Athlete with Wand (1894) Directed by William K.L. Dickson

(Review originally written at 20 October 2007)

The athlete shows some great flexibility here! ...Seriously what is this guy doing? It looks ridicules. He is simply flexing his arms and legs in different positions while constantly holding a wand in his both hands. Of course they simply wanted to test as many movements as possible to see what the possibilities were, the do's and don't's and how it all looked on film.

Interestinly there is also a dog lying in the corner, presumably also as part of the experiment to see how secondary objects, persons, other things or in this case a dog would look on the corner of the camera field. The dog also looked as if he/she was trying to figure out what this athlete was exactly doing, but he/she mostly didn't bothered with him and simply choose to relax a bit. I sympathize for him/her.

For an early Edison Manufacturing Company film it's quite long. It's over 30 seconds long. And all shows that Edison and Co. were all making progress at the point.

6/10