Good start, but then it gets ruined

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I watched this almost immediately after La Magie Méliès, a remarkable French television documentary by Jacques Mény made just a decade later, a documentary so well researched and put together that it has the very singular quality (a first in my experience) of being as satisfying for the specialist as for the ordinary viewer. This piece of work is exactly the reverse; it is so poorly organised that is unlikely to satisfy the ordinary viewer and will certainly not please a specialist.I was unfortunate in only being able to find an English version, horrifically dubbed with one of those ghastly narrations in an artificial "neutral" voice and with continual false emphases, born of prompt-card reading that is nowadays so miserably typical of British radio and television. But even had I been able to hear somebody with a genuine interest in the subject talking in a natural voice, I still don't think I should have really warmed to the "bit of this - bit of that" style which became simply more and more irritating as the film progressed.It is not that the material itself is not interesting. It is - very interesting even - but the fact that one could continually see ways in which it could be assembled both more informatively and more entertainingly simply added to the sense of frustration.I remember years ago attending a history conference concerned in part with the computerisation of precious census data, then in the hands of the Mormons, who, in those early days of the PC, were the only ones who could afford to do it. The Mormons, who could not understand why anyone should want to use the data for anything but the investigation of one's own genealogy frustrated all the historians present (myself included) with their obtuseness. Herr Welkes has all the characteristic faults of "the collector" and this makes him a sort of Mormon of the world of pre-cinema.In my review of La Magie Méliès, I explained how, despite its inevitable parti pris for its subject, impressed I was by the cautious way the film treated generalisations when quoting from his autobiography. Here we have the opposite - continual grandiose claims on the part of the film-maker himself that the film itself does not at all substantiate. And the continual misuse of the term "montage"...By the end of the film all pretence at coherence is abandoned and we end up with a sequence, post-film, that is nothing more than a display of curiosities from the Welkes collection.The subject is not the same but I would warmly recommend to anyone interested either in pre-film and early film or in hos to make a really good documentary the excellent Magie Méliès.

Educational and documentary films have an advantage over books in visual example capabilities, but they tend to suffer in providing a framework for understanding history, a reasoned thesis and, otherwise, being informative in ways where writing remains superior. Werner Nekes's "Film Before Film" demonstrates these benefits and drawbacks. Nekes wisely focused mostly on showing off his toys rather than elaborating on a weak thesis and sometimes misinformative (or mistranslated) narration. The presentation, however, does have its own drawbacks—mostly the music and problems specifically relating to translation to an English-language audience like me.In the introduction, Nekes says that film is the "end-product" of many innovations, which in their earlier stages were associated with "the mysterious arts of magic and alchemy". This "end-product" view leads to some arduous associations between some objects that seemingly have little to nothing to do with the invention of movies. One of the most flimsy connections is made in showing a horse race toy card lit by a cigarette. The narrator remarks, "To photograph, literally, means to write with light. This horse race is written with fire." As interesting as such objects are in themselves, they don't necessarily demonstrate relevance to the archeology of cinema (or so-called "pre-cinema" history). Some books have done better to place some of these items in the context of their own times and in relation to film. Two of the best are "The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema" by Laurent Mannoni and "Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies" by Deac Rossell.The "mysterious arts of magic and alchemy" part doesn't make much sense, either. Assuming this wasn't a mistranslation, to talk of "magic and alchemy" is seemingly dismissive of the science and engineering that went into these innovations. These were often used in magic acts—the magic lantern especially—and, of course, Georges Méliès was an important cinemagician. Yet, scientists, in fact, made and used many of them, including physicists like Michael Faraday and Joseph Plateau (inventor of the Phenakistoscope). The magic lantern was first invented by the polymath Christiaan Huygens. Cinematography can also claim inventors the likes of astronomer Jules Janssen and the physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey. These objects were known to the public as "philosophical toys". They weren't merely of amusement value, but also displayed obvious scientific ingenuity. The book "Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography" by Virgilio Tosi makes this point of scientific origins well, whereas Nekes seems to largely ignore it, despite it staring him in the face.Nekes also poorly explains the science of how we see movies. He deserves, however, a bit of a pass on this given that this film is from 1986 and that he doesn't explicitly give a full committal to the "persistence of vision" myth, which, even today, many continue to inaccurately ascribe to the illusion of movies. Nevertheless, Nekes gives as the reason for this that the "eye is sluggish" and gives the wrong implication of afterimages being involved. Usually, this is how persistence of vision is explained: that the still images are somehow fused from afterimages on the retina into the illusion of motion. Today, however, many film scholars are coming around to what psychologists and scientists have known since at least the 1970s: that we see apparent motion mentally and the same way that we see real motion. Among others, articles on the persistence of vision myth by Joseph and Barbara Anderson have gone a long way in dispelling this poor film scholarship.Fortunately, Nekes spends most of the film demonstrating his extensive collection. The devices that are most relevant to motion pictures are shown at the beginning; they include the Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope, Praxinoscope and Marey's single-plate chronophotography (although Marey's pioneering work with cinematographic cameras and films isn't mentioned). There are also the Mutoscope and Kinora machines, which delivered photographic films in a flip-book format. Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photography is mentioned later (although it's wrongly implied that Muybridge synthesized their motion; whereas, instead, he projected painted animations, which were often based on his photographs, with his Zoöpraxiscope). Some other important pre-cinema and early cinematic innovations aren't mentioned. While I applaud Nekes for his lack of nationalistic bias, it's, nevertheless, a glaring omission that he doesn't cover the work of fellow Germans Ottomar Anschütz and the Skladanowsky brothers. Although Nekes mostly covers objects designed for home entertainment, rather then showmen's exhibitions or the happenings of scientific or industrial workshops, he does briefly cover some of the history of public spectacles such as the magic lantern and shadow puppetry.The other innovations covered are of varying relevance to film history—except that they're all illusions of some kind. They include the Thaumatrope, camera obscura, camera lucida and perspective painting, anamorphic art, lithophanes, rubbing pictures, perforated images, phosphorus-covered images, watercolor mystery paintings, transparencies, panoramas, pop-up books, stanhopes, stereoscopic photographs, anaglyph 3D, kaleidoscopes, flip books, and still photographs given the illusion of movement by the Momuscope. These toys aren't restricted to children's amusement not only because of their scientific utility, but also because much of it's erotica or pornography. The peepshow medium and private use of many of these objects lend itself to this function. Likewise, the revealing nature of the illusions lend themselves to sex jokes and hidden nudes—for instance, a picture of a woman in a bikini that when dipped in water removes the bikini to uncover a nude image.Unfortunately, the repetitive and grating musical score distracts from the enjoyment of these demonstrations. Another problem with the Kino Video is that the voice-overs distractingly compete simultaneously in the introduction with Nekes speaking German. They should've replaced the original language entirely with voice-overs, as they did for the narration, or used subtitles. Nevertheless, it's useful to see visual demonstrations of these devices. The rest of Nekes's six-part "Media Magica" series, for which I've only seen this initial installment, may've cleared up some of this film's shortcomings. And the passion and respect Nekes shows for his incredible toy collection is welcome.

It's unfortunate that this movie is really poor quality and tries to do a few things it simply can't, because otherwise it's pretty interesting.An exploration of the various forms of moving or changing imagery based pre-film media is the subject of this documentary, as a German researcher shows us the various different tools and toys that made illusions of movements come to people in earlier centuries. Most of them deal with shadow play, boxes, and lanterns, but he also analyses the use of pop-up books and stuff like masks.I think the most interesting thing presented in this film is the fact that a lot of these things were pornographic in nature, most likely because of the sense of voyeurism they create.A big problem with a lot of the things he tries to do is to show three-dimensional imagery on the two dimensional screen. Sometimes he talks about stereoscopic vision and shows the two separate holes, but the viewer can't get an idea of what it's ultimately supposed to look like because the camera only has one eye, not two.--PolarisDiB

Starting with the camera obscura and three dimensional view boxes and moving on to the slide projectors and various nineteenth century devices, and ending with mechanical books and hold-to-light postcards, this documentary covers predecessors of motion pictures, both as entertainment and as scientific curiosities.Seems a bit slow and lacking in focus. The musical score was hard to take. Not really for a general audience.