Newark Athlete (1891) Directed by William K.L. Dickson

(Review originally written at 15 October 2007)

This movie is a very short and simple experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film. Guess it sounds more complex than it really was.

Basically all it shows is an 'athelete', who to me just seemed to be a random young boy, swinging a couple of Indian Clubs.

The movie doesn't have the best visual quality and it seems to end perhaps just a second before it was really supposed to. It doesn't even have a halve swing now but more of a quarter swing. Also judging by the quality I'm not sure of it if this was a good successful experiment from Edison and workers but then again at that time of course all experiments were useful and contributed to the development of future movie making, this one included.

6/10