Australia's earliest surviving film screened

AUSTRALIA'S earliest surviving film — a 1896 movie known as Patineur Grotesque or Humorous Rollerskater — was shown in the country for the first time yesterday, Arts Minister Peter Garrett said.

The comedy, which shows a cigar-smoking, top-hatted man rollerskating before a crowd with a white hand mark on the seat of his trousers — is thought to have been filmed in Melbourne by French cinematographer Marius Sestier.

While the one-minute movie, which features some of the earliest images of Australia caught on film, was shown overseas over a century ago, Wednesday's screening is believed to be the first time it has been shown Down Under.

"While Sestier's other films were a fixture of all his shows throughout Australia at the time, there is no record of this film ever having been shown here," Garrett said.

"Amazingly, however, it was screened across Europe and as far away as Mexico, making it one of the first films to broadcast images of Australia abroad."

The images, shot on long-obsolete 35mm film, were discovered in an archive in France by an Australian intern from Canberra's National Film and Sound Archive in 2006.

They were painstakingly adapted to digital format by Australian experts who built special tools to copy and preserve the film, which shows the skating gentleman tripping, falling and dropping his hat before the gathering crowd.

As the man attempts to collect the hat, he continues to fall about and the movie ends when he finally gets it back on his head.

Among the audience in Canberra yesterday were descendants of Sestier, a filmmaker with the Freres Lumiere, who is credited with bringing the movies to Australia and who opened the country's first cinema in Sydney in 1896.

The copied film, along with another 1896 Sestier film about the Melbourne Cup horse race, has been placed in the Canberra film archive.

"We do have a love affair with film in this country," Garrett said.

"And (both films) show two things very close to our hearts — humour and the Melbourne Cup."

National Film and Sound Archive chairman Chris Puplick said "Patineur Grotesque" was created at a time when "Hollywood was still a cow paddock."

AFP