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Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

★ — Roundhay Garden Scene (1888)

Shot in Leeds on 14 October 1888, Roundhay Garden Scene holds its place in history as the earliest surviving motion picture, captured by French-born inventor Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince using his single-lens LPCCP camera on paper-based photographic film. Le Prince was working in Leeds at the time, having moved to England some years prior, and the garden belongs to the Whitley family at Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, with the figures on screen including Le Prince's own son and mother-in-law. The whole thing runs roughly two to three seconds at around 12 frames per second. Le Prince himself disappeared mysteriously in 1890, boarding a train in France and never arriving at his destination, leaving the question of what he might have achieved a genuinely strange footnote to cinema's origin.

I was curious. What was the first film ever made? Turns out... we can't watch that because it didn't survive. This did. It's 2 seconds long. In nearly 140 years we've gone from this... to 3 hour long bollywood epics like RRR.

Rating: ★ | Year: 1888 | Watched: 2025-07-03

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