Brilliant and touching

brilliant actors, brilliant editing

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

An athlete swings Indian clubs.There is not much to say about this because it is very brief, very damaged and not much happens -- a pair of clubs spin a couple times. I suspect this was an important early film test, but it is in such awful shape today that it pretty much negates whatever value it has as historic.I have to wonder how Edison and Dickson went about choosing their earliest subjects. Why a man with clubs? For how brief the film is, he could have been jumping rope or swinging a bat. It really makes no difference because he is not given enough time to really exhibit any skill.

This is a particularly interesting document of movie history looking at the fact that it was recorded even before the first Olympic Games of the modern era 1896 in Athens. He wasn't there most likely, but here he gets the chance to show everybody 122 years later what he can do with the clubs.This is Dickson's first work after the Monkeyshines trilogy and while he was experimenting right in front of our eyes in that one, he's certainly done a lot of testing that we didn't witness in-between the projects as well. Newark Athlete is clearly improved and quality-wise several leagues above his previous work.

Between the years of 1888 and 1889, American inventor Thomas Alva Edison became very interested in developing a device able to show "motion pictures". It was known that a french inventor named Louis Le Prince had made a movie in Leeds, England, in 1888; and Edison wanted to know how to make his own. Soon the idea came to him and he began working on his devise, however, he lost interest in it as he couldn't see any potential in the invention. Fortunately, one of his collaborators, Scottish inventor William K.L. Dickson decided to take the project and in 1890 he developed what would later be known as the Kinetoscope, a devise that showed short movies through the window of a cabinet. However, the movies Dickson made wasn't of a good quality, so he spent the following years trying to make something as good (or better) than what Le Prince had achieved. Many experiments were done, and by 1891, Dickson and his team were almost there.After the moderate success of his "Monkeyshines" experiments, Dickson knew he was able to capture images and reproduce them in his Kinetoscope, now all he had to do was to improve the quality of his movies. 1891 would be a year of constant experimenting, in hopes of showing the invention at the Chicago's World Fair. And among the films that Dickson was able to make during those years was this experimental movie codenamed "Newark Athlete". This movie depicted a man, apparently an athlete (although he could had been one of Edison's workers) as does some exercises swinging the clubs he has in each of his hands. The man raises the heads of clubs and keeps moving them for as long as the movie lasts, obviously hoping that his movements were being captured by the camera.Like most of Dickson's experiments, there was no plot or theme in the film, as this movies weren't meant to be shown to the public. The main purpose of the film is to check if the camera was able to capture the movements of the athlete, and to measure elements such as lighting, the quality of the lenses, the film and the recording speed. When compared to the "Monkeyshines" films, this movie shows a notorious improvement in the quality of the film, as the image not only moves at a fluid speed, it's almost as clear as Dickson intended. It wouldn't take him too long before he was able to make short films the way he wanted, and soon in that year he would make the first Kinetoscope movie shown to an audience: "Dickson Greeting", where he was welcoming us to the era of Kinetoscope. 6/10

according to the edison motion pictures site this was an experimental picture to test new equipment and new techniques more than anything else.the film is a small fragment of a boy swinging his clubs. part 1 is the original and part 2 is the looped version. all this will make a bit more sense when you see fragment 2 where all the material was composed together by gordon hendricks.the film looks scary like eraserhead, only missing the noise typical for lynch :) not as interesting as some of the other early heise/dickson works, but worth seeing.