Fred Ott's Sneeze (also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze) is an 1894 American, short, black-and-white, silent documentary film shot by William K.L. Dickson and starring Fred Ott. It was the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States.
In the five-second film one of Thomas Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress, "It was filmed for publicity purposes as ...
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Fred Ott's Sneeze (also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze) is an 1894 American, short, black-and-white, silent documentary film shot by William K.L. Dickson and starring Fred Ott. It was the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States.
In the five-second film one of Thomas Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress, "It was filmed for publicity purposes as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly".
The film was produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company, which had begun making films in 1890 under the direction of Dickson, one of the earliest film pioneers. It was filmed within the Black Maria studio at West Orange, New Jersey, in the USA, which was America's first movie studio. It was filmed between January 2, 1894 and January 7, 1894 and was displayed, at the time, through the means of a Kinetoscope.
As a film produced prior to 1923 its copyright has now...
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