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FILM
The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder and the Movies
Paul Fischer
Allen & Unwin, $39.99
Out of the past comes a mystery, one that asks who is responsible for the disappearance of the man who invented motion pictures. The sketch on the cover of Paul Fischer’s engrossing book introduces him: a man dressed in the style of an 18th-century gentleman, his mutton chops and beard avouching him as a man of the world as he proudly directs his gaze forward, his elbow resting on his box-like invention, a device he called a “taker” or “receiver” of animated photographs. His name is Louis Aime Augustin Le Prince.
Inside, there’s a still from the first moving images ever shot, a two-second epic showing three members of his family and a female friend moving around outside their home in Leeds. He called it Roundhay Garden Scene. The year was 1888. Two years later, he was gone. While travelling on family business in the South of France, he vanished without trace and his disappearance remains officially unsolved.
Still from Louis Le Prince’s two-second clip of family members in the garden, the first moving images ever filmed.Credit:SSPL/ Getty
Over the years, other inventors have been credited in Le Prince’s stead with inventing motion pictures. In the US, it’s often Thomas Edison, whose labours previously led to the electric light and the phonograph; or sometimes the British-born Eadweard Muybridge, who invented the zoopraxiscope, which famously captured still photos of horses and human figures in motion.
Inventor of cinematography Louis Le Prince, who vanished under bizarre circumstances.Credit:Getty
In France, it’s the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, who made and screened a series of (very) short films in the latter half of the 1890s, including The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. Brilliantly referenced in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D Hugo (2011), it lasted for 50 seconds, showing a train heading in the general direction of the camera and reportedly causing audiences to flee for their lives.
Fischer, however, leaves little room for doubt about who was responsible. What makes his book different from a conventional film history is that it’s essentially a whodunit. It asks: what happened to Le Prince? Was he murdered and, if so, by whom? Or did he commit suicide and end up as one of the many unidentified corpses that used to turn up each year in the Paris morgue?
Drawing on old newspaper accounts, the unpublished memoirs of key participants, the written testimony of Le Prince’s research team and other witnesses, as well as legal files from the archives, Fischer presents what he reasonably describes as “a ghost story, a family saga and an unsolved mystery”. The style he brings to it is novelistic, his narrative beginning with Le Prince’s disappearance and then moving back in time to flesh out the profiles of various individuals who, directly or indirectly, were a part of his life – and who might or might not have been directly involved in what happened to him.
At the heart of it all, though, is the impact on Le Prince’s wife, Lizzie, of her husband’s dedication to his work and his disappearance. The book traces the growth of their relationship as they moved between Paris during la belle epoque and Leeds, where she grew up and they eventually made a home together. Her struggles to cope with the emotional and financial stresses of being the wife of an inventor are at least as important to the story Fischer has to tell as her husband’s work.