Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
On Quartile, Monkeyshines, No. 1 scores 5/10 across five categories — strongest on Novelty (Above Average), weakest on Ending (Well Below Average).
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.