles Chaplin, Orson Welles, John Cassavetes, and Stanley Kubrick would personally author so many aspects of their films."
Inside: 57 films by Georges Méliès, the
Grandfather of Visual Effects.
[more inside]
posted by Paragon
on Feb 3, 2010 -
31 comments
Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. was born into vaudeville. He quickly became a popular and controversial part of his family's stage act; an act that had his father violently hurling the "disobedient" child across the stage into scenery, the orchestra pit, or even into the audience, only to see him emerge amazingly unharmed. After the boy took an unplanned and particularly clamorous fall down a hotel stairwell, an astonished
Harry Houdini cried out to the parents, "
What a buster your kid took!" And thus, as legend has it, did little Joseph Frank Keaton Jr. become
Buster Keaton.
At 22, Keaton made his
cinematic debut with mentor Fatty Arbuckle. Afterward, he immediately founded Buster Keaton Studios, releasing a series of brilliant short (and later longer) comedies.
Dozens of these are freely available to stream or download at the
Internet Archive, including
Steamboat Bill Jr,
Convict 13,
The Electric House, and his seminal
The General (alt), which, despite
completely failing at the box office, would be later hailed by many as one of the
greatest
films
of
all
time.
[more inside]
posted by churl
on Apr 25, 2007 -
58 comments
«The silent queen of all that is snowy and pure» (.pdf) I will never forget the first time I saw Giovanni Pastrone’s
extraordinary Cabiria... I wasn’t quite
prepared for the sheer scope and beauty of this film. And I was
completely unprepared for having my sense of film history re-aligned. There are so many elements that we took for granted
as American inventions – the long-form historical epic, the
moving camera, diffused light. Suddenly, here they were in a
picture made two years before Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.
-- Martin Scorsese
It was the first film to be over three hours long, the first to use a moving camera, the first to cost 20 times the average cost of a motion picture; Pastrone took several elephants and hundreds of extras to the Alps, in the dead of winter, to film scenes that only lasted a couple of minutes
onscreen. He hired an ex-dockworker and
turned him into one of the first action movie heroes,
Maciste. And, he also created
the first international marketing campaign of the history of cinema. The Americans were so impressed that Cabiria became
the first film to be ever shown on White House grounds. Last week, at the Cannes Film Festival,
a beautiful, painstakingly restored version of this forgotten masterpiece has just been shown to the public.
posted by matteo
on May 29, 2006 -
13 comments
The Unhappy Medium. If you like modern silent films like Doc Hammer's
Rub, linked here
previously, you may also enjoy the work of
Chelsea Spear. Her
Alphabet is a short about math, music and a precocious child, while
The Unhappy Medium, set in the 1920's, is about spiritualism, fraud, adults and children. And some good news for the would-be filmmaker: Kodak still makes
Super-8 film, and there are plenty of cameras both
old and
new available.
posted by box
on Feb 6, 2005 -
6 comments
