THE MAN WHO INVENTED MOTION PICTURES

The story of a pioneer in motion-picture making and his mysterious disappearance.

In this combination of “a ghost story, a family saga, and an unsolved mystery,” Fischer, an author and film producer, introduces us to relatively obscure 19th-century artist and inventor Louis Le Prince, a Frenchman whose career prompted him to relocate to England and the U.S. Fascinated by photography and the manipulation of recorded images, Le Prince made extraordinary advancements in cinematography and is now credited by some historians, including Fischer, as having created the first true motion pictures in the late 1880s. His suspicious disappearance in 1890, shortly before he was to unveil his revolutionary single-lens camera, allowed rival inventions to supersede his invention. This meant that other innovators, such as the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Thomas Edison, the so-called “Wizard of Menlo Park,” got credit as the most important trailblazers in the field. Fischer’s sketch of the historical context in which Le Prince worked—“at the end of a century when humankind had already domesticated space, light, and time”—is consistently entertaining and illuminating. The author vividly renders the personalities and science involved in the production of early cinema, and he lucidly explains the complex technological challenges and breakthroughs. Particularly insightful are Fischer’s interpretations of the likely motivations of Le Prince and his assistants as they attempted, under frequent financial duress, to complete a workable prototype of their camera and secure international patent protections. Also intriguing is the book’s contribution to the ongoing demythologization of cultural icon Edison, who seems to have routinely schemed his way into taking credit for the work of others. Though Fischer’s ultimate conclusion about the circumstances behind Le Prince’s death remains speculative, he offers and defends a plausible version of events that draws persuasively on extant historical evidence.

A fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative of one of the forgotten figures in cinematic history.