In The Pursuit Of A Dream

Ask any film buff you know who the inventor of moving film was and the chances are that they will mention Thomas Edison and/or the Lumiere brothers, In fact, both would be the wrong answer.

In 1888 a certain Louse Time Augustin Le Prince, a French man living in Leeds in the United Kingdom, invented the concept and the practice of moving film a full two years before Edison even began to experiment with the idea, let alone complete the invention. However, Edison won the legal battle claiming to be the sole inventor of moving film and as a result ruled the film industry in the United States for a great many years. How could that possibly be when Le Prince had prima facie evidence of his much earlier version of the invention? This is where it all gets more than a little murky.

Le Prince had shot a few short films using a single lens camera of his own invention and was on the very verge of a public breakthrough. According to Wikipedia Le Prince....

"was possibly the first person to shoot a moving picture sequence using a single lens camera and a strip of (paper) film."

In October of 1888 Le prince had made a short film entitled 'Roundhay Garden' which was a sequence of frames showing members of his own family walking around the garden in circles.

During the subsequent eighteen months Le Prince made at least one other moving film of traffic crossing Leeds Bridge, plus a short film of his son playing the accordion. All of this was well in advance of other players on the scene in Europe and the United States. So what went wrong?

What happened was that in 1990 Le Prince took a trip to his country of birth, France (Dijon and Paris to be precise) and simply disappeared before he could get the chance to go public with his idea. At the time Le Prince was actually very busy preparing a trip to the USA to give a public premier of his idea at the Morris Jumel Mansion in New York. How scarily convenient must that have been?

The story is that Le Prince boarded a train from Dijon (where he had been visiting his brother, the last person to see him alive) to Paris. However, when the train arrived, very mysteriously, there was no sign of him. And it is here that there is a great divergence of explanations as to what happened next.

It would be very easy to presume that he was murdered for his invention and there have been stories that Edison had sent over his henchmen to do the dastardly deed. However, thuggish as Edison was in protecting his inventions, there isn't any evidence to support this story of a plot, let alone its execution.

Other stories that were offered up included suicide due to be being depressed about a looming bankruptcy, or due to being outed as a closet gay. The story of Le Prince's gayness was that Le Prince disappeared upon the orders of his family who did not want to be embarrassed in public. But his alleged homosexuality has been strongly and effectively contested as being unproven. As for his supposed bankruptcy, there are conflicting versions as to the validity of this claim.

Yet another story was that Le Prince never boarded the train at Dijon and yet another that he was killed by a taxi driver and this body was dumped in the River Seine for money. This is the preferred scenario of his descendants and one which does seem to be supported by the discovery of a body recovered from the Seine in 1890.

Whatever really happened, there is more than enough intrigue in this mysterious disappearance, to make a decent murder, mystery, suspense movie about it. Which when you think about it, is more than a little ironic. Think about it a moment; a film of a man in pursuit of a dream, seeking his fame and fortune based upon his invention of film, only to be thwarted by whatever social mores, inner turmoil or dark powerful forces that were at play back in those days. Sounds like a great idea for a blockbuster movie to me.