The World’s Oldest Surviving Film: “Roundhay Garden Scene,” Circa 1888

This may or may not be the first film ever made, but it is nonetheless an invaluable historical document.

This will be short and sweet, as I am not the right person to write about the technical history of film.

In terms of being technologically inclined, writing on a computer and surfing the web is basically my limit. If you clicked here looking for an in-depth piece on the evolution of film cameras and stock, you got the wrong guy and the wrong story.

What follows is not so much an article, in fact; it’s the sharing of a discovery.

Frenchman Louis Le Prince is said to have been the first to capture continuous movement on film, his work predating that of the Lumière Brothers, Thomas Edison, and George Méliès.

I had never heard of him until a recent boring evening in quarantine perusing YouTube videos. Apparently, several of the film pros and historians interviewed in David Nicholas Wilkinson’s 2015 documentary, “The First Film,” hadn’t either.