Flicker Friday: The Very First Motion Pictures

With the Academy Awards around the corner and everyone in a mood to celebrate the best of modern movie-making, it's interesting to look back to see just how far we've come since the very first films were made more than a century ago. This video from KKD1247 introduces viewers to Eadweard Muybridge's galloping horse, from 1878, and the running bison, from 1883. Both films use Muybridge's method of showing still photographs in rapid sequence. The video follows with Monkeyshines, no. 1 and no. 2, which are film fragments of a man making large gestures, shot in 1889-90 using Thomas Edison's experimental horizontal-feed kinetoscope camera and viewer.

Do you think Muybridge or Edison could have imagined the slick feature films we take for granted today? Probably not. But it's inspiring to see how far the human imagination can go once it gets a nudge in the right direction.

Enjoy!