In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of the flowing cloth. She moves to her right and left across an unadorned stage. Many of the prints were distributed in hand-tinted color.
A short film depicting the execution of Mary, Queen of the Scots. Mary is brought to the execution block and made to kneel down with her neck over it. The executioner lifts his axe ready to bring it down. After that frame Mary has been replaced by a dummy. The axe comes down and severs the head of the dummy from the body. The executioner picks up the head and shows it around for everyone else to see. One of the first camera tricks to be used in a movie.
After the train station clerk is assaulted and left bound and gagged, then the departing train and its passengers robbed, a posse goes in hot pursuit of the fleeing bandits.
It's a busy day at the office, and the stenographer is exhausted from trying to keep up with the demands on her skills. Even when she stays late, she cannot catch up with all of the work. But then a man comes into the office to demonstrate the many advantages of the Edison System, his company's new business phonograph.
This is a film taken of the execution of Topsy, an elephant employed to help build Luna Park on Coney Island.
An early Thomas Edison short. A young woman is kidnapped while attending a play in Chinatown. A reporter attends another play in Chinatown, is likewise kidnapped and rescues the young woman. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011 in partnership with the National Film Preservation Foundation New Zealand Project.
William K.L. Dickson plays the violin while two men dance. This is the oldest surviving sound film where sound is recorded on the phonograph.
Three men hammer on an anvil and pass a bottle of beer around. Notable for being the first film in which a scene is being acted out.
A man (Thomas Edison's assistant) takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. This is one of the earliest Thomas Edison films and was the second motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States.
The first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera and possibly the first woman to appear in a motion picture within the United States. In the film, Carmencita is recorded going through a routine she had been performing at Koster & Bial's in New York since February 1890.
Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.
A western short depicting the execution of a horse thief by a group of enraged cowboys. This film is considered to be lost.
When a burglar dressed as Santa Claus steals a family's Christmas presents, amateur detective Octavius sets out to recover the loot.
Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge is faced with his own story of growing bitterness and meanness, and must decide what his own future will hold: death or redemption.
Frankenstein, a young medical student, trying to create the perfect human being, instead creates a misshapen monster. Made ill by what he has done, Frankenstein is comforted by his fiancée; but on his wedding night he is visited by the monster.
Edison short about a happy couple about to be married, but the guy's carelessness at their workplace leads to tragedy.
Experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope and believed to be the first film shot in the United States. It shows a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and is only a few seconds long.
The hanging of child murderer, William Carr
Ruthless stockbroker John McLane has ruined James Horton through reckless money management. McLane is extremely hard in business matters. When Horton’s son, Walter, confronts McLane they have a stormy altercation in which McLane is accidentally killed with a paper knife. McLane’s blind daughter Nora has been upstairs during the incident but runs down to find Horton sitting in a chair feigning sleep. Nora touches him lightly on the face thus impressing his features in her mind and when she turns to her father he flees. In time Nora’s blindness is cured and at a house party she meets Walter Horton. He recognizes her but she does not know him, and they fall in love but when she touches his face, she realizes the truth.
A cartoonist defies reality when he draws objects that become three-dimensional after he lifts them off his sketch pad.
