Adding 1874 as a Year

You could try to make a Data Verification case (http://www.imdb.com/helpdesk/data_ver...) for the update reference number of the year update case you've submitted. In it you should specify sources and links backing up your case. Maybe that will help getting the correct year added for the movie.

Out of personal interest; is there somewhere I can watch/get said movie? Does it still survive? I'm fascinated by the very beginning of movie history, and watch anything I can come by from the earliest pioneer years. But this is, I must say, the first time I've heard of this title.

I've forwarded this request to our editors in charge of titles. This is an unusual change so the year in the title would have to be modified manually. If you have a specific source/URL that supports the 1874 year, please post it here so I can forward that as well.

thanks

Thanks for the help.

These websites that I originally submitted when adding the title all support the 1874 year and the existence of the title and, to cartman_1337, a couple of them also show the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3155794/e...

I've also read about this in some books on the origins of movies, including in "Cinema Before Cinema: the Origins of Scientific Cinematography" by Virgilio Tosi and elsewhere.

Any update on this? It's been 4 weeks without a reply since I entered a data verification request, as cartman_1337 suggested, and longer since the other actions described in this thread were taken. Is there anything else I should/could do?

Thanks

If you still have a copy of the book, "Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography", could you provide a page number and possibly a short quotation that illustrates your point.

FYI: The book is available from Amazon.com.
http://www.amazon.com/Cinema-Before-O...

This book sounds interesting and one that I will add to my reading list.

Jules Janssen and his recording of the transit of Venus are covered in chapters 13 ("The retina of the scientist") and 14 ("The first scientific cine camera") of the book "Cinema Before Cinema", pages 33-40.

I'm not sure what point of mine you're refering to. If you mean the year being 1874, it's mentioned throughout, including in those links on the above linked IMDb page, that the transit of Venus was on and was recorded on 8 December 1874.

From the book: "As far as the shots he had taken during the event of 8 December 1874 were concerned, Janssen declared: 'In Japan we obtained a plate of the first internal contact of Venus. The weather was a little cloudy, so that these images are weak, but they are quite visible.'"

Tosi's book is interesting, especially if you're interested in early cinema history. Janssen and the "Passage de Venus" are often mentioned briefly in books on this subject. He's mentioned a bit more at length by Tosi because of the emphasis on the scientific origins of movies.

This article also descibes it well:
http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu//f...

Anyways, anyone know whether the year for this entry will be changed?

We are still having a bit of internal discussion here about whether this is a valid title (i.e. it represents an early example of cinema) or whether it's a precursor that should be listed in some different way. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks for the update. What different way is there to list a “precursor’?

I’m interested to know how this internal discussion goes. I’ve been studying the beginnings of cinema lately, and definitions of what cinema (or movies, films, motion pictures, etc.) is often seem largely arbitrary and muddled.

For instance, restricting the definition to theatrical projections would eliminate the Edison Kinetoscope films and many experimental or non-commercial films throughout the years listed on IMDb. I know IMDb makes some distinctions based on how a title is distributed, but I’m not so clear on what’s to be of a title that wasn’t originally distributed for entertainment or public consumption, but which, nonetheless, is available as such now. Or that was photographed “cinematographically”, but wasn’t intended by the maker to be viewed “cinematically”, but, nonetheless, is available as such now.

Likewise, the material used may’ve offered an easy route to a definition when films were made on actual film, but now they’re made digitally, they’re streamed and loaded from discs.

The film historian Deac Rossell offered the definition of a moving picture that “includes all attempts to reproduce natural and continuous movement, principally through stroboscopic means, whether drawn or photographic” (from “The Public Exhibition of Moving Pictures Before 1896”). The “problem” with this definition, however, is that it could include everything from flip books and zoetrope strips to some magic lantern slides.

IMDb seems to have become more inclusive itself in defining movies. “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop” (1880) was photographed by multiple cameras (as opposed to Janssen’s single camera) onto glass plates and those photographs were never themselves used in “their day” to reproduce motion “cinematically” (although they are now). In their day, drawings based on the photographs were made on a disc and projected to audiences. Louis Le Prince made his “films” (four of them listed on IMDb) on glass and paper and never showed them publicly. That’s essentially the same case with the IMDb listed “films” of William Friese-Greene and “London’s Trafalgar Square” (1890). “Je vous aime” (1891) was photographed on celluloid film, but was cut and pasted onto a disc for public projection. Étienne-Jules Marey may’ve been the first to use celluloid film and a camera built for such use, but he didn’t project his films, such as “Falling Cat” (1894), to audiences. Same thing with some early Edison films, e.g. "Fred Ott's Sneeze" (1894). The IMDb title “Miss Jerry” (1894) seems more of a magic lantern program than a film. And so on....

In defense of my adding “Passage de Venus”, I worked off this model of inclusion of the above work of Muybridge, Le Prince, Friese-Greene, Marey, Edison/Dickson, etc. that suggest “cinema” is the product of “cinematography”, for which this title has been credited by some historians as the first instance of.

Anyways, sorry for the long post and good luck treading such ground.

Here are some quotations in regards to Jules Janssen and this title from authorities in film academia and history that may help in IMDb’s decision.

From “Der Weg des Films” by Friedrich von Zglinicki (p 170) (quoted in Hermann Hecht, “Pre-Cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image Before 1896”, p 176, entry 274F): “One can consider Janssen who used the Maltese cross movement in use to this day... as the originator of modern cinematography.”

From “Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography” by Virgilio Tosi (p 39 in a chapter tellingly titled “The first scientific cine camera”): “Janssen’s photographic revolver was a genuine scientific cine camera in embryo. It had a motor, an optical system, a variable shutter, and sensitive material in movement.”

From Étienne-Jules Marey (quoted by Tosi, p 39): “Janssen was the first who, for the purposes of science, thought of taking by automatic means a series of photographic images to represent the successive phases of a phenomenon.”

If not referred to as “cinematography”, Janssen’s work is classified as “chronophotography”, which is a term coined by Marey and which predates terms such as “cinema” that entered common use after the Lumière brothers’ invention. IMDb titles such as “Sallie Gardner at a Gallop” (1880) and “Falling Cat” (1894) also are generally called “chronophotography” and considered along with “Passage de Venus” to be the beginnings of scientific cinema. Several authors, thus, have claimed the likes of Eadweard Muybridge and Marey to be a “father of the motion picture”. Academic historians like Tosi and Marta Braun favor Marey, while Gordon Hendricks and other, often American authors, have favored Muybridge.

From “Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies” by Deac Rossell (p 27): “Series chronophotography is conceptually indistinguishable from a filmed motion picture, which consists of a long band of individually recorded still photographs....”

From the essay “Breaking the Black Box: A Reassessment of Chronophotography as a Medium for Moving Pictures” by Deac Rossell: “... chronophotography has always been something of a problem for historians of early cinema. The relationship of chronophotography to early cinema is based on an odd physiological fact of perception: that to the eye, celluloid moving pictures – in the Edison Kinetoscope, in the Lumère Cinématographe – produce the same illusion of movement as series chronophotographs mounted in a zoetrope or on a phenakistiscope disk or in any other appropriate reproductive device.”

“If we break out of the technological ‘black box’ and take a wider view of chronophotography in relation to the cinema, then we find we do not diminish chronophotography as one of the most important steps towards the creation of cinematic institutions, but rather we find the chronophotographers ready to deliver an even more interesting and more compelling proto-cinematic repertoire of experiences to our field.... I believe that we need to take a new and wider look at all of the chronophotographers from a perspective that does not argue from stabilized cinema practise backwards, but which comes form an inclusive and wide-ranging viewpoint that takes careful account of the many different types of ‘moving picture’ activity at the end of the 19th century.”