When were the movies born? Unlike the razor-sharp digital cinematography that is the current standard for cinemas, the date is imprecise, hazy, out of focus.
The first motion picture cameras were patented in 1887 and 1888. Within a few years, “moving pictures” of horses, trains, dancers and other sights were being exhibited for a curious and sometimes scandalized paying public. The Thomas Edison company’s 1896 “The Kiss,” which offered 47 seconds of staged smooching, was reviewed as if it were something sinful. Wrote one critic of the title spectacle: “Magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over, it is absolutely disgusting.”