Product Details

• Model: 2362
• Released on: 2004-09-01
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 5
• Formats: Box set, Black & White, DVD-Video, NTSC, Import
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 5
• Dimensions: 1.35 pounds
• Running time: 379 minutes

From Amazon.com
The home-video revolution has yielded a wealth of valuable compilations, but few are as miraculously definitive as The Movies Begin. Equally suited to home or classroom viewing, this authoritative five-volume set is a vital document of film history, providing a one-stop destination for anyone wishing to witness the first two decades of motion pictures. That period--from 1894 to 1913--saw movies develop at a breakneck pace, from the earliest "actualities" of the Lumière brothers in France to D.W. Griffith's audacious development of dramatic action in the Biograph shorts of the early 1910s. Sensibly organized into pivotal stages of technical and creative progress, each of these volumes represents the priceless value of film preservation; all 133 films in the set are presented in the finest condition available, from archival prints to complete restorations, and accompanied by music that perfectly captures the spirit of each film and the time of their creation.

Under the expert guidance of film historian David Shepard, this collection is uniquely comprehensive, with fact, fiction, and fantasy represented in equal measure. All major figures are included; it's fitting that one volume is devoted to astonishing shorts by movie magician Georges Méliès, while other volumes serve as "greatest hits" compilations of movie innovations by Edwin S. Porter, Cecil Hepworth, Max Linder, Alice Guy Blanche, and many others. The breathtaking growth of movies is fully apparent by volume 5 ("Comedy, Spectacle, and New Horizons"); most viewers will find this the most entertaining, but each volume is a revelation, offering films that haven't been widely seen since they were first produced. To understand and appreciate the foundation upon which modern filmmaking is built, The Movies Begin is truly essential. --Jeff Shannon

Additional Features
Each DVD of The Movies Begin includes concise, authoritative onscreen program notes by film historian Charles Musser, offering illuminating details about nearly every film in the set. Volumes 2 and 3 are further enhanced by Barry Salt's historical commentary, defining the cultural contexts and creative advances of the films under discussion. Together, these valuable supplements serve as further proof that The Movies Begin was produced with the utmost concern for serious students of motion-picture history. --Jeff Shannon

From the Back Cover
Volume One: The Great Train Robbery and Other Primary Works, 1893-1907
The genesis of the motion picture medium is vividly re-created in this unprecedented collection of the cinema's formative works. More than crucial historical artifacts, these films reveal the foundation from which the styles and stories of the contemporary cinema would later arise.

An animated rendering of Eadweard Muybridge's primitive motion studies (1877-85) begins the program, immediately defining the compound appeal of cinema as both a scientific marvel and sensational popular entertainment. This is followed by the works of Louis and Auguste Lumière, who offer cinematic glimpses of such commonplace sights as children quarreling, a lion in a zoo, or the feeding of poultry.

As for more obvious fictions there is the myth-making of Edwin S. Porter's seminal The Great Train Robbery (1903) and the pictorial splendor of Ferdinand Zecca's The Golden Beetle (1907), both presented in mint condition prints with the original hand-tinting, as well as Georges Méliès's extravagant A Trip to the Moon (1902, complete with narration penned by the director, intended to accompany its performance).

The low-art origins of the cinema are represented in some of Thomas Edison's Kinetoscopes (1894-97, serpentine dances, a cockfight, a bedroom full of seminary girls engaged in a pillow fight, and the notorious first screen kiss) and a collection of mechanized peep shows from American Mutoscope and Biograph, whose burlesque origins are free from social or aesthetic pretense, being designed solely for titillation and amusement. When social crusaders spoke of the evils of film, this is what they had in mind. 75 minutes.

Volume Two: The European Pioneers, 1895-1906
While some consider the cinema a distinctly American invention, the most influential figures during its infancy were two brothers in France: Auguste and Louis Lumière. In the beginning, they dominated world film production and distribution. Through the magic of cinema, such ordinary sights as the demolition of a wall, the arrival of a train, a family enjoying breakfast, or workers exiting a factory were transformed into mystifying spectacles of light and motion, having their premiere on December 28, 1895.

Perhaps the most extraordinary elements of this collection are the early British films, virtually unseen in the United States. Robert W. Paul, a scientific instrument maker by trade, devoted 15 years to motion pictures, designing his own camera and projector and, in March 1896, staging the first performance by an Englishman of projected motion pictures to a fee-paying public. Paul's works range from Lumière-influenced actualities to experiments with stop motion (Extraordinary Cab Accident, 1903) and miniature effects (The (?) Motorist, 1906, made with Walter R. Booth).

Other inventive artists represented herein include George Albert Smith, a well-known scientific lecturer of the day; Walter Haggar and sons, who exhibited their films in a traveling tent show; Frank Mottershaw of the Sheffield Photographic Company; James Bamforth, also a manufacturer of lantern slides and picture postcards; and James A. Williamson, whose 1901 short "Stop Thief!" is considered the source of the subsequent development of the chase film. 58 minutes.

Volume Three: Experimentation and Discovery, 1898-1910
More than any other decade, the first 10 years of the moving picture saw the greatest amount of experimentation and development. Ranging from the ingeniously creative to the audacious, the films represented in this volume offer a sampling of the primitive masterworks that allowed the technical novelty of the cinema to so quickly flourish into an artistically expressive medium.

In the films of Cecil Hepworth, one witnesses a primal use of titles (How It Feels to Be Run Over, 1900) and some rather gruesome visual comedy (Explosion of a Motor Car, 1900). A Visit to Peek Frean and Co.'s Biscuit Works (1906) by G.H. Cricks features the extensive use of indoor arc lighting; at the same time being a key transitional film between the early actualities and a more involved form of nonfiction filmmaking that would ultimately blossom into the documentary.

From France's Pathé Frères come films that are alternately titillating (Par le Trou de Serrue/Peeping Tom, 1901), awe-inspiring (Aladin, or the Wonderful Lamp, 1906), colorful (Magic Bricks, 1908), and dramatic (Revolution in Russia, 1905, which depicts the same event as Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin). Particularly striking is History of a Crime (1901), in which a criminal's memories are visually rendered through a unique bit of production design.

This volume concludes with several works from the Edison Manufacturing Co., including the first-known advertising film (Dewar's--It's Scotch, 1898) and Edwin S. Porter's The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), a stunning visual fantasy adapted from the comics of Winsor McCay, whose animation can be glimpsed in Volume 5 of this series. 58 minutes.

Volume Four: The Magic of Méliès, 1897-1904
Decades before the term "special effects" was coined, audiences of the newborn cinema were witnessing spectacular screen illusions, courtesy of the medium's first master magician: Georges Méliès. The films collected on this disc offer an unparalled view of Méliès's career, introducing the viewer to the rich body of work that lies beyond A Trip to the Moon (1902), which is featured in Volume One of The Movies Begin.

Such films as The Eclipse (1907) and Long Distance Wireless Photography (1908) not only demonstrate Méliès's astounding employment of double exposure, makeup, editing, and theatrical trickery but provide mesmerizing insight into the social context of his work, which blended Victorian approaches to astronomy, superstition, and feminine beauty with the unnatural wonders of 20th century technology and heavy doses of slapstick. The centerpiece of the collection is The Impossible Voyage (1904), a fantastic tale of an around-the-world expedition, presented with the authentic frame-by-frame hand-coloring and narration penned by Méliès himself.

Georges Méliès: Cinema Magician is a documentary on the filmmaker's life, integrating rare photographs, early drawings, and numerous clips, charting his rise from shoe factory worker to proprietor of Paris's mystical Théatre Robert-Houdin, where Méliès learned the skills to become a cinematic illusionist and developed an interest in the supernatural, exquisitely represented in The Mysterious Retort (1906) and The Black Imp (1905). 103 minutes.

Volume Five: Comedy, Spectacle and New Horizons, 1908-1913
By 1907, the cinema's initial growing pains had subsided and fairly distinct generic categories of production were established. This volume of The Movies Begin examines some of these integral works that begin to reflect the modern-day cinema--punctuated with authentic hand-tinted lantern slides used during early theatrical exhibition.

Visual comedy, with notable elements of slapstick, is represented in Pathé Frères' The Policemen's Little Run (1907), Bangville Police (1913, representing the first appearance of the legendary Keystone Kops), and Max Linder's Troubles of a Grass Widower (1908). Best remembered today as a major influence on Charlie Chaplin, Linder was one of the first and most popular stars of the cinema. The comic potential of such a basic device as an undercranked camera is exhibited in Pathé's Onésime, Horloger (Onésime, Clock-Maker, 1912).

Alice Guy Blaché's Making an American Citizen (1912) is an excellent example of the films of social conscience, always an undercurrent beneath the apparently smooth surfaces of commercial productions. Released the very same week was D.W. Griffith's The Girl and Her Trust, a superb film of wide emotional range and great technical virtuosity made near the end of his tenure at the Biograph Company. Nero, or the Fall of Rome (1909) strains at conventional film limitations in dimension and duration, looking forward to the revolutionary Italian epics (Cabiria, The Last Days of Pompeii) that followed a few years later. Equally prophetic are the dazzling animations showcased in the Vitagraph Company's Winsor McCay and His Animated Pictures (1911). 85 minutes.