The Dog Factory

So I'm taking this really cool film class called The History and Aesthetics of Cinema before 1945, which is right up my alley and so I'm enjoying it a lot. The cinema was up and rolling by about 1896, when little theatres showed short films that were usually only one take and anywhere from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. At this point, the cinema wasn't based on narrative, plot, character, cinematography - instead, because it was so new, it was dubbed the "Cinema of Attractions" because people went to the cinema to watch this new invention, not to watch a significant film. After a couple of years, the films were still usually only a couple of takes, but instead of featuring something simple like a train going by or a couple kissing, they had little plots that were usually silly and had some sort of trick effect.

One of my favorites was done by Edison and is called "The Dog Factory." The great thing about these early films was that they often weren't copyrighted and so some of them are available on YouTube, like this one.

I loved it - it's clever and I laughed in my lecture. Here it is.