Roundhay Garden Scene
Reviewed by Edward Larsen Terkelsen

UK, NR, 1.66/2.11 s, 1888
Directed by Louis Le Prince. Stars Harriet Hartley, Adolphe Le Prince, Joseph Whitley, et al.

Roundhay Garden Scene, which runs about as long as it takes for you to say its name, is thought to be the oldest movie in existence. (Some might argue for Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, but that was a succession of photographs taken by different cameras, so I’m afraid it doesn’t qualify.) Shot by French inventor Louis Le Prince in the autumn of 1888, Roundhay predates the Lumières’ La Sortie des usines Lumière à Lyon by seven years and Edison’s Record of a Sneeze by six. (The former, however, was the first moving picture to be projected, while the latter was the first to be copyrighted.) The haunting, largely deteriorated clip, which was recorded at 12 frames per second on Eastman Kodak 64mm paper roll with a single lens camera that Le Prince himself invented, commemorates a brief (and I mean very brief) moment of out-of-doors gaiety—a ghostly impression of how folks amused themselves a half-century or better before the boob tube laid claim to their idle time. The apparently moneyed merrymakers include Le Prince’s in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Whitley; his son, Adolphe; and a family friend, Harriet Hartley (whose background remains a mystery to this writer). The setting is a grassy patch on the Whitley estate, which was located in Oakwood Grange, an upper-class ‘burb nestled between Gipton and Roundhay Park in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. Everybody is in full feather, like the well-heeled types in Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, but their behavior is unexpectedly blithe, almost buffoonish. In what may be the cinema’s first long shot, Adolphe orbits Harriet (who’s spinning ‘round like a record) and Lady Whitley (who’s wobbling backwards like a drunk on the verge of passing out) faster than a peregrine falcon, but he falls short of reaching ol’ Joe (who’s either bopping up a storm or just trying to get the hell away from him) by a mere frame or two. And that’s all there is to it, really, though it took me several viewings to take in what each of the participants was doing. Naturally, it’s open for interpretation as to why they’re doing what they’re doing. Are they square dancing? Are they playing Duck, Duck, Grey Duck? Are they blasted out of their cotton-pickin’ gourds on the Devil’s dandruff? Who knows, and good luck to you in trying to figure it out. But don’t bother popping a batch of Orville Redenbacher’s Kettle Korn; the show will be over before you get a chance to bite into that first piece of sweet and savory goodness. Roundhay is not only the most ancient flick on record, it could very well be the shortest. The running time for the National Science Museum’s 20-frame remnant of the original filmstrip is 1.66 seconds when projected at its proper speed, while the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television’s digitally remastered 52-frame version, which is exhibited at the modern frame-rate of 24p, runs for 2.11 seconds. I’m not sure how long Le Prince’s opus ran before it was subjected to the ravages of time, but the fact that any part of it remains at all is downright miraculous.

Though historically significant, Roundhay Garden Scene should not be confused with a work of art. It was, after all, just an experiment. But that hasn’t stopped some would-be reviewers from subjecting it to the hooey that they learned in their college film theory courses. Here’s an excerpt from one particularly tedious dissertation that I found on the Internet: “We notice a feeling of unease mingled with carelessness in the body language of John [sic] Whitley, and a quiet resignation in trying to keep the procession unbroken in Sarah Whitley’s turn—leaving the youth and following her husband; akin to Mrs. Ramsey in Virginia Wolf’s [sic] To the Lighthouse, too old to entertain the young ones, yet not ready to give it up.” Try as I might, I can’t read something like that without busting a gut. I mean, who in their right mind devotes thousands of words to deconstructing a home movie? The most that can be said about Roundhay aesthetically is that it’s well composed—the mise-en-scène tolerates several disparate points of action. But the truth of the matter is that the story behind Roundhay is far more interesting than what’s up there on the screen. Here are some fun facts: Ten days after she made her big debut, Mrs. W. experienced a fatal heart attack. Two years later, Le Prince boarded a train in Dijon and was never heard from again. (He was thiiis close to putting his filmic achievements on display in New York. Suspicious.) And ten years after that, Adolphe lost his life at a duck shoot on Fire Island. All of these unfortunate incidents cast a pall over Roundhay’s breezy goings-on. 

June 15, 2011 

© Copyright 2011 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.