Louis Le Prince
Louis Le Prince | |
---|---|
inventor | |
Spouse |
Elizabeth Le Prince-Whitley
(m. 1869) |
Children | Adolphe |
Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (28 August 1841 – disappeared 16 September 1890, declared dead 16 September 1897) was a French artist and the inventor of an early motion-picture camera, and director of Roundhay Garden Scene. He was possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film.[1][2] He has been credited as the "Father of Cinematography",[3] but his work did not influence the commercial development of cinema—owing largely to the events surrounding his 1890 disappearance.[4][5]
A Frenchman who also worked in the United Kingdom and the United States, Le Prince's motion-picture experiments culminated in 1888 in
Le Prince was never able to perform a planned public demonstration of his camera in the US because he mysteriously vanished; he was last known to be boarding a train on 16 September 1890.
In early 1890, Edison workers had begun experimenting with using a strip of
Early life and education
Le Prince was born on 28 August 1841 in
Career
In conclusion, I would say that Mr. Le Prince was in many ways a very extraordinary man, apart from his inventive genius, which was undoubtedly great. He stood 6ft. 3in. or 4in. (190cm) in his stockings, well built in proportion, and he was most gentle and considerate and, though an inventor, of an extremely placid disposition which nothing appeared to ruffle.
— Declaration of Frederic Mason (wood-worker and assistant of Le Prince, April 21, 1931, American consulate of Bradford, England)
Le Prince moved to
Le Prince and his wife started a school of applied art, the Leeds Technical School of Art,
In 1881, Le Prince went to the United States[13] as an agent for Lincrusta Walton, staying in the country along with his family once his contract had ended.[citation needed] He became the manager for a small group of French artists who produced large panoramas, usually of famous battles, that were exhibited in New York City, Washington, D.C. and Chicago.[13][14]
During this time he began experiments relating to the production of 'moving' photographs, designing a camera that utilised sixteen lenses,[14] which was the first invention he patented. Although the camera was capable of 'capturing' motion, it wasn't a complete success because each lens photographed the subject from a slightly different viewpoint and thus the image would have jumped about, if he had been able to project it (which is unknown).
After his return to Leeds in May 1887,[14] Le Prince built a single-lens camera in mid-late 1888. An experimental model was developed in a workshop at 160 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds and used to shoot his motion-picture films. It was first used on 14 October 1888 to shoot what would become known as Roundhay Garden Scene and a sequence of his son Adolphe playing the accordion. Le Prince later used it to film road traffic and pedestrians crossing Leeds Bridge. The film was shot from Hicks the Ironmongers, now the British Waterways building on the south east side of the bridge[1] and marked with a commemorative Blue plaque.
Disappearance
In September 1890, Le Prince was preparing for a trip to the United States, supposedly to publicly premiere his work and join his wife and children. Before this journey, he decided to return to France to visit his brother in
Patent Wars assassination, "Equity 6928"
Christopher Rawlence pursues the assassination theory, along with other theories, and discusses the Le Prince family's suspicions of Edison over patents (the Equity 6928) in his 1990 book and documentary The Missing Reel.[20] Rawlence claims that at the time that he vanished, Le Prince was about to patent his 1889 projector in the UK and then leave Europe for his scheduled New York official exhibition. His widow assumed foul play though no concrete evidence has ever emerged and Rawlence prefers the suicide theory. In 1898, Le Prince's elder son Adolphe, who had assisted his father in many of his experiments, was called as a witness for the American Mutoscope Company in their litigation with Edison [Equity 6928]. By citing Le Prince's achievements, Mutoscope hoped to annul Edison's subsequent claims to have invented the moving-picture camera. Le Prince's widow Lizzie and Adolphe hoped that this would gain recognition for Le Prince's achievement, but when the case went against Mutoscope their hopes were dashed. Two years later, Adolphe Le Prince was found dead on Fire Island near New York.[21]
Disappearance ordered by the family
In 1966, Jacques Deslandes proposed a theory in Histoire comparée du cinéma (The Comparative History of Cinema), claiming that Le Prince voluntarily disappeared due to financial reasons and "familial conveniences". Journalist Léo Sauvage quotes a note shown to him by Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library, in 1977, that claimed Le Prince died in Chicago in 1898, having moved there at the family's request because he was homosexual; but he rejects that assertion.[22] It is extremely likely that this wasn't at all true, as there is no evidence to suggest that Le Prince was gay.[23]
Fratricide, murder for money
In 1967, Jean Mitry proposed, in Histoire du cinéma, that Le Prince was killed. Mitry notes that if Le Prince truly wanted to disappear, he could have done so at any time prior to that. Thus, he most likely never boarded the train in Dijon. He also wonders why, if his brother, who was confirmed as the last person to have seen Le Prince alive, knew Le Prince was suicidal, he didn't try to stop Le Prince, and why he didn't report Le Prince's mental state to the police before it was too late.[24]
Suspected drowning
A photograph of a drowned man pulled from the Seine in 1890, strongly resembling Le Prince, was discovered in 2003 during research in the Paris police archives.[13][25] This led to the theory that he had failed to get his moving picture to work, had heavy debts, and thus chose to take his own life.[18] It has been claimed that the body was too short to be Le Prince.[8]
Patents and cameras
On 10 January 1888, Le Prince was granted an American patent on a 16-lens device that he claimed could serve as both motion picture camera (which he termed "the receiver or photo-camera") and a projector (which he called "the deliverer or stereopticon").[26] That same day he took out a near-identical provisional patent for the same devices in Great Britain, proposing "a system of preferably 3, 4, 8, 9, 16 or more lenses". Shortly before the final version was submitted he added a sentence which described a single-lens system, but this was neither fully explained nor illustrated, unlike the several pages of description of the multi-lens system,[27] meaning the single-lens camera was not legally covered by patent.
This addendum was submitted on 10 October 1888[28] and, on 14 October, Le Prince used his single-lens camera to film Roundhay Garden Scene. During the period 1889–1890 he worked with the mechanic James Longley on various "deliverers" (projectors) with one, two, three and sixteen lenses. The images were to be separated, printed and mounted individually, sometimes on a flexible band, moved by metal eyelets. The single lens projector used individual pictures mounted in wooden frames.[28] His assistant, James Longley, claimed the three-lens version was the most successful.[28] Those close to Le Prince have testified to him projecting his first films in his workshop as tests, but they were never presented to anyone outside his immediate circle of family and associates and the nature of the projector is unknown.
In 1889, he took French-American dual citizenship in order to establish himself with his family in New York City and to follow up his research. However, he was never able to perform his planned public exhibition at the Morris–Jumel Mansion in Manhattan, in September 1890, due to his disappearance.[29]
Later recognition
This section needs additional citations for verification. (October 2017) |
Even though Le Prince's achievement is remarkable, with only William Friese-Greene and Wordsworth Donisthorpe achieving anything comparable in the period 1888–1890, his work was largely forgotten until the 1920s, as he disappeared before the first public demonstration of the result of his work, having never shown his invention to any photographic society or scientific institution or the general public.
For the April 1894 commercial exploitation of his personal
However, in Leeds, Le Prince is celebrated as a local hero. On 12 December 1930, the Lord Mayor of Leeds unveiled a bronze memorial tablet at 160 Woodhouse Lane, Le Prince's former workshop. In 2003, the
In France, an appreciation society was created as L'Association des Amis de Le Prince (Association of Le Prince's Friends), which still exists in Lyon.
In 1990, Christopher Rawlence wrote The Missing Reel, The Untold Story of the Lost inventor of Moving Pictures and produced the TV programme The Missing Reel (1989) for Channel Four, a dramatised feature on the life of Le Prince.
In 1992, the Japanese filmmaker Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell) directed Talking Head, an avant-garde feature film paying tribute to the cinematography history's tragic ending figures such as George Eastman, Georges Méliès and Louis Le Prince who is credited as "the true inventor of eiga", 映画, Japanese for "motion picture film".
In 2013, a feature documentary,
In 2023, the Roundhay Garden Scene was shown and recreated for the grand finale of the 10th Annual Live
Le Prince Cine Camera-Projector types
Legacy
Remaining material and production
Le Prince developed a single-lens camera in his workshop at 160 Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, which was used to shoot his motion-picture films. Remaining surviving production consists of two scenes in the garden at Oakwood Grange (his wife's family home, in Roundhay) and another of Leeds Bridge.
Forty years later, Le Prince's daughter, Marie, gave the remaining apparatus to the
All available versions of these sequences are derived from materials held by the National Science and Media Museum.
Man Walking Around a Corner (16-Lens Camera)
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Sequence of 12 complete frames + 4 partial frames, from National Science Museum, London circa 1931. (Courtesy NMPFT, Bradford) NMPFT. Filmed in Paris before 18.08.1887.
The only existing images from Le Prince's 16-lens camera are a sequence of 16 frames of a man walking around a corner. This appears to have been shot onto a single glass plate (which has since broken), rather than the twin strips of Eastman paper film envisaged in his patent. Jacques Pfend, a French cinema-historian and Le Prince specialist, confirms that these images were shot in Paris, at the corner of Rue Bochart-de-Saron (where Le Prince was living) and Avenue Trudaine. Le Prince sent 8 images of his mechanic running (which may be from this sequence) to his wife in New York City in a letter dated 18 August 1887,[33] which suggests it represented a significant camera test. Exposure is very irregular from lens to lens with some of the images almost completely bleached out, which Le Prince later on fixed.
Roundhay Garden Scene (Single-Lens Camera MkII)
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Roundhay, 1888 original 20 frames by National Science Museum, London 1931 (Courtesy of NMPFT, Bradford).
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Animation of Roundhay frames with image stabilised NMPFT, Bradford 1999.
The 1931 National Science Museum copy of what remains of a sequence shot in Roundhay Garden features 20 frames. The frames appear to have been printed in reverse from the negative, but this is corrected in the video. The film's damaged edge results in distortion and deformation on the right side of the stabilised digital movie. The scene was shot in Le Prince's father-in-law's garden at Oakwood Grange, Roundhay on 14 October 1888. The NMPFT animation lasts two seconds at 24fps (frames per second), meaning the original footage is playing at 10fps. In this version, the action is speeded up – the original footage was probably shot at 7fps.
Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (Single-Lens Camera MkII)
Louis Le Prince filmed traffic crossing Leeds Bridge from Hicks the Ironmongers[1] at the following coordinates: 53°47′37.70″N 1°32′29.18″W / 53.7938056°N 1.5414389°W.[34]
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6-frame sequence (118-120 & 122–124) of Leeds Bridge (National Science Museum, London 1923)
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20-frame sequence of Leeds Bridge (National Science Museum)(Courtesy NMPFT, Bradford)
The earliest copy belongs to the 1923 NMPFT inventory (frames 118–120 and 122–124), though this longer sequence comes from the 1931 inventory (frames 110–129). According to Adolphe Le Prince who assisted his father when this film was shot in late October 1888, it was taken at 20fps. However, the digitally stabilised sequence produced by the NMPFT lasts two seconds, meaning the footage is playing here at 10fps. As with the Roundhay Garden sequence, its appearance is sped up, suggesting the original footage was probably shot at 7fps. This would fit with what we know of the projection experiments, where James Longley reported a top speed of 7fps.[35]
Accordion Player (Single-Lens Camera MkII)
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Copy of original 19 frames (numbered 41–59) by National Science Museum, London 1931 (Courtesy of NMPFT, Bradford).
The last remaining film of Le Prince's single-lens camera is a sequence of frames of Adolphe Le Prince playing a
Filmography
Film | |||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Year | Title | Director | Editor | Producer | Cinematographer |
1887 | Man Walking Around a Corner | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
1888 | Roundhay Garden Scene | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge
|
Yes | No | No | Yes | |
Accordion Player
|
Yes | No | No | Yes |
Archive footage | |||
---|---|---|---|
Year | Title | Role | Notes |
2015 | The First Film | — | Posthumous release |
Mikhail Bondarev: Heck of a Great Man | Special thanks (as Lui Le Prince) | Short, Posthumous release |
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "BBC Education – Local Heroes Le Prince Biography". Archived from the original on 28 November 1999. Retrieved 27 May 2008.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link), BBC, archived on 28 November 1999 - ^ .
- ^ "The 'Father' Of Kinematography: Leeds Memorial Pioneer Work In England". The Manchester Guardian (1901–1959), Manchester, England 13 December 1930: 19.
- ISBN 9781982114824.
- ^ Greenblatt, Leah (14 April 2022). "He Created the First Known Movie. Then He Vanished. In his new book, The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures, Paul Fischer investigates the life – and mysterious disappearance – of Louis Le Prince". The New York Times. Retrieved 17 April 2022.
- ^ "Louis Le Prince, who shot the world's first film in Leeds". BBC. 24 August 2016.
- ^ a b "Pioneers of Early Cinema: 1, Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1841–1890?)" (PDF). www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk. p. 2. Retrieved 25 November 2012.
he developed a single-lens camera which he used to make moving picture sequences at the Whitley family home in Roundhay and of Leeds Bridge in October 1888. ... it has been claimed that a photograph of a drowned man in the Paris police archives is that of Le Prince.
- ^ a b "The tragedy of Louis Le Prince". www.acmi.net.au. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
- ^ a b c Spehr, Paul (2008). The Man Who Made Movies: W.K.L. Dickson. United Kingdom: John Libbey Publishing Ltd.
- ^ "Archives Municipales de Metz – Visualiseur". Retrieved 9 May 2020.
- ISSN 0769-0959. The birth certificate mentions "born August on the 28th, 1841 at 5am. The common mistake of making him born in 1842 comes from an article of Ernest Kilburn Scott, mistake made since then in numerous articles, including the one by Simon Popple
- ISSN 0769-0959.
- ^ a b c d e f Herbert, Stephen. "Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince". Who's Who of Victorian Cinema. Archived from the original on 21 July 2006. Retrieved 26 August 2006.
- ^ a b c d Adventures in CyberSound: Le Prince, Louis Aimé Augustin, Dr Russell Naughton (using source: Michael Harvey, NMPFT Pioneers of Early Cinema: 1. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince)
- ^ "Pioneers of Early Cinema: Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1841–1890?)" (PDF). National Media Museum. June 2011.
- ^ "Louis Le Prince – New Thinking: Part 1". The Optilogue. 21 November 2022. Retrieved 23 November 2022.
- ISBN 9781474409308.
- ^ a b "The Shadow Traps". www.stitcher.com. Retrieved 4 November 2019.
- ISBN 978-0-415-97235-2.
- ^ The Missing Reel, by Christopher Rawlence (Athenum Publishers, New York, 1990)
- ^ Burns, Paul. "The History of the Discovery of Cinematography". – "After his disappearance, the Le Prince family led by his wife and son went to court against Edison in what became known as Equity 6928. The famous Patent Wars ensued and by 1908 Thomas Edison was regarded as sole inventor of motion pictures, in the US at least. However, in 1902, two years after Le Prince's son Adolphe had testified in the suit, he was found shot dead on Fire Island, New York."
- ^ Léo Sauvage, "Un épisode mystérieux de l'histoire du cinéma : La disparition de Le Prince", Historia, n° 430 bis, Sept. 1982, pp. 45–51: "une telle affirmation (...) est totalement dépourvue de vraisemblance".
- ^ Dembowski (1995): "Pierre Gras, conservateur en chef de la Bibliothèque publique de Dijon, en 1977, montra à Léo Sauvage une note (il la cite dans son ouvrage), prise lors de la visite d'un historien connu (il a tu son nom) qui avait déclaré : – Le Prince est mort à Chicago en 1898, disparition volontaire exigée par la famille. Homosexualité. Disons clairement qu'il n'y a pas l'ombre d'une preuve à l'appui d'une telle assertion."
- ^ Dembowski (1995): "S'il en était ainsi, pourquoi n'a-t-il rien fait pour l'empêcher de réaliser son funeste projet, pourquoi n'a-t-il pas averti la police à temps?"
- ^ "The mystery of Leeds's long-lost movie pioneer". The Daily Telegraph. 23 June 2015. Archived from the original on 11 March 2021. Retrieved 9 May 2020.
- ^ "Method of and apparatus for producing animated pictures of natural scenery and life". 10 January 1888. Retrieved 29 December 2017.
- ^ "Patents Completed". British Journal of Photography. 35: 793.
- ^ a b c Aulas & Pfend, Jean-Jacques & Jacques (1 December 2000). "Louis Aimé Augustin Leprince, inventeur et artiste, précurseur du cinéma". 1895. Revue de l'association française de recherche sur l'histoire du cinéma. 32.
- ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 4 November 2023.
- ^ "The First Film". Guerilla Group. Archived from the original on 16 June 2018. Retrieved 16 June 2018.
- ^ "10th Annual On Cinema Oscar Special". heinetwork.tv. On Cinema. Retrieved 14 March 2023.
- ^ "Cinematography". National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Archived from the original on 11 July 2006. Retrieved 16 April 2009.
- ^ Letter dated 18 August 1887 in Louis Le Prince Collection at Leeds University Library
- ^ "Google Earth Community: First Moving Pictures". Retrieved 9 May 2020.[permanent dead link]
- ^ Letter from James Longley to Louis le Prince 8 August 1889. "The best result that I got was 426 per minute" – From Le Prince Collection in Leeds University Library.
Sources
- Insight Collections and Research Centre
- The Career of Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince by E. Kilburn Scott (July 1931)
- La naissance du cinéma : cent sept ans et un crime..." by Irénée Dembowski (in Kino 1989, translated from Polish to French in Cahiers de l'AFIS, numéro 182, nov.–déc. by Michel Rouzé, quoted by Alliage numéro 22 1995)
- "Le Prince's Early Film Cameras", by Simon Popple (in Photographica World, September 1993)
- "Le Prince and the Lumières", by Rod Varley (in Making of the Modern World, Science Museum, UK, 1992)
- "Career of Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince", by E. Kilburn Scott, (in Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, US, July 1931)
- "The Pioneer Work of Le Prince in Kinematography", by E. Kilburn Scott (in The Photographic Journal #63, August 1923, pp. 373–378)
- "Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince" by Merritt Crawford (in Cinema, 1 December 1930, pp. 28–31)
- L'affaire Lumière. Du mythe à l'histoire, enquête sur les origines du cinéma by Léo Sauvage, 1985 ISBN 2-86244-045-0
- Ingenious Le Prince 16-lens camera
- "Louis Le Prince: the body of evidence" by Richard Howells (in Screen vol.47 #2, Oxford University Press, 2006)
- "Le Prince, inventeur et artiste, précurseur du cinema" by Jean-Jacques Aulas and Jacques Pfend (in Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma N°32, December 2000, p. 9) ISSN 0769-0959
- New research centre honours father of film
- Essential Films, chapter 2, Culture Wars by Ion Martea
- Roundhay Garden Scene (1888), Culture Wars by Ion Martea
- Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888), Culture Wars by Ion Martea
- The Indispensable Murder Book, edited by Joseph Henry Jackson (New York: The Book Society, 1951), pp. 437–464, "The Red and White Girdle" by Christopher Morley. This deals with the murder of Gouffe, and shows the intense study of that trunk murder in 1889–90.
- The facts concerning the life and death of LOUIS AIME AUGUSTIN LEPRINCE, pioneer of the moving pîcture and his family, by Jacques Pfend (Sarreguemines/57200/France) 2014.ISBN 9782954244198.
External links
- Louis Le Prince at IMDb
- Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge at IMDb
- Jean-Jacques Aulas et Jacques Pfend, Louis Aimé Augustin Leprince, inventeur et artiste, précurseur du cinéma
- Roundhay Garden Scene on YouTube
- Leeds Bridge on YouTube
- Accordion Player by Louis Le Prince on YouTubea rough video from the first 17 frames
- Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography, and Television. University of Leeds. Retrieved 2008-09-26
- The Legend of Louis Le Prince
- Leodis – a photographic archive of Leeds. Leeds Library & Information Service. Allows search for key terms such as Louis Le Prince or Leeds Bridge or Bridge End or Hick Brothers or Auto Express (workshop site), etc.
- National Science and Media Museum, Bradford
- Armley Mills- Leeds Industrial Museum
- Le Prince single-lens camera 1888, Science & Society Picture Library
- Chronomedia year 1888 (Terramedia)
- Local films for local people (BBC Bradford & West Yorkshire)
- louisleprince.net