The Two Oldest Surviving Movies

The name Louis Le Prince is rarely mentioned when talking about the history of film. But on October 14th, 1888, French inventor Le Prince, shot what is believed to be the first film ever made, or at least the oldest one still in existence. The now legendary 2 second long piece of film features Le Prince's son Adolphe, and the family of Le Prince's wife, the Whitleys, walking around in circles, laughing to themselves, in a garden in Roundhay, Leeds, England.

A dedicated inventor born in 1841, Louis Le Prince started experimenting with film as early as 1881, years before Thomas Edison or the Lumière brothers, and by 1886 he had built the Le Prince single-lens camera. On that now famous day in October 1888, cinema was born in Roundhay Garden, with Le Prince creating a new art form which would become one of the most important mediums of entertainment of our time.

Sadly, what is now known as the "Roundhay Garden Scene" was tainted by tragedy, as Sarah Whitley, Le Prince's mother-in-law, who appears in the film, died just ten days after the shooting of the moving picture. Le Prince shot a second film later that year, "Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge" also just two seconds long, and then two years later in 1890, before making his first public demonstration of the films, Le Prince and his camera vanished aboard a train bound for Paris, and neither he nor his equipment were ever seen again. The nature and circumstances surrounding Le Prince's disappearance remain a complete mystery to this day.

Le Prince did not survive to fight the legal battles over the patent of his invention, and it was thus the names of Thomas Edison and the Lumière Brothers which would become the ones associated with the birth of film-making a decade later. But in truth, it was Le Prince's invention that would truly be the beginning of it all.

Видео The Two Oldest Surviving Movies канала bdosmike