Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
Experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope and believed to be the first film shot in the United States. It shows a blurry figure in white standing in one place making large gestures and is only a few seconds long.
Monkeyshines No. 1 is primarily a historical artifact rather than a cinematic achievement by conventional standards. Its plot is essentially nonexistent — a blurry figure making gestures for a few seconds. Acting cannot be meaningfully assessed in a traditional sense, though the subject's broad gestures give it a minimal performative quality. Cinematography, while technically crude, earns credit as a genuinely pioneering technical experiment — the first film shot in the United States, testing Edison's Kinetoscope cylinder format, which is historically significant in the craft of image capture. Novelty is a strong 4: this is arguably the singular origin point of American cinema, utterly one-of-a-kind in its place in history. The ending, like the plot, is abrupt and structurally null — it simply stops, as expected of a test reel.