Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

collections, the George Kleine Collection and the Edison Laboratory
Collection. Kleine was an important distributor of films, especially of
foreign films; his collection consists of films made from 1898 to 1926.
The Kleine Collection fills an important gap in the Library’s Edison
materials because it covers the years when films were submitted on
nitrate stock for copyright, and thus, were not kept by the Library.
The Edison films used on the web site from the Kleine Collection were
made during the 1910s and include early documentaries (Down the Old
Potomac and Gold and Diamond Mines of South Africa, both made in
1917), comedies (The Good Sport, 1918) and early animation (R.F.D.
10,000 B.C., 1917).
The Edison Laboratory Collection was donated by the Edison National
Historic Site to the Library of Congress. Although not fully processed,
the collection contains unique items, such as advertising films made to
promote the Edison business cylinder phonograph (The Stenographer’s
Friend, 1910) and the disc phonograph (The Voice of the Violin, 1915).
A film about Thomas Edison made by the General Electric Company was
also part of this varied collection and is included on the web site (A Day
with Thomas A. Edison, 1922).
On the Library’s web site, 341 Edison films are available including such
genres as actuality, advertising, animation, early documentary, drama,
adventure, trick, humorous, and reenactment motion pictures.
Chronological as well as alphabetical listings of the films are on the site
along with brief essays on the history of Edison’s motion picture
inventions and films. Each motion picture on the site has its own catalog
record offering detailed bibliographic information about the film, and
from here one can choose to play a film using either MPEG or
Quicktime formats.
Additional materials dealing with Edison are also available. The site is
illustrated with photographs of Edison motion picture cameras,
advertisements from film journals of the day, and captured frames from
the films themselves. Interviews conducted with Thomas Edison by two
journals, Nickelodeon and Edison Diamond Points (the journal for the
Edison Diamond Disc), have also been scanned and appear in their
entirety.
In August 1910, Edison predicted accurately the future possibilities of
the motion picture in The Nickelodeon, saying that films to come would
include sound and color. He extolled the educational possibilities of the
motion picture, saying, “Geography, history, literature, botany, surgery,
and even chemistry can be taught much more entertainingly,
authentically and convincingly by [film’s] aid than is now possible with
present methods. What child would not readily absorb a lasting
impression of the people of India, for instance, and their customs
through the visualization of scenes in that country? Information
conveyed in that manner would be retained in memory, where days and
weeks of dry reading would fail of accomplishment.” Edison would
probably be pleased to know that the products of his companies are still
accessible, in some cases one hundred years after they were made, to
101 Journal of Film Preservation / 58/59 / 1999