AMAZING DISCOVERY: Actual motion pictures made during the American Civil War!
Yes. . . here they are, in all their quaking glory: real movies from 1860, fully 28 years before the so-called "first motion picture", Roundhay Garden. While Roundhay (filmed in 1888) lasts barely a second, these Civil War movies go on forever! They simply never STOP!
(Roundhay Garden, 1888, which lasts barely a second).
As if this weren't incredible enough, these remarkable historical
artifacts are filmed in 3D!
Burn the textbooks!
Discard all known film studies!
Fie on Edison, what did HE know!
To fully understand the phenomenon of 3D Movies from the American Civil War, we must take a look at film technology. When still images are rapidly displayed in sequence, the illusion of motion is created. So it was with Roundhay Garden (5 frames). But just LOOK at these amazing Civil War images! An astounding illusion of motion is created using, in most cases, only two or three frames. And it never stops! The movement just continues. This would have driven Edison crazy!
As is the case with all serious creative endeavours, these superb historic dramas prove the maxim "less is more". With a mere jerk, twitch, and spasm, this remarkable gentleman transports us to another time, another place. And look closely at the details, the furniture, the clothing, as it wobbles and lurches and twists, to fully appreciate the eerie 3D effect!
As with all major historical discoveries, disagreements and controversies have arisen, particularly about the state of mind and health of these subjects. Eager to push their own petty agendas, some historians have suggested that they may have had untreated neurological disorders. Seismologists have a very different interpretation of the same data, as do entomologists who have suggested the possibility of a parasitic invasion.
Few give credence to the cynical claim that these movies are dismissable because they (in the words of one ignorant critic) "have no plot". But what they admittedly lack in story line, they more than make up for in sheer mesmerizing sameness. Only the subtle shifting from one frame to the next creates that uncanny sense of motion: the vertiginous feeling that the floor under your feet is being violently shaken.
Along with thoughtful historical interpretation has come the usual lunacy from extremists. Suggestions that this fine lady is sitting on a Hula Chair is not only disrespectful but impossible (unless she is, as one disreputable quasi-historian has hinted, a time traveller). The suggestion that she is astride one of those Victorian medical vibrators is equally ridiculous, though it would explain why her suitor can't keep his eyes off her.
Film historians are beginning to discuss possible titles for these newly-discovered Civil War epics. A working title for this particular motion picture is, "The Man Holds Up His Hat".
"The Men Lean On The Clock."
"Shake, Rattle n' Roll."
"I Lost My Boots in San Francisco."
"Can't Stop Fiddling with This Pencil".
"I AM Sitting on a Hula Chair".
"Don't Go to My Barber, He Can't Trim a Beard"
"Yep - I Told You It Would Happen".
Blogger's explanation. OK, I hate explaining myself, but a friend of mine asked why he was seeing only flickering old photos and not movies. Well, technically he IS seeing movies, but they're only two or three frames long. These were taken for stereoscopes - your old Granny might have had one. This was a viewer with double-image cards that, when viewed as one image, "sort of" looked like 3D. The effect is kind of like those gifs from ten or fifteen years ago that everyone raved about. The effect is an optical illusion from having two slightly different perspectives shuffled back and forth. So I would assume the photographer snapped two photos from slightly different angles. This is why some of them have alarming changes in body posture, heads bobbing up and down, people disappearing and reappearing, etc. BUT, technically speaking, these ARE movies! I will post a link below written by a historian, claiming the same thing. So I'm not quite as ditzy as I seem.
