animated pictures

In 1888, Le Prince filmed Roundhay Garden Scene, which is thought to be the world's first successful attempt to record moving images, and hence the very first motion picture film.^[1] He followed this with a film of a street scene. These were several years before the work of competing inventors such as Thomas Edison and Auguste and Louis Lumière.

Le Prince was a Frenchman who divided his adult life among France, Britain and the United States. His ground-breaking work in 1888 was conducted in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England.

He was never able to perform a planned public demonstration in the United States because he mysteriously vanished from a train in 1890. His body and luggage were never found, but, over a century later, a police archive was found to contain a photograph of a drowned man who could be him.

Forgotten inventor of motion pictures

The early history of motion pictures in the United States and Europe is marked by battles over patents of cameras. In 1886 Le Prince was granted an American dual-patent on a 16-lens device that combined a motion picture camera with a projector. A patent for a single-lens type (MkI) was refused because of an interfering patent, but a few years later the same patent was not opposed when Edison applied for one.

On October 14, 1888, Le Prince used an updated version (MkII) of his single-lens camera to film Roundhay Garden Scene. He exhibited his first films in the Whitley factory in Leeds, but they were not distributed to the general public.

The following year, 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 Jumel Mansion, New York, in September 1890, due to his mysterious disapperance. Consequently, Le Prince's contribution to the birth of the cinema has often been overlooked.

Life

Childhood and school

Le Prince was born in the fortress at Metz, France on 28 August 1842. His father was a major of artillery in the French Army^[2] and an officer of the Légion d'honneur. He grew up spending time in the studio of his father's friend, the photography pioneer Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre, from whom the young Le Prince received lessons relating to photography and chemistry and for whom he was the subject of a Daguerrotype, an early type of photograph. His education went on to include the study of painting in Paris and post-graduate chemistry at Leipzig University, which provided him with the academic knowledge he was to utilise in the future.

Adulthood

He moved to Leeds, West Yorkshire, England in 1866, after being invited to join John Whitley, a friend from college, in Whitley Partners of Hunslet, a firm of brass founders making valves and components. In 1869 he married Elizabeth Whitley, John's sister and a talented artist. The couple started a school of applied art, the Leeds Technical School of Art, in 1871 and became well renowned for their work in fixing colour photography on to metal and pottery, leading to them being commissioned for portraits of Queen Victoria and the long-serving Prime Minister William Gladstone produced in this way, that were included alongside other mementos of the time in a time capsule - manufactured by Whitley Partners of Hunslet - which was placed in the foundations of Cleopatra's Needle on the embankment of the River Thames.

In 1881 Le Prince went to the United States as an agent for Whitley Partners, staying in the country along with his family once his contract had ended. 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 DC and Chicago. During this time he continued the experiments he had begun, relating to the production of 'moving' photographs and to find the best material for film stock.

During his time in the United States, Le Prince built a camera that utilised sixteen lenses and was his first invention to be 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 projected image jumped about.

After his return to Leeds in 1886, Le Prince built and then patented, a one lens camera. It was first used sometime prior to October 1888 to shoot what would become known as Roundhay Garden Scene, presumably the world's first motion picture. Three days after the camera system was patented, on 13 October 1888, Le Prince used it to shoot trams and the horse-drawn and pedestrian traffic on Leeds Bridge. These pictures were soon projected on a screen in Leeds, making it the first motion picture exhibition.

Suspicious disappearance

In September 1890, Le Prince boarded a train on a Friday, promising friends he would rejoin them in Paris on the following Monday for the return journey to England, to be followed by a trip to the US to promote his new camera. However, Le Prince did not arrive at the appointed time and he was never seen again by his family or friends. All that could be established about his last whereabouts was that he was seen boarding a train at Dijon for his return to Paris on 16 September 1890.

The French police, Scotland Yard and the family undertook exhaustive searches but never found his body or luggage. This mysterious disappearance case was never solved. However, five main theories have been proposed.

1. Missing person (1890):

   No luggage, nor corpse was found in the Dijon-Paris express nor along the railway. No one saw Le Prince at the Dijon station on September 16, 1890, except his brother. No one saw Le Prince in the Dijon-Paris express after he was seen boarding it. No one noticed strange behavior, nor aggression in the Dijon-Paris express. The French police report conclusion: a missing person. ([1])

2. Perfect suicide (1890):

   According to a police report, Louis Le Prince wanted to commit suicide because he was on the verge of bankruptcy. Le Prince had already set his suicide and he managed for his own body and belongings to never be found. This theory was reported in 1928, by Georges Potoniée, quoting the son of the architect in Les Origines Du Cinématographe. ([2])

3. Patent Wars assassination, "Equity 6928" (1900):

   Christopher Rawlence proposes the assassination theory and discusses Le Prince's conflict with Edison over patents (the Equity 6928) in his 1990 Missing Reel. At the time that he vanished, Le Prince was about to patent his 1889 projector in England and then leave Europe for his scheduled New York official exhibition. According to a specific British law, Le Prince's patents were cancelled in 1897, leading to Patent Wars in the following year. In 1898, Edison was named sole inventor of the motion picture camera in the United States. In 1900, Le Prince's widow Elizabeth and his elder son, Alphonse, went to court against Edison. Two years later Alphonse Le Prince was found murdered in Fire Island, New York.[3]

4. Disappearance ordered by the family (1966):
   • In 1966, Jacques Deslandes proposed a theory in Histoire comparée du cinéma: "Le Prince's disappearance was voluntary and was caused by reasons of financial order and familial conveniences". [4]
   • In his 1985 L'affaire Lumière: Du mythe à l'histoire, enquête sur les origines du cinéma ("Lumière affair: From myth to History, report on the origins of cinema"), journalist Léo Sauvage quotes a note from Pierre Gras, director of the Dijon municipal library, "Le Prince is dead in Chicago in 1898, voluntary disappearance at the family's request. Homosexuality." This statement was made by a famous, but kept secret, historian visiting the Dijon library. Gras showed this note to Sauvage in 1977.[5]
5. Fratricide, murder for money (1967):

   In 1967, Jean Mitry proposed, in Histoire du cinéma, a murder for money theory. Since the architect was sure his brother wanted to commit suicide, why didn't he try to stop him, and why didn't he report this to the police before it was too late?[6]

A photograph of a drowning victim from 1890 resembling Le Prince was discovered in 2003 during research in the Paris police archives which strengthen the murder and assassination theories.^[2]

Career

Decisive meetings

• Louis Daguerre
• Eadweard Muybridge
• Jean Le Roy

Late recognition

Even though Le Prince's solo achievement is unchallenged, his work has been long forgotten since he disappeared on the eve of the first public demonstration of the result of years of toil in his Leeds workshop and test conducted at the New York Institute for the Deaf. His pursuit of trademarks over in the United States, the dominance and influence of his countryman rival Thomas Edison, founder of the oligopolistic Edison Trust, became unstoppable.

For the April 1894 commercial exploitation of his personnal kinetoscope Parlor, Thomas Edison is credited as the inventor of cinema in the United States, while in France, the Lumière Brothers, are coined inventors of the Cinématographe device and inventor of cinema for the first, collective, commercial exploitation of motion picture films in Paris. Like Le Prince, another untold proto-cinema figure is, the French inventor, Léon Bouly, who created the first "Cinématographe" device and patented it in 1892 (Patent Nº219,350). He was never credited, and two years later, his left unpaid patent was bought by the Lumière Brothers (Patent N°245,032).

However, at Leeds, England, Le Prince is celebrated as a local hero, on December 12, 1930, the Lord Mayor of Leeds unveiled a bronze memorial tablet on #160 Woodhouse Lane (now Auto Express Co.), Le Prince's workshop. In 2003, the University's "Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television" was named in his honour. Le Prince's workshop in Woodhouse Lane is now the site of the BBC in Leeds.

In France, an appreciation society was created as "Association des Amis de Le Prince" ("Association of LePrince's friends") which still exists in Lyon.

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, George Méliès and Louis Le Prince who is credited as "the true inventor of eiga", Japanese for "motion picture film".

LePrince Cine Camera-Projector types

Le Prince's legacy

Remaining material & production

Le Prince developed his single-lens type camera at a workshop in Woodhouse Lane, Leeds. An updated version of this model was used to direct his motion picture films. Remaining production consist of a scene at his wife's family home, in Roundhay, another at Leeds Bridge and an accordion player.

These world's first motion picture films does not exist anymore and Le Prince disappeared body and effects two years later, but parts of the original paper film strips remaining in the camera (MkII) were found and exploited later.

Half a century later, Le Prince's widow gave the remaining apparatus to the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television (NMPFT) of Bradford. In October 1930, photographic copies of these original fragments were produced by workers of the NMPFT. In the 2000s, the copies weres restored, remastered and re-animated to produce a digital version which was uploaded on the museum's website as public ressources ("Roundhay" & "Leeds"). These versions are running at, the modern cinématographe 24fps frame rate, but Le Prince used the framerate adjust device built in his apparatus to test various speeds. According to Alphonse Le Prince who assisted his father at Leeds, Rounday is believed to be shot at 12fps and Leeds Bridge at 20fps.

Since the NMPFT release, various names are used to designate the untitled films, such as "Leeds Bridge" or "Round Garden Scene". Actually, all current online versions (e.g., GIF, FLV, SWF, OGG, WMV, etc.) are derived from the NMPFT files, and these tentative titles are not cannon to Le Prince whose moterhood language was French. However "Leeds Bridge" is believed to be the original title, as the traffic sequence was referred as such by Frederic Mason, Le Prince's mechanic.

Man Walking Around A Corner (LPCC Type-16)

The last remaining production of Le Prince's 16-lens camera is a frame sequence of a man walking around a corner. It is believed to be shot with the 16-lens type but it is unsure has it looks like to had been made with a single glass plate not an Eastman American film.

Roundhay Garden Scene (LPCCP Type-1 MkII)

The 1930 copy of the remaining film sequence shot in Roundhay garden features twenty frames. The digital version produced by the NMPFT is 24.64fps (52 frames) switches the left side and the right side, since the house is actually on the right side in the 1930 copy. It is believed to had been mirrored because of paper parts stuck on the left side of the film that would reduce the visibility. The reason is both physiologic and cultural, a Western viewer's eyes are used to automatically watch from top left to right, this reflex action comes from the childhood taught reading direction. The garden sequence film's damaged side results in distortion and deformation on the, inverted, right side of the digital movie. The scene was shot in Le Prince's father-in-law garden on October 14 1888.

Leeds Bridge (LPCCP Type-1 MkII)

The earliest frames copy belongs to the 1923 NMPFT inventory, though a different sequence, are coming from the 1931 inventory. Digital footage produced by the NMPFT is 23.50fps (65 frames), and the version produced by Charl Lucassen is 5.5fps (20 frames), although the original film was shot by Le Prince's camera at 20fps on a 60mm film according to Alphonse Le Prince who assisted his father when this film was shot in late October 1888. The Leeds Bridge film found in the single-camera (MkII) actually contains three scenes, first the garden scene (20 frames), then the traffic scene and a last sequence of an accordion player (19 frames plus a damaged 20th) who had not been restored nor remastered yet by the NMPFT. The third sequence suffers the same problem as the garden sequence.

Accordion Player (LPCCP Type-1 MkII)

The last remaining film of Le Prince's 16-lens camera is a sequence of frames of an accordion player. The location of its recording is uncertain; it could be Leeds or Paris. The recording date is probably 1888. The NMPFT has not remastered this film, probably because of its uncertain recording time and location.

Notes

Sources

• NMPFT Pioneers of Early Cinema : 1. Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1842-1890?) by Michael Harvey
• Insight Collections & Research Centre
• Guinness Book of Movie Facts & Feats
• Who's Who of Victorian Cinema
• 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, numero 182, nov.-déc. by Michel Rouzé, quoted by Alliage numéro 22 1995)
• The Missing Reel, by Christopher Rawlence (Athenum Publishers, New York, 1990)
• 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, USA, July 1931)
• The Pioneer Work of Le Prince in Kinematography, by E. Kilburn Scott (in The Photographic Journal #63, August 1923, p.373~8)
• Louis Aimée Augustin Le Prince by Merritt Crawford (in Cinema, 1 Dec., 1930, p.28~31)
• L'affaire Lumière. Du mythe à l'histoire, enquête sur les origines du cinéma by Léo Sauvage, 1985 ISBN 2862440450
• 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 cinéma by Jean-Jacques Aulas and Jacques Pfend (in Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma N°32, Dec. 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

See also

• Roundhay Garden Scene

External links

• Louis Le Prince at the Internet Movie Database
• Adventures In Cybersound an extended biography
• Roundhay Garden Scene Video
• Leeds Bridge Video
• Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography, and Television
• The Legend of Louis Le Prince
• Le Prince single-lens camera 1888, Science & Society Picture Library
• Chronomedia year 1888 (Terramedia)
• The History of the Discovery of the Cinematography 1885~1889
• Local films for local people (BBC Bradford & West Yorkshire)