March of the Movies

Forty years after he was in charge of Edison's project to make a working motion picture camera, J. Stuart Blackton was credited as director of this movie. I have no doubt that legal action was threatened at some stage; this two-reel short tells the now-standard history of the movies from the American perspective, which is pretty odd for a movie produced in Great Britain. There it was well known that several other competing inventors came up with the camera at the same time or even before Edison. However, the producers undoubtedly had hopes of distributing this film in the US, and why tell the Yanks something they would know to be a lie? You might as well tell them that the light bulb was invented by Joseph Swan in 1860.

As a statement of the standard hagiography of the movies it does a pretty good job, although it departs from that standard as claiming that the talkies hit in 1928. I suspect that the first British movie palace wasn't wired for sound until that year, so that the important people couldn't enjoy Al Jolson unless they had seen him in person. How self-centered some people are!