A SHORT HISTORY OF

a short history of film
A filmstrip from Thomas A. Edison’s
Sandow (1894).
tured muscleman Eugen Sandow flexing
his muscles for the gaze of Edison’s
camera. Carmencita (1894) was a brief
documentary of a Spanish dancer performing
her sexually charged routine for
the presumably male audience. Annabelle
the Dancer (1895), featuring Annabelle
Whitford Moore performing an
energetic dance in a long flowing gown,
was shown in the first public display
of Edison’s Kinetoscopic films using
Thomas Armat’s Vitascope projector.
The film was hand-tinted in various colors
and shown at Koster & Bial’s Music
Hall in New York City on 23 April 1896.
Edison had intended his films to be
peep-show entertainments, but he soon
changed his mind as he saw the commercial
potential of projected motion
pictures. Now, with the Vitascope apparatus,
he recycled his earlier films for
public projection.
In the earliest Edison films, there is
no attempt to disguise the artificiality of the spectacle
being created for and recorded by the camera. In all of
Edison’s films, it is the body—at work, at play, or preening
for the camera—that is the center of our attention, in contrast to the
films of Auguste and Louis Lumière, which photographed life in a direct and
unadorned fashion, with minimal staging. As late as 1898, Edison’s technicians
were still using bare or simple black backgrounds to film Serpentine
Dance and Sun Dance (both 1897, starring the dancer Annabelle), as well as
Ella Lola, a la Trilby and Turkish Dance, Ella Lola (both 1898). This last film
became a celebrated censorship case when Ella Lola’s suggestive body display
was obscured, in some versions, by the insertion of an optically superimposed
grid, which covered the offending portions of her anatomy.
Other early Edison films, including Newark Athlete, Men Boxing (both
1891), Man on Parallel Bars, Fencers (both 1892), Wrestling Match, Athlete
with Wand, and Unsuccessful Somersault (all 1894), continued his film factory’s
fascination with the human body. As the novelty of captured motion
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