Man Walking Around a Corner (1887) FULL VIDEO

 

 

Man Walking Around a Corner 1887

Release Date: December 12, 1887

Country of Origin: France, UK

A frame sequence featuring a man walking around a corner.

Filmed by Louis Le Prince in August 1887, Man Walking Around a Corner is an early film or forerunner to film. It was taken in the ninth arrondissement of Paris at the intersection of Avenue Trudaine and Rue Bochart-de-Saron. In a letter dated August 18, 1887, he gave his wife pictures from the movie. In fact, according to David Wilkinson's 2015 documentary The First Film, the piece is not a movie but rather a collection of sixteen images, each captured with one of Le Prince's sixteen lenses. After developing the one-lens camera, Le Prince created the first moving image in history on October 14, 1888. Less than two seconds are needed to complete the task.

The 1887 sequence Man Walking Around a Corner by Louis Le Prince is a foundational artifact in the history of cinema. While often categorized as a "precursor" rather than a finished film, its trailblazing achievements include:

World's Earliest Surviving Motion Capture: Recorded in August 1887, it is widely considered the oldest surviving sequence of images designed to capture movement.

Pioneering Multi-Lens Technology: Le Prince used a custom-built 16-lens camera (LPCC Type-16) to shoot the sequence. Each lens fired in rapid succession to capture a man rounding a corner in Paris, achieving a frame rate of roughly 32 images per second.

Technological Bridge to Cinema: The sequence proved that motion could be captured mechanically. Although the 16-lens system was ultimately flawed because each lens had a slightly different perspective (causing "jerky" movement), it directly led Le Prince to develop his successful single-lens camera in 1888.

First Use of Chronophotography for Projection: While earlier pioneers like Eadweard Muybridge used sequential photography, Le Prince’s 1887 experiment was a critical step toward the projectable film format, predating Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope by four years.

Historical Benchmark: The sequence consists of 16 frames (surviving on a single glass plate) that last approximately two seconds when animated, providing a literal "first glimpse" of the birth of the medium. 

Today, the original glass plate is preserved at the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford, England.