Snapshot: Episode One: 1880s - Louis Le Prince

Who was the world’s first film director?  Was it Thomas Alva Edison, that egotistical icon of American invention or WKL Dickson, the British born Edison employee from whom ‘honest Tom’ stole so much credit?  Was it the Lumiere brothers, canny Frenchmen who first charged an audience for the privilege of seeing images of their workers leaving their factory, thus giving the medium its official birthday: December 28, 1895.

The answer is none of the above.  A full seven years before the Lumieres opened for business, six years before Dickson and his high profile boss conducted an in-house experiment that is believed to be the first sound movie, and twelve months before the initial out of focus experimental Edison film fragments, another inventor beat them all to it.  The year was 1888, the first motion picture was christened the “Roundhay Garden Scene” and its director’s name was Louis Le Prince.

Le Prince was born in Metz, France in 1842, the son of an artillery officer.  His early life was influenced by a friend of his father’s, Louis Daguerre, a pioneer photographer from whom Le Prince learnt the principles of photography and chemistry.  The future filmmaker had a diverse education, studying painting in Paris and post-graduate chemistry at Leipzig University.

Moving to Leeds, England in 1866 Le Prince joined a brass works firm, Whitley Partners of Hunslet.  Perfecting a technique for fixing colour photographs onto metal and pottery, he was commissioned for portraits of Queen Victoria and Prime Minister William Gladstone.

In 1881 Le Prince went to America and began a series of experiments relating to the production of ‘moving photographs’.  He patented his first camera in 1886, a 16 lens invention which produced imperfect images compromised by the fact that each individual frame was from a slightly different viewpoint.

Le Prince’s decisive breakthrough came when he returned to Leeds in May 1887.  Building and patenting a one lens camera, he shot the “Roundhay Garden Scene” on the 14th of October, 1888.  The same apparatus was employed again shortly afterwards to record trams, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages crossing Leeds Bridge.  The resulting film was called, unsurprisingly, “Leeds Bridge”.  A third and final work from Le Prince was of a man playing an accordion; it is unclear whether this was shot in England at the same location or in Paris later that year.

Le Prince’s films were digitised in the early 2000s and can now be enjoyed on You Tube 120 years after their making.  Unfortunately, playing the “Roundhay Garden Scene” at 24 frames a second, roughly twice the speed at which it was shot, does the first auteur something of a disservice, as though he were some kind of proto-Benny Hill, putting his Victorian relatives through their paces at break-neck speed.  Clocking in a breathtaking 2 seconds flat, the “Roundhay Garden Scene” depicts members of Le Prince’s family moving in a circular direction, little imagining that they were the world’s first cinematic performers.

If Le Prince’s movies lack drama his own life did not.  He disappeared mysteriously on September 16 1890 after boarding a train at Dijon bound for Paris.  Some claim he committed suicide, others are of the opinion that he was murdered by family members dismayed at his alleged homosexuality.  His own wife thought him assassinated by jealous patent rivals.  Whatever the cause, Louis Le Prince’s vanishing effectively removed him from the history books.  Until now.