This Week in History: 1897: The first generation of cinema is unveiled in Gastown
Credit to Author: John Mackie| Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 22:55:58 +0000
The Nov. 30, 1897 edition of The Vancouver World was brimming with stories and ads revolving around the Klondike Gold Rush.
Amidst all the gold fever, it’s easy to miss a small story on Page 6, “The New Pictures Alive.” An innocuous headline, but the story described a new cultural phenomenon — “moving picture” shows, or films.
“The new programme on this week at the Cinematograph exhibition at 226 Carrall Street is giving even more satisfaction than the first,” said the story. “Several new jubilee scenes are shown. The projecting apparatus and jubilee views, it should be understood, are identically the same as those exhibited before Queen Victoria last Tuesday. The entertainments throughout are of the highest merit and absorbing interest.”
Cinematograph is a misspelling of Cinematographe, a camera invented by Louis and Auguste Lumiere that was capable of recording, developing and projecting films.
On March 18, 1895, the Lumiere brothers set up their camera outside their factory in Lyon, France and filmed happy workers walking through the factory gates after their shift. The 50-second black and white clip is considered the first commercial film ever made.
On Dec. 28, 1895, a Cinematographe Lumiere theatre opened in Paris at the Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capucines. It was a sensation, and the Lumiere brothers capitalized by opening theatres in Brussels, London and New York in 1896.
Louis and Auguste Lumiere in their workshop, Lyon, France, early to mid 20th century.
Entrepreneurs around the globe purchased Cinematographe cameras and films, and the Cinematographe made its Montreal debut on June 27, 1896.
It took almost a year and a half for the Lumiere brothers’ invention to make it to Carrall Street, but was an instant success.
“The attendance at the Cinematographe entertainment is large and increasing,” The World reported on Nov. 26. “(It) now includes great numbers of ladies and children as the fact develops that the marvellous ‘pictures alive’ are of a strictly high class and refined character.”
Until now, it was believed that the first film in Vancouver was shown in a store on Cordova Street in 1898 by John A. Schuberg.
Schuberg claimed he purchased an Edison film projector in Seattle and some films for $250 and showed them for two weeks before he returned to Winnipeg, where he lived at the time. Schuberg also said he opened Canada’s first movie theatre, the Electric, at 38 West Cordova Street in November 1902.
But the Cinematographe at 226 Carrall predates Schuberg’s 1898 films. Moreover, early film expert Paul Moore said several films were shown in Vancouver before the Carrall Street Cinematographe.
Thomas Edison (left) and George Eastman with an early motion picture camera.
The first films in B.C. were shown in Victoria on Sept. 28, 1895 on an Edison Kinetoscope. But the Kinetoscope only allowed one person to look at the films through a viewer, like a peep show. The first projected films came along 16 months later.
“The earliest (projected films) I have found in B.C. (were shown by) a company called the Edison Bioscope Novelty Company that pops up from Spokane into Nelson and then Sandon on Jan. 18, 1897,” said Moore, an associate professor of sociology at Ryerson University in Toronto.
“The earliest film I’ve found on the coast is by this fascinating guy called Gregory de Kannet. Gregory de Kannet debuts his Magniscope in Victoria on Feb. 5, 1897, and Feb. 8 in Vancouver.”
The Magniscope was a third type of early film projector invented by American Edward Amet.
De Klannet claimed to be a Russian journalist, and was referred to as “Dr. de Klannet” in the newspapers. Whether he was a real doctor or a flim-flam man is unclear, but he showed films of Russia to accompany lectures on his homeland.
“His subject ‘A Hundred Minutes in the Land of the Tsar’ was ably handled,” The World reported on Feb. 10, 1897. “The Magniscope and stereopticon views were also very good.”
Moore has found four more film exhibitions in Vancouver before the Carrall Street exhibition, including one featuring an “Ethiopticon” projector on Aug. 2 and 3.
“I have no idea (what the Ethiopticon is, but) I’m fascinated by the name,” said Moore.
Given all the 1897 films, how did Schuberg lay claim to being the first to show a film here?
“He stays in the business, making the transition from that early period of travelling shows to the later period of movie theatres,” explains Moore. “That’s why his 1898 shows get called the first in Vancouver, and the first in B.C. — he’s around later to say that he was the first.”
Nov. 30, 1897 Vancouver World story on an exhibition of the Lumiere Cinematograph camera and films in a building at the northeast corner of Carrall and East Cordova (which was then called Oppenheimer).
Nov. 24, 1897 Vancouver World story on an exhibition of the Lumiere Cinematograph camera and films.
Feb. 9, 1897 story in the Vancouver World on Dr. Gregory de Klannet, who brought the first films to Vancouver.
Feb. 6, 1897 story in the Victoria Times on Dr. Gregory de Klannet.
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