A D V E N T U R E S   in   C Y B E R S O U N D

Australians' first experience of "Film" was the Edison Kinetoscope. On 30th of November 1894 this machine made it's Australian public debut when James McMahon opened a 'Kinetoscope parlor' at 148 Pitt Street, Sydney. Customers paid a shilling at the door, then moved along five machines, each of which featured a different title, running as a continuous 20 second loop These items, all produced by the Edison company, showed 'Anna Belle' performing her butterfly dance, 'Caicedo Dancing on the tightrope' and four others.

No less than 22 000 people flocked to see the Kinetoscope during it's first five weeks in Sydney. In march 1895 the same machines toured to Melbourne , and subsequently Adelaide and other parts of Australia. But it was in the Vaudeville houses and the music halls rather than penny arcades that the new medium of cinema began to emerge.

The introducing of the Kinetoscope brought interest from people all around Australia and prompting quick action from enthusiasts to get involved knowing the potential of such a business. Only Two years later from Australia's introduction to the Kinetoscope in 1896, Lumiere agents with their camera-projectors had traveled as far as North and South America, Southern Europe, Russia, China, Scandinavia, the Middle East and of course Australia.

Quick profits were made by these showmen as they built up an audience for short, topical scenes such as A Sack Race Between Lumiere and Sons Factory, Lyons, Negro Minstrels Dancing in the London Streets, The Electrical Carriage Race from Paris to Bordaux and even The Fish Markets at Marseilles!

The stage bound, virtually static product of Edison's Vitascope Company and other early products suffered by comparison with the "actualities" of the Lumiere brothers. A Lumiere agent could photograph the people of a district and show them the results the same day. Sent back to the Lumiere head office, prints of these film could then be distributed to other parts of the world.

Australia did not have it's first experience of projected film from the Lumiere brothers but from an American magician named Carl Hertz. His program announced as "a conflux of apparent miracles and marvelous illusions" included "the great London sensation, the Cinematographe" which, it was claimed, would reproduce animated nature as if to bring it to life.

Hertz's use of the Lumiere trademark "Cinematographe" was, in fact, misleading because his projector was one of two "Kinematographs" constructed by R.W.Paul in London earlier that year.

These acts were the very earliest introductions to the earliest form of the Cinematography we know of today. Cinema was working to shorten the distances and widen human horizons well before the Wright brothers made their first powered flight.

Source: CATHS

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