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Under the expert guidance of film historian David Shepard, this collection is uniquely comprehensive, with fact, fiction, and fantasy represented in equal measure. All major figures are included; it's fitting that one volume is devoted to astonishing shorts by movie magician Georges Méliès, while other volumes serve as "greatest hits" compilations of movie innovations by Edwin S. Porter, Cecil Hepworth, Max Linder, Alice Guy Blanche, and many others. The breathtaking growth of movies is fully apparent by volume 5 ("Comedy, Spectacle, and New Horizons"); most viewers will find this the most entertaining, but each volume is a revelation, offering films that haven't been widely seen since they were first produced. To understand and appreciate the foundation upon which modern filmmaking is built, The Movies Begin is truly essential. --Jeff Shannon
An animated rendering of Eadweard Muybridge's primitive motion studies (1877-85) begins the program, immediately defining the compound appeal of cinema as both a scientific marvel and sensational popular entertainment. This is followed by the works of Louis and Auguste Lumière, who offer cinematic glimpses of such commonplace sights as children quarreling, a lion in a zoo, or the feeding of poultry.
As for more obvious fictions there is the myth-making of Edwin S. Porter's seminal The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the pictorial splendor of Ferdinand Zecca's The Golden Beetle (1907), both presented in mint condition prints with the original hand-tinting, as well as Georges Méliès's extravagant A Trip to the Moon (1902, complete with narration penned by the director, intended to accompany its performance).
The low-art origins of the cinema are represented in some of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscopes (1894-97, serpentine dances, a cockfight, a bedroom full of seminary girls engaged in a pillow fight, and the notorious first screen kiss) and a collection of mechanized peep shows from American Mutoscope and Biograph, whose burlesque origins are free from social or aesthetic pretense, being designed solely for titillation and amusement. When social crusaders spoke of the evils of film, this is what they had in mind. 75 minutes.
Volume Two: The European Pioneers, 1895-1906
While some consider the cinema a distinctly American invention, the most influential figures during its infancy were two brothers in France: Auguste and Louis Lumière. In the beginning, they dominated world film production and distribution. Through the magic of cinema, such ordinary sights as the demolition of a wall, the arrival of a train, a family enjoying breakfast, or workers exiting a factory were transformed into mystifying spectacles of light and motion, having their premiere on December 28, 1895.
Perhaps the most extraordinary elements of this collection are the early British films, virtually unseen in the United States. Robert W. Paul, a scientific instrument maker by trade, devoted 15 years to motion pictures, designing his own camera and projector and, in March 1896, staging the first performance by an Englishman of projected motion pictures to a fee-paying public. Paul's works range from Lumière-influenced actualities to experiments with stop motion (Extraordinary Cab Accident, 1903) and miniature effects (The (?) Motorist, 1906, made with Walter R. Booth).
Other inventive artists represented herein include George Albert Smith, a well-known scientific lecturer of the day; Walter Haggar and sons, who exhibited their films in a traveling tent show; Frank Mottershaw of the Sheffield Photographic Company; James Bamforth, also a manufacturer of lantern slides and picture postcards; and James A. Williamson, whose 1901 short "Stop Thief!" is considered the source of the subsequent development of the chase film. 58 minutes.
Volume Three: Experimentation and Discovery, 1898-1910
More than any other decade, the first 10 years of the moving picture saw the greatest amount of experimentation and development. Ranging from the ingeniously creative to the audacious, the films represented in this volume offer a sampling of the primitive masterworks that allowed the technical novelty of the cinema to so quickly flourish into an artistically expressive medium.
In the films of Cecil Hepworth, one witnesses a primal use of titles (How It Feels to Be Run Over, 1900) and some rather gruesome visual comedy (Explosion of a Motor Car, 1900). A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.'s Biscuit Works (1906) by G.H. Cricks features the extensive use of indoor arc lighting; at the same time being a key transitional film between the early actualities and a more involved form of nonfiction filmmaking that would ultimately blossom into the documentary.
From France's Pathé Frères come films that are alternately titillating (Par le Trou de Serrue/Peeping Tom, 1901), awe-inspiring (Aladin, or the Wonderful Lamp, 1906), colorful (Magic Bricks, 1908), and dramatic (Revolution in Russia, 1905, which depicts the same event as Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin). Particularly striking is History of a Crime (1901), in which a criminal's memories are visually rendered through a unique bit of production design.
This volume concludes with several works from the Edison Manufacturing Co., including the first-known advertising film (Dewar's--It's Scotch, 1898) and Edwin S. Porter's The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), a stunning visual fantasy adapted from the comics of Winsor McCay, whose animation can be glimpsed in Volume 5 of this series. 58 minutes.
Volume Four: The Magic of Méliès, 1897-1904
Decades before the term "special effects" was coined, audiences of the newborn cinema were witnessing spectacular screen illusions, courtesy of the medium's first master magician: Georges Méliès. The films collected on this disc offer an unparalled view of Méliès's career, introducing the viewer to the rich body of work that lies beyond A Trip to the Moon (1902), which is featured in Volume One of The Movies Begin.
Such films as The Eclipse (1907) and Long Distance Wireless Photography (1908) not only demonstrate Méliès's astounding employment of double exposure, makeup, editing, and theatrical trickery but provide mesmerizing insight into the social context of his work, which blended Victorian approaches to astronomy, superstition, and feminine beauty with the unnatural wonders of 20th century technology and heavy doses of slapstick. The centerpiece of the collection is The Impossible Voyage (1904), a fantastic tale of an around-the-world expedition, presented with the authentic frame-by-frame hand-coloring and narration penned by Méliès himself.
Georges Méliès: Cinema Magician is a documentary on the filmmaker's life, integrating rare photographs, early drawings, and numerous clips, charting his rise from shoe factory worker to proprietor of Paris's mystical Théatre Robert-Houdin, where Méliès learned the skills to become a cinematic illusionist and developed an interest in the supernatural, exquisitely represented in The Mysterious Retort (1906) and The Black Imp (1905). 103 minutes.
Volume Five: Comedy, Spectacle and New Horizons, 1908-1913
By 1907, the cinema's initial growing pains had subsided and fairly distinct generic categories of production were established. This volume of The Movies Begin examines some of these integral works that begin to reflect the modern-day cinema--punctuated with authentic hand-tinted lantern slides used during early theatrical exhibition.
Visual comedy, with notable elements of slapstick, is represented in Pathé Frères' The Policemen's Little Run (1907), Bangville Police (1913, representing the first appearance of the legendary Keystone Kops), and Max Linder's Troubles of a Grass Widower (1908). Best remembered today as a major influence on Charlie Chaplin, Linder was one of the first and most popular stars of the cinema. The comic potential of such a basic device as an undercranked camera is exhibited in Pathé's Onésime, Horloger (Onésime, Clock-Maker, 1912).
Alice Guy Blaché's Making an American Citizen (1912) is an excellent example of the films of social conscience, always an undercurrent beneath the apparently smooth surfaces of commercial productions. Released the very same week was D.W. Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust, a superb film of wide emotional range and great technical virtuosity made near the end of his tenure at the Biograph Company. Nero, or the Fall of Rome (1909) strains at conventional film limitations in dimension and duration, looking forward to the revolutionary Italian epics (Cabiria, The Last Days of Pompeii) that followed a few years later. Equally prophetic are the dazzling animations showcased in the Vitagraph Company's Winsor McCay and His Animated Pictures (1911). 85 minutes.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
82 of 83 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not to be missed,
By Gwen Kramer "gwenhwyvar" (Sunny and not-so-sunny California) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913 (DVD)
To the casual movie viewer, the history of cinema begins in the 1930s, when silents were totally replaced with the new talkie medium. Beyond an occasional showing of The Phantom of the Opera or a few Keaton or Chaplin movies, silents- and especially early silents- are a part of the murky past. This collection is a real eye opener to either a movie fan who wants to broaden their knowledge or someone who, like me, is a silent movie fan who wants to see how it all began.This collection offers a broad variety. From early melodramas and comedies to newsreel footage and special effects vehicles. The two most famous early silents- The Great Train Robbery and A Trip to the Moon- are shown here but other, more unusual films such as the Golden Beetle and the Grass Widower are also allowed to shine. The picture quality is excellant especially considering the age of these films. The music by Robert Israel is wonderful, always appropriate and quite a bit less sober than most silent movie music. Even my mother, who likes silents but dislikes silent movie music enjoyed it. It should please both purists and casual fans. One fault I found with this collection is that some movies have narration whether you want it or not. It surely would not have been difficult to include an on/off function for the commentary track. Also, at points the sound is badly mixed so that the music drowns out the narrator. However, this fairly minor flaw did not ruin my enjoyment of the collection. I particularly enjoyed the pre-WWI French films, it is easy to see why the French imports could outshine much of the American output. They are beautifully produced, make no bones about their staginess and have an element of playful fantasy. The last disc has a film of the wonderful French comedian Max Linder, it's a shame that he never regained his pre-war popularity because his comedy is spurisingly modern and he has obvious charisma. The newsreels are also a highlight, Russia in the winter, various "working dogs", an english biscuit factory... all are valuable historically as well as very amusing. This set is cheap at the price and while not all of the films can be called masterpieces, they are all important in reconstructing a period of cinema history that is too often ignored. If you have any interest in the story of earlky cinema, I recommend this set without reservation.
46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Tremendous Collection,
By
This review is from: The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913 (DVD)
This set contains over 100 films from the early days of the silent cinema - beginning with some of the early serial photography experiments by Edward Muybridge.We see the works of the Edison Studio, the early Lumiere Brothers films, and a great selection of Melies films. Most amazing to me were the tinted films from the Pathe Freres company. There are two films that are absolutely astounding, as every frame of the film was tinted by hand. The colors are vibrant and surprisingly consistent. Friends who have watched these films have come away simply shocked. The films presented here are not all interesting. There are quite a few films from the infancy of cinema, when the camera was used to create scenes that are really the equivalent of postcards, where a still camera would have produced the same effect. Many films are incomplete, a sad fact of cinema preservation, and often frustrating when you don't get to see the second half of the film! There are no Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Fatty Arbuckle films to be seen here, and only one D.W. Griffith film. (Griffith will be well represented in a future release put together by David Shepherd's "Film Preservation Associates" on Image DVD.) What is here are the true beginnings of an art form, the experiments that made film what it is now. There are also excellent program notes by Charles Musser, which really help explain what is being seen, especially when parts of a film are missing. Kudos to the Kino company for including these notes! If you are a cinema nut, and interested in the origins of film, then this set is highly recommended!
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Essential, but by no means perfect,
By
This review is from: The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913 (DVD)
There's no doubt that this is an essential purchase for anyone interested in early cinema: MOVIES BEGIN includes many of the landmarks, as well as some fascinating rarieties. There are tons of fun: classics by Cecil Hepworth, Edison, the Lumieres, and many others. There's no other such extenstive DVD compillation on the market and KINO ON VIDEO should be immensly praised.
However, if you consider it not for its educational values, but as a DVD edition per se, there are major flaws. First of all, commentary track (no matter how insightful) isn't optional, which is below any standards. Secondly, all the foriegn films have electronically imposed English subtitles which are impossible to reduce - it makes a bad „old video tape" impression. Film notes included on the disc itself are very interesting, but the edition as a whole simply yields for a booklet which could accompany you while watching. Furthermore, there's no precise information on the sleeve notes about the exact duration of each separate movie, only enigmatic „total running time", which makes it less comfortable to use e. g. during classes. It may seem that I sneer at something very beautiful and indeed it is so - but every beautiful thing may be improved upon. In fact, the amazing recent edition of the Edison films also by KINO proves that they are learning. Whatever are my complaints, this one remains a compulsory viewing. Michal Oleszczyk, Tarnowskie Gory, Poland
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