Edison Kinetographic Record of a Sneeze; aka Fred Ott’s
Sneeze
Dir: William K.L. Dickson
1894
0:05
The official debut of cinema, in the hands of the Lumiere
brothers, was still almost exactly two years away. Thomas Edison was busy
trying to crack the problems of making and showing sequential images for
profit.
The protean American inventor was also an exceptionally
sharp businessman and master marketer (and litigator against rivals) as well.
In the hands of his deputy Dickson, after more than two years of experiments,
the first public exhibition of a Kinetoscope was held on May 9, 1891. (The film
shown there, “Blacksmith Scene,” I have written on previously in the NFR
series. The link is here.)
Soon Dickson was filming “actualities” to fill the short-duration
loops the Kinetoscope could accommodate. The playback devices were
coin-operated, hand-cranked, and could only accommodate one viewer at a time. Cranking
the spindle, the images, backed by a light source, would pass in front of a set of magnifying glasses set
in a frame. The images were printed on tough, flexible celluloid trimmed to a width of 1 3/8 inches per
frame – 35 millimeters, the standard through to the digital age.
Oddly enough, when the first Kinetoscope parlor opened on
April 14, 1894 at Broadway and 27th Street in Manhattan, this film
wasn’t on the menu with the familiar “Blacksmiths,” “Horse Shoeing,” “Highland
Dance,” and seven others. This film is composed of a demonstration strip of
photographs taken to illustrate an article for Harper’s Weekly about the new process (Edison also knew how to work
the press).
On January 7, journalist Burton Phillips came to Edison’s
East Orange, New Jersey lab. He requested “some nice-looking person” perform a
sneeze. Casting about the office, they settled on Ott, a jovial prankster, who
was happy to comply.
In the five seconds of the film, we see an affable, sharp-nosed,
big-eared, well-fed, luxuriously mustachioed man. He feigns taking a pinch of
snuff, sneezes, then looks up just as the film ends. I have run this hopped-up
filmstrip a dozen times.
Is it my imagination, or does Fred Ott give us a coy,
sly look at the last millisecond? I think he does, making this the first film
to really capture feeling and illustrate character. In that last millisecond,
film shows its potential. And I think that’s what makes this snippet memorable,
crowding out the contemporary shorts of trapeze artists, wrestlers, fighting
cocks, and the like.
Two days later, Dickson and his assistant copyrighted the
film, as a photograph, at the Library of Congress, making this the first
identifiable copyrighted film. Oh, Fred Ott, what have you wrought?
