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14/9/1896: The Biograph Projector
Throughout the first half of 1896, while Thomas Edison was already projecting images with his Vitascope, the American Mutoscope Company worked on developing and perfecting their Biograph projector. Perhaps, as former Edison protégé W.K.L.Dickson was amongst their number, they were acutely aware of Edison’s fondness for suing, for patent infringement, any rival’s invention that bore even a passing resemblance to one of his own. Certainly, the Biograph bore little resemblance to the Vitascope, operating on an entirely different principle: it used film that was more than twice the size of the strip used by Edison, and which therefore had four times more surface area per frame; the camera also punctured the film with sprocket holes as it was briefly fixed behind the lens during filming.
No doubt conscious of Edison’s head start over them, Dickson and cameraman G.W.Bitzer (later to become director D. W. Griffith’s cinematographer) spent the summer filming a wealth of material. They constructed a stage on the roof of their New York office at 841 Broadway and shot films that could be used on both the Biograph and the Mutoscope, their rival to Edison’s Kinetoscope. Among the films they shot there were two of popular dancer Annabelle, Butterfly Dance and Flag Dance. They also filmed a scene from the hit stage play Trilby, and three films featuring black performers: Hard Wash, Watermelon Feast, and the somewhat unfortunately titled Dancing Darkies. Dickson and Bitzer also filmed a host of actualities: views of Union Square, Broadway parades, Atlantic City and Philadelphia. In August, they travelled to Cape Cod to film acclaimed comic actor Joseph Jefferson in the part of Rip Van Winkle (a role that kept him in work for nearly 40 years). They also began shooting the first of their newsreel films when they filmed Chinese diplomat Li Hung Chang visiting both President Cleveland and Grant’s Tomb in New York as he returned home from Russia after attending the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II. The intrepid duo then pushed on to West Point, where they filmed the cadets on parade, and to Niagara for shots of the Falls.
They were ready by then to demonstrate the Biograph to an audience for the first time, and chose a variety show starring strongman Eugen Sandow, at the Alvin Theatre in Pittsburgh on the 14th September 1896. The news reviews of their performance were positive. Because of the larger film size, the image thrown onto the screen was larger and clearer than that presented by both the Vitascope and the Lumieres' Cinematographe The papers praised the “clear-cut and distinct” pictures, and proclaimed the quality of the pictures to be “the best…in [the new] process of photography”.
Shortly after this promising start, the team filmed presidential candidate – and brother of a major Biograph investor – William McKinley strolling on the lawn of his home in Canton, Ohio. Together with Empire State Express, a film of the train on its New York to Buffalo run, the film of future president McKinley was the hit of the Biograph’s “official” debut at Hammerstein’s Olympia Music Hall on Monday 12th October 1896. This was no doubt due to the fact that the audience was crammed with Republican supporters. Once again, the press reviews were favourable, and the show soon began a recording breaking run of nearly three months at Koster & Bial’s, the Music Hall at which Edison’s Vitascope had debuted six months earlier. By the end of 1896, the Biograph was playing in at least six vaudeville theatres. [ADD]
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