Posts tagged with "thomas edison"
Georges Méliès and the Birth of Filmmaking
Georges Méliès was born on December 8, 1861. I says hats off (or heads off if you’re as talented as Monsieur Méliès) to the man who first recognized cinema’s potential for magic. To honor the bday of one of cinema’s greatest pioneers, here’s a repost of a Méliès primer that I wrote for the Toronto Film Scene, [...]
Film Friday Weekly Roundup
This is going to sound terribly narcissistic but often as I’m flipping through my RSS feeds I see a new post and think “Oh that sounds interesting!” Then it turns out to be my own. Wait, maybe that just makes me sound a bit senile? At any rate, and in my defense, there are a [...]
The Vitascope Premieres
Today is the anniversary of the first projected movie screening in the United States. Edison’s Vitascope debuted on April 23, 1896 at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall in New York City with none other than one Mr. Edwin S.Porter manning the machine. The European’s had already projected movies of course. The Lumiere brothers did it [...]
The Sneeze Felt Round the World
On this day in 1894, Fred Ott sneezed. Or he sneezed at least once. He did take a puff of snuff before sneezing, and I imagine snuff must be hell on the nasal passages. So maybe Fred Ott sneezed 100 times on January 7, 1894 – we’ll never know. But we do know he sneezed [...]
Edison Studio’s Frankenstein (1910)
The 1910 Edison Studios production of Frankenstein is the first film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel. Believed to be lost for many years, the film later turned up in the hands of a private collector who proved unwilling to share. By the time BearManor Media released the restored public domain print in 2010, the film [...]









