Edison Shorts -- 1894-1897

This was included in a collection of other old films from this era. The Edison Shorts include the following:

The Kiss - 1896
Serpentine Dances - 1895
Sandow (Strong Man) - 1894
Glenroy Brothers (Comic Boxing) - 1894
Cock Fight - 1896
The Barber Shop - 1894
Feeding the Doves - 1896
Seminary Girls - 1897

These basically show exactly as the title suggests, and they all were very short (most a minute or less). All of them were a single shot with the camera probably mounted on a tripod. There was no zoom, pan or anything else beyond what the camera saw from its perch.

These kind of look like someone's home videos or what a photographer might shoot with his still camera, except that the pictures are moving. It kind of indicates that the original idea was to use it as a traditional camera, but to give the end user a feeling of life in his pictures instead of trying to capture life in a still. The advent of storytelling in this medium was a few years off still. 

The final one in the list (Seminary Girls), like Eadweard's sequential pictures, point to the seedier side of the art form with a bunch of girls in their nightgowns engaging in a pillow fight. It appears Edison had a bit fo a dirty old man streak as well, and one might wonder what he has in his "private" collection.

This is on "The Movies Begin Vol. 1".