The Missing Reel: Louis Le Prince and the Invention of Film

Introduction: History, Photography, and the Dream of Motion

History as a concept was created within the human mind thousands of years ago. It most likely arose from tales told around flickering campfires — of great deeds performed by fathers and mothers, dangerous beasts conquered, and nourishing plants and fruits discovered and distinguished from poisonous ones. Gradually, even before the invention of writing, these stories were incorporated into ever more complicated sagas that involved not only wondrous accomplishments but details of day-to-day living. These sagas were handed down to succeeding generations, who enlarged them and eventually used them as the bases of various religious practices. Virtually all of the really ancient religions devote extensive portions of their writings to the presentation of racial or ethnic history.

For most of the existence of the human race, history was confined to the spoken or written word. The evidence of activities and races of people who had vanished remained in the ruins of their civilizations, of course, but the details of who they had been and how they had lived were at the whim of those who spoke or wrote of them, or painted imaginative images in oil on canvas. At least, this was true until the nineteenth century, when the dream of capturing an actual fragment of time — of history — in a way that it could be viewed by an endless number of eyes became a reality.

Most of this scientific advance came in Europe. The earliest known reference to photography comes in a letter from a French physician named Joseph Nicéphore Niépce dated July 19, 1822, and the oldest surviving photograph is one taken by Niépce of a street view in 1827. These first efforts may seem crude to us today, but they finally allowed people to catch events as they flashed by and display them to others. The next obvious step was to develop photography to the point that it could do the same for actual motion.

The average person is likely to identify the almost legendary Thomas Edison as the "father" of motion picture photography. And while Edison is still credited with developing the first commercially successful motion picture process (in 1891) and giving the first public demonstration of moving pictures (in May of that year), he was not the first person to photograph and then display the activities of the world around him. Even if we dismiss the claims of prior success by supporters of the Lumière brothers in France — debate continues as to whether they beat Edison to the discovery — one man remains who should be recognized as the true pioneer of the art, though his name is forgotten by all but a very few today.

Christopher Rawlence, author of The Missing Reel, was born in England in 1945 and brought up on a farm. He became interested in art, the theater, and films early in life and studied at the Courtauld Institute of Art before teaching art history at university. While teaching, he became the co-founder of the Red Ladder Theatre, a politically engaged company for which he acted, wrote, and directed. His interests led him further into film, and in 1988 he wrote and directed The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a psychological examination of the mind of an artist. Rawlence is married and the father of two daughters.

In spite of his education in the arts, Rawlence was as unaware of the French-born Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince as the average person until 1976, when he toured an old house in the Chapeltown area of North Leeds, England, with an idea toward buying it. The house itself was slowly succumbing to age, and the local city council had begun to consider demolishing it. When this possibility was raised, the man guiding Rawlence and his party through the residence responded that the house was of historical value, since it had once belonged to Augustin Le Prince, the inventor of the motion picture. These first hints inspired Rawlence to dig into the largely overlooked life of Le Prince and eventually resulted in the fascinating, if somewhat chaotic, The Missing Reel.