Nov. 10 movie: More Treasures from America Film Archives. This was not one movie but a collection of silent films, plus the first known sound film ever, from 1894! It was 15 seconds of a guy playing violin while two other guys danced. Also included: The Suburbanites, a 1904 movie about a Manhattan family who move to the suburbs. Apparently this transition was just as difficult a hundred years ago as it is today, except the movers threw your dishes on the ground from a horse drawn carriage, not a van. And a 1909 short by D.W. Griffith, and have I ever mentioned how much I hate D.W. Griffith? Sure, he's influential and all, the architect of modern filmmaking, whatever. He's such a godawful preachy moralizer. I can't stand even his non-racist films.
There was also a strange 1910 version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in which a donkey accompanies Dorothy to Oz, and she does not get home to Kansas. And some ads -- the earliest from 1897! Early advertising was so effective. I can't wait to buy a tin of Flash Cleaner and visit the Electric Refrigerator Show. Also a western, and some serials, and melodramas of course. Honestly this was more about edumacation than entertainment.
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