Men Boxing (1891)

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Boring

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Edison Studies was the first film company in the USA; their first films, which were Kinetoscope shorts and were very brief, were not released to the public at all as they were merely tests. Such is the case with "Men Boxing", a film so short being called a minute long on IMDb is technically not true. It's only a couple secs actually, and while only a film test that would never be released to the public it also is a bit fun. We see two young men in a boxing ring (both unidentified to this very day, I believe) swinging at each other. While Edison filmed boxing matches later in 1894 that were of true athletes, this short is obviously a test and the 'boxers' really have no idea how to box at all. That said it doesn't really matter as for 1891 it's slightly amusing and manages to be fun within its brief run time. Worth the watch if you wanna see a very old film from the silent era. A 7 outta 10 for the historical value, an 8 outta 10 because it can still amuse today.

Newark Athlete (1891) Men Boxing (1891) Newark Athlete is just a brief fragment from the Edison studio, which was apparently just a set up test to check the conditions on the camera. The thing only lasts a few seconds so needless to say the studio wasn't trying to make anything special out of it but thankfully the thing survives so film buffs such as myself can view the early history of film. Men Boxing on the other hand seems to be the studio actually trying to put something fun on film. Two men, both wearing boxing gloves, throw a few punches at one another while smiling for the camera. Some think this once again was just testing the camera but since it contains a tad bit more I'm going to guess the men making it thought this could be something real.

Perhaps the censors got to this one. For a title that offers the promise of nothing but blood splattering action this is a lame affair. Two men standing feet apart waving comical 'Mickey Mouse' white gloves at each other. I don't know if the guy on the right knew that he was becoming part of cinema history but I'm sure that he is disappointed that his five seconds of fame find him in a submissive 'come and get me big boy' stance.Still better than Rocky V though.

The Wizard of Menlo Park and the inventor of the electric light bulb, Thomas Alva Edison, moved his laboratory facilities (in late 1877) to a new location in West Orange, New Jersey. At about this same time he completed work on his invention of the phonograph. Beginning in 1878, Edison marketed the phonograph as an "entertainment novelty" and soon turned it into a popular consumer product.At this new facility, Edison started a lucrative project (he thought) to automatically extract the metal from iron ore during the milling process - he would loose his shirt on this project which never was successful.Encouraged by the work of others, particularly Eadward Muybridge (Muybridge had developed a method of taking pictures in quick succession, with multiple cameras, and then projecting them rapidly to simulate motion), Edison notified the U.S. Patent Office that he was: "experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear..." Initial experiments involved micro-photographs wrapped around a drum - after all, the photographs were intended to provide a visual stimulus to accompany the sound which would be played by a phonograph using a cylinder as its source. This system did not work.By mid-1889, Edison turned the project over to an assistant, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. Dickson was a natural for the job since besides being a chief experimenter, he was the plant photographer at West Orange. Dickson continued with the film-on-a-drum theme with limited success. Edison was touring Europe to bask in the warm glow of adulation for his electric-light invention. While in Paris, he was influenced by Dr. Etienne Jules Marey and his invention of a camera gun which shot pictures at a rapid rate and recorded the results on a band of film. Meanwhile Dickson had built a studio at West Orange. The Black Maria was a strange building; mounted on a railroad-turntable type of mechanism, coated in tar paper, and with a roof that opened to allow the sunlight to enter and fall on a small stage that had a black backdrop. When Edison returned from Europe he shifted Dickson's effort to focus on developing a method to advance a roll of film rapidly but intermittently past a single lens.Other work interfered with motion picture experimentation until 1891 when Dickson, and another Edison man - William Heise, developed a method of running 3/4 inch film strips horizontally past a lens. The camera was dubbed a Kinetograph. By late 1892, an improved Kinetograph with a vertical feed system and using 1-1/2-inch-wide film (35mm) was developed; and used to take this movie of men boxing. They are on the stage-with-the-black-backdrop in the Black Maria.