Quartile rating: 5/10 · 1 rating
The last remaining film of Le Prince's LPCCP Type-1 MkII single-lens camera is a sequence of frames of his son, Adolphe Le Prince, playing a diatonic button accordion. It was recorded on the steps of the house of Joseph Whitley, Adolphe's grandfather.
One of the earliest surviving films ever made, 'Accordion Player' (1888) by Louis Le Prince is a landmark in cinema history. Plot and narrative structure are essentially nonexistent — it is a brief document of a boy playing an accordion. Acting is minimal but the subject performs naturally for the camera. Cinematography is remarkable for its era: the single-lens camera capturing motion at this point in history is genuinely impressive and earns above-average marks on purely historical technical merit. Novelty is exceptional — this is one of the very first motion pictures ever recorded, making it singularly distinctive in the history of the medium. The ending, however, is abrupt and structureless, as expected of a proto-film fragment with no conceived conclusion.