Feeding the Doves

In this Edison Company 20-second short, a woman on a farm stands in front of a building, feeding doves and chickens with grain that she retrieves from her apron. A young girl stands beside her, there is a horse and barn in the background, and at one point a woman walks across the left hand side of the frame.

Contrary to contemporary beliefs that "Hollywood is running out of ideas", and that remakes are a new phenomenon, this actuality (a cinematographic record of "real life") is one of the earlier remakes, in this case of a Lumiere film. Versions of "Feeding the Doves" were also shot by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company and the International Film Company.

Maybe I'm already showing my bias against realism, but for my money, this short is not nearly as successful as early Edison Company shorts such as Glenroy Brothers (Comic Boxing), Annabelle Serpentine Dance, or The Barbershop, all made in 1894 (although The Barbershop is questionably from 1893). These other shorts were shot inside Edison's Black Maria studio in New Jersey, and all are "artificial" and staged.

It's significant that Edison was experimenting with his Kinetoscope camera for location shooting, to emulate the actualities that the other early film companies were producing, but aesthetically, Feeding the Doves just doesn't work as well. At this point, experimentation was more important than aesthetics, but this is somewhat odd in light of the aesthetic heights that the Edison Company had already reached.

It also doesn't help that the film is even shakier than normal (presumably due to inaccuracies in the threading mechanism), and our remaining copies are very dirty, scratched and have prominent copyright notice frames. It's interesting to note the cut in the shot coinciding with the appearance of the woman who walks through the left hand side of the frame.

Feeding the Doves (1896)

Those against all the remakes today would probably have hated living back in the early era of cinema when anything popular was eventually made by every studio making movies. This film runs a very brief 20-seconds but I guess it was quite popular in its day. We see a woman and her young daughter throwing grain to their chickens and doves who fly around and that's pretty much it. This same type of film was shot two years earlier by the Lumiere company and future versions would follow from American Mutoscope, Biograph and others. There's certainly nothing special in any version but I guess people got a kick out of seeing all these birds jumping around. I guess those in big cities had never seen this type of thing before.

One of the significant aspects of this film is not in the film itself but what it represents in terms of Edison's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope. Instead of bringing performers to the camera, the camera was going to the performers on a farm. Many others were making films including: Lumiere, Paul and Melies in Europe; and American Mutoscope, Vitagraph and the (short lived)International Film Company in the United States. People now were preferring projected movies to those found in peep shows. Edison had sold about 900 Kinetoscopes but realized that the future was in projected movies; so he started projecting films in March of 1896. There were many other films on the market - even though Edison was trying his best to legally prevent it - that were much better than this one of a woman and a child feeding birds. The woman and the child are moving only their arms to throw the seed and it is the flurry of birds in the foreground that provide the 'action'. Movies like this could not compete against movies such as the railroad scenes or scenes of Niagara Falls.

Itself a remake of a Lumière feature, this Edison movie was popular enough in the USA that it is said to have inspired two further remakes by other American studios. In itself, it is a pleasant but bland scene, and neither the subject matter nor the filming technique show anything particularly innovative or skilled, even for the 1890s. Whatever popularity it may have had could only have come from the feelings evoked by the setting itself.

The scene shows a woman and a girl tossing handfuls of bird feed to a yard full of chickens and doves. While there is little action, with what action there is coming mostly from the doves, it is indeed the kind of agreeable rural scene that would likely have made audiences feel peaceful and, perhaps, a bit nostalgic.

The movie itself has a surprising number of rough edges, even for its time, since the Edison film crews by this time already had a good amount of experience. There are a couple of jumpy spots and a lot of scratches, all of which may come only from deterioration over time. But there are other defects that were there from the beginning. A portion of someone's hat (or the top of a head) is occasionally visible at the bottom of the screen, and there are several conspicuous hash marks surrounding the area where most of the birds are feeding. It seems very likely that this was a way of marking out where the action needed to be kept, but even at the time such devices were usually less obvious.

While there are many other Edison features and other 1896 movies that are better in themselves, like most movies of its time this one also is still interesting for what it tells us about the techniques of film-makers and the tastes of audiences in the earliest decade of motion pictures.