Things you have just found out

I'm learning a bit about cinema and its origins. There are many ways to answer the question of what the first movie was, and it is a fascinating topic in itself, but one cinephile I like favors Grandma's Reading Glass, a 1900 British movie by George Albert Smith. There are several interesting things about it (a scripted scene consisting of multiple shots -- hence editing -- including close-ups, a novelty then), but also cat.



I went looking for other old cats. Grandma's cat is believed to guest star in another film made by Smith some three years later, The Sick Kitten (the eponymous kitten is played by another cat).



An older instance of cat vid is William Dickson's 1894 movie The Boxing Cats (Prof. Welton's). "The two cats were members of Welton's touring "cat circus", which reportedly also featured cats riding bicycles", dixit Wikipedia.



Chronophotography, a technique that allowed you to take multiple photos in close succession, is usually considered to be pre-cinema. Étienne-Jules Marey, scientist and chronophotographer, never saw his work in motion, but we can, which gives us another contender for first cat vid ever, and possibly the oldest there is:



My favorite ones are Smith's, because they showed cats being cats with just about the same level of moderate coercion most domestic cats are accustomed to. And so I'll take the liberty to give the Best Early Cat Motion Picture award to The Sick Kitten (1903), by George Albert Smith. Hope this makes up for those pesky French brothers stealing the spotlight in history books.

The term "steeple" is used in French as well but I don't think I'd formed an opinion regarding its meaning. I seem to recall having had to look up "steeplechase" after Etaoin said something here, but maybe I'm making it up.

We have other horse riding-related anglicisms by the way. I may have mentioned it already, but redingote is still funny to me: it comes from riding coat. We also use the term jockey.

What could reasonably be described as the first sound film in history was The Photo-Drama of Creation, an 8-hour long religious film made in 1912 by Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Bible Student movement... which would later come to be known as the Jehovah's Witnesses (it's more complicated than that -- schisms -- but close enough).

filmsite.org, which came up in my previous searches because of its "Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points in Film History", says this:



Wikipedia:

It just occurred to me that 'Nescafé' has the word 'café' in it. Turns out that it's a contraction of 'Nestlé Café'. The things you see when you haven't got a gun...

Allow me to use this thread for anything I've learned one way or another at an indefinite point in the past. For instance, this one I learned a couple weeks ago:

There's an expression in French, l'arroseur arrosé (the waterer watered), which is the equivalent of "the biter bit". It is relatively common, and its meaning is clear enough on its own that I never wondered where it came from. It turns out it's the name of one of the earliest films by the Lumière brothers, shot and screened in 1895. In fact it was one of the 10 films presented during the famed first commercial public film screening by the Lumière brothers at Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris, on December 28, 1895, and is considered to be both the first fiction and first comedy in film history.



I find it fascinating that when people started to use that expression, it was a reference to a specific film and gag, perhaps one of the first instances of an item of pop culture making its way into and staying in the language. (The Bible and the works of Molière for instance have provided French with many expressions; I wouldn't consider them "pop culture", but I guess it's debatable.)

And something I've just found out: there was a British remake of that film, made in 1899 or 1900, called... The Biter Bit!

I am astounded. It never occurred to me it could signify anything else to anyone who'd heard of the company. I can understand missing a pun, but it's written out here.

The Salmon of Knowledge. Why have I never heard of this? Off to eat hazelnut-fed salmon.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_of_Knowledge