Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894)

Original title

Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze

Directed by

William Kennedy Dickson

Genre

silent film

Country

United States

Runtime

4 min

Rating

4.8 of 10 from 103 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A man takes a pinch of snuff and then sneezes. This very brief film was one of the earliest motion pictures ever made.

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What happens

Fred Ott's Sneeze (also known as Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze) is an 1894 short, black-and-white silent film shot by William K.L. Dickson and featuring Fred Ott. According to the Library of Congress, it is the second oldest surviving U.S. motion picture to be copyrighted, although it has since entered the public domain. The film was shot on January 7, 1894; however the film's copyright was filed two days later. In the approximately five-second film, one of Thomas Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress, the film was "made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly." The published Harper's Weekly version is slightly longer than what now survives on film, and depicts a second sneeze. In 2015, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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