"The tar-papered Black Maria was the color of a police paddy wagon, hence its nickname. It was even painted black on the inside. Part of its roof opened on hinges to allow the sun to shine upon the shooting stage. Sunlight was the only light source strong enough to register an image on the slow film emulsion of the day. If the sun happened to be on an inconvenient side of the Black Maria, the building was simply rotated on casters to face in the proper direction."
"Ironically, the earliest surviving paper print submitted to the Library of Congress by Edison was not intended to be shown in the Kinetoscope. This was a five-second snippet entitled the “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze,” or better known as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.” Ott was an Edison employee who amused his co-workers with outrageous exhibitions of comic sneezing and Heise put the resident clown to work. “Harper’s Weekly” needed a series of picture of someone sneezing, so Heise filmed Ott expectorating in front of The Doghouse and chose the best frames for publication."
"Yet the masses needed an opiate to deliver them from the starched, arch theatricalism of the Victorian stage, and quickly accepted the paradoxical opiate of “two-dimensional realism” the cinema would sell. This opiate was quite literally present in Edison’s Fred Ott's
Sneeze (1894), whose title character stuffs some snuff into his flickering beak, causing it to twitch momentarily, and then sneezes it out in one involuntary yet definitive spasm, returning the hallucinogen to the ether as the film concludes. This, one of cinema’s very first events, recognized the medium itself as a drug, probably the first time the cinema's narcotic form and its content were used, if unintentionally, to mutually admire one another, long before the narcoses of the cinema became the Hollywood imperialism Europeans have so much difficulty resisting."
launch from dragonball sneeze via sneeze sneezing
owie, those bullets really smart!
I can't see the Japanese version (bandwidth issues). What happens--are they all bloody?
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"The tar-papered Black Maria was the color of a police paddy wagon, hence its nickname. It was even painted black on the inside. Part of its roof opened on hinges to allow the sun to shine upon the shooting stage. Sunlight was the only light source strong enough to register an image on the slow film emulsion of the day. If the sun happened to be on an inconvenient side of the Black Maria, the building was simply rotated on casters to face in the proper direction."
"Ironically, the earliest surviving paper print submitted to the Library of Congress by Edison was not intended to be shown in the Kinetoscope. This was a five-second snippet entitled the “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of A Sneeze,” or better known as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.” Ott was an Edison employee who amused his co-workers with outrageous exhibitions of comic sneezing and Heise put the resident clown to work. “Harper’s Weekly” needed a series of picture of someone sneezing, so Heise filmed Ott expectorating in front of The Doghouse and chose the best frames for publication."
- bill 12-17-2003 8:39 pm
"Yet the masses needed an opiate to deliver them from the starched, arch theatricalism of the Victorian stage, and quickly accepted the paradoxical opiate of “two-dimensional realism” the cinema would sell. This opiate was quite literally present in Edison’s Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894), whose title character stuffs some snuff into his flickering beak, causing it to twitch momentarily, and then sneezes it out in one involuntary yet definitive spasm, returning the hallucinogen to the ether as the film concludes. This, one of cinema’s very first events, recognized the medium itself as a drug, probably the first time the cinema's narcotic form and its content were used, if unintentionally, to mutually admire one another, long before the narcoses of the cinema became the Hollywood imperialism Europeans have so much difficulty resisting."
- bill 12-17-2003 9:13 pm [add a comment]
launch from dragonball sneeze via sneeze sneezing
- bill 12-17-2003 9:27 pm [add a comment]
owie, those bullets really smart!
- sally mckay 12-18-2003 9:00 am [add a comment]
I can't see the Japanese version (bandwidth issues). What happens--are they all bloody?
- tom moody 12-18-2003 9:16 am [add a comment]