User Reviews

A Hand Shake (1892)

This film clocks in at just four seconds and features William K.L. Dickson and William Heise shaking hands.

From what I've read this film was never released to the public and was basically just a test for the camera. Of course it's impossible to judge this like a film of today but there's no question there's something special about watching the footage well over a hundred years after it was made. As a film buff I just love watching this old footage even though there's certainly nothing special about it other than its age and how it would slowly help shape motion pictures into what they would eventually become.

Here's another of the test films that William Dickson made for Edison before he perfected motion pictures. It shows a man and a woman grasping hands. It lasts for four seconds, it's fuzzy and clumsy and unless you know what is going on, it's very difficult to figure it out. You can see the man's shirt and the woman's blouse, brilliant whites, but other than that, very little.

Nonetheless, the clarity of the print is vastly improved over the previous year's test strips. It would still be more than a year until Dickson had something suitable for exhibition, but he was making progress.

While I know pretty much everything about the earliest motion pictures, there's one thing I don't understand: why, when compared to the Kinetoscopic shorts of 1891, Edison's 1892 output was so much worse in quality than previously. Take, for example, the beautifully photographed "Dickson Greeting" and "Men Boxing" of the previous year and compare it to this short: why did the quality drop so low? "A Handshake" is grainy, blurry and poorly lit, (how'd were they even able to identify Dickson and Heise as the two men?) and I have a hard time understanding why this was so. Either time has not been easy on the film, they used a different type of filmstrip which proved unsuccessful, or they altered the camera to improve the visual look even more and actually made it worse. Either way, it's mystifying to see how poor the footage is when viewed now.

I can't blame it all on time, filmstrip or camera, though, as there is yet another possible reason why the end result is so bad. Let's suppose that I was trying to invent the Kinetograph, and I would want a good test subject: would I want to go with a small gesture of little movement or a big gesture with a clear amount of action? Clearly the latter, and I think that's what caused this experiment to end up not as successful: the little gesture within frame doesn't show a obvious movement and thus makes the motion not as clear when seen now. An exaggerated wave or a bow would have provided a much better amount of movement.

But it's good to experiment, and I'm sure the results of this test (for that's all it is, a test) taught Heise and Dickson a very important lesson.