First Public Showing of a Motion Picture

Firstival comes to the Philadelphia Film Society on Saturday, October 24, with a sculpture and workshop marking the first public showing of a motion picture. It's a look back at a piece of movie history that happened right here in the city, long before the cinema we recognize today existed.

Most of us think of the birth of film as a late 19th-century French thing, but Philadelphia beat it to the punch by two and a half decades. On February 5, 1870, local chemist and inventor Henry Heyl showed his phasmatrope to a live audience of about 1,500 people at the Academy of Music. He didn't have a projector in the modern sense; he attached multiple photographs to a 'skeleton wheel' with 18 slits that he rotated by hand. When he projected those glass-slide images with a bright lantern, they appeared to move. The whole thing ran at about three frames per second.

That first screening featured three short pictures: a Japanese acrobat, a character called 'Brother Jonathan' who was voiced by an actor standing behind the screen, and Heyl himself waltzing to a live orchestra. He showed it again at the Franklin Institute the following month, but that was as far as his movie career went. He never returned to filmmaking, and instead spent the rest of his life inventing things you've probably got in your kitchen or office: the first foldable paper milk-delivery box and a wire-stitching machine for sewing books, which we now know as the first stapler.

Firstival brings that story back to the city with a sculpture and a workshop. It runs from 11 AM to 1 PM at the Philadelphia Film Society, 1412 Chestnut Street, and admission is free.