LeftyLiebowitz
It was okay. I just wish Edison had put more effort into convincing CGI.
Rainey Dawn
Actually a very nice looking but extremely short film. It's a total of 18 seconds long but it is a silent film by Thomas Edison and, from what I've read, the first film ever edited. This is a real piece of film history one that is good to watch whether for film history or for entertainment value.The film looks fairly realistic - in particular for 1895! Sure the actor playing Mary Stuart was replaced with a dummy for the edit - they are not going to execute a real actor and that was the purpose of this film - film editing! It's actually very Gothic looking - the executioner and the execution - neat piece of film history.9/10
Snow Leopard
For its day, this dramatization of Mary Stuart's execution has effective and believable special effects. The combination of the macabre subject matter and the brand-new visual trick must have produced quite a reaction from its audiences in 1895, given the accounts of how early movie audiences sometimes reacted even to much milder material.The execution scene doesn't really have much that identifies the subject as Mary, Queen of Scots, and in fact some details would be at odds with a couple of the known historical facts about her death. But in itself, it is believable enough. It's certainly possible to tell that it uses a camera trick, but it was probably very effective in its time. The surviving print is rather blurry, but in this case it almost makes it seem more believable, by making some of the rough edges a little less obvious.Special camera effects have now become so refined that it's hard to be as impressed with those done long ago. Yet even today, once you've seen enough computer-generated images, their seams start to show too, except for the very best of them. In its day, this would have come pretty close to setting the standard.
Mikko_Elo_
all right, the execution of mary, queen of scots is certainly not the prettiest of the edison labs. films. i'm not keen on executions nor bad camera tricks and this one delivers. still, it's the first of it's kind for both, and is therefore essential viewing for anyone seriously interested in film.now, let's get realistic for a second here. the camera trick used here is one of the first, if not the first of it's kind. apparently it shocked the audience it had in it's days, but for obvious reasons it today looks quite fake. this is also one of the first if not the first film reproducing a historical scene going for the best possible realism, a description that later became a definition for a genre. the execution wasn't very realistic historically either, though.according to IMDb it's also the first film with trained actors. it doesn't show much ;) but it's yet another merit for this film only mildly interesting in traditional sense. like it or not, the execution of mary stuart ranks high in film history. the influence it has given to countless films after it cannot be dismissed.
AD
