Rip Van Winkle (1903)
*** (out of 4)
This film is a rather interesting one as it takes eight movies made in 1896 and edits them together to try and tell a complete story. I'm going to take a guess and say this was released after The Great Train Robbery so as an early example of a "plot" driven film this works as a great piece of history. It's interesting to view the film today because it plays perfectly as something you'd expect to see in the day but there's no getting around the fact that all of this stuff was filmed and released in 1896. That makes the original movies all the more impressive since they were telling a story years before it became the normal thing. The Great Train Robbery gets credit for being the first film to tell a story but perhaps historians should rethink that and take a closer look at those eight shorts.
*** (out of 4)
This film is a rather interesting one as it takes eight movies made in 1896 and edits them together to try and tell a complete story. I'm going to take a guess and say this was released after The Great Train Robbery so as an early example of a "plot" driven film this works as a great piece of history. It's interesting to view the film today because it plays perfectly as something you'd expect to see in the day but there's no getting around the fact that all of this stuff was filmed and released in 1896. That makes the original movies all the more impressive since they were telling a story years before it became the normal thing. The Great Train Robbery gets credit for being the first film to tell a story but perhaps historians should rethink that and take a closer look at those eight shorts.