Inventing the Cinema at the Black Maria

Abstract

Picture the following scene: it is a sunny day in the mid-1890s, say 1894. You've been invited to the Laboratory of Thomas Edison in West Orange to help with an experiment. You arrive and a group of men in one of the brick buildings directs you to a particularly ungainly contraption sheathed in black tarpaper located out in a back lot. It is the Black Maria film studio - the world's first purpose built film studio - with a roof that, lifted up, allows for the sun to brightly illuminate the stage, and the entire building rotates to follow the sun even as it moves during the the day. It looks like no other building you've ever seen. You wonder, in fact, if it is safe to enter. You're happy that the talented Annabelle Whitford, who would perform on numerous filmmaking sessions between 1894 and 1897, will dance before the camera today. If you thought that this event was more than a novelty, if you thought that in a hundred years historians would remember this event as one of the first motion pictures made in America, then you might have written down some notes to serve as documentary evidence: who was there; what roles they played in the production; how the process of shooting the film progressed; what problems the film makers encountered; how the performer related to the unusual circumstances of playing for a camera and crew; and, more. If you wrote your name down as working on this film, you would be remembered as one of the first filmmakers. Historians will later regret that no documentation survives of this event, but you've come here out of curiosity not for posterity.