''Carmencita'' is an 1894 American

short Short may refer to: Places * Short (crater), a lunar impact crater on the near side of the Moon * Short, Mississippi, an unincorporated community * Short, Oklahoma, a census-designated place People * Short (surname) * List of people known as ...

black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...

silent

documentary film A documentary film or documentary is a non-fictional film, motion-picture intended to "document reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction, education or maintaining a Recorded history, historical record". Bill Nichols (film critic), Bil ...

directed and produced by William K.L. Dickson, the Scottish

inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...

credited with the invention of the

motion picture A film also called a movie, motion picture, moving picture, picture, photoplay or (slang) flick is a work of visual art that simulates experiences and otherwise communicates ideas, stories, perceptions, feelings, beauty, or atmosphere ...

camera A camera is an Optics, optical instrument that can capture an image. Most cameras can capture 2D images, with some more advanced models being able to capture 3D images. At a basic level, most cameras consist of sealed boxes (the camera body), ...

under the employ of

Thomas Edison Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventio ...

. The film is titled after the dancer who features in it. This film is one of a series of Edison short films featuring

circus A circus is a company of performers who put on diverse entertainment shows that may include clowns, acrobats, trained animals, trapeze acts, musicians, dancers, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, magicians, ventriloquists, and unicyclist ...

and

vaudeville Vaudeville (; ) is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment born in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition ...

acts. It features the dancer

Carmencita Carmen Dauset Moreno, better known simply as Carmencita (1868 – 1910), was a Spanish-style dancer in American pre-vaudeville variety and music hall ballet. Biography Born in Almería, Andalusia, Spain, Carmencita took dancing lessons in Malag ...

going through a routine she had been performing at

Koster and Bial's Music Hall Koster and Bial's Music Hall was an important vaudeville theatre in New York City, located at Broadway and Thirty-Fourth Street, where Macy's flagship store now stands. It had a seating capacity of 3,748, twice the size of many theaters. Ticket pr ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

since February 1890. According to film historian

Charles Musser Charles John Musser (born 16 January 1951) is a film historian and documentary film maker. Since 1992 he has taught at Yale University, where he is currently a professor of Film and Media Studies as well as American Studies and Theater Studies. ...

, Carmencita was the first woman to appear in front of an Edison motion picture camera and may have been the first woman to appear in a motion picture within the United States.

Production

The film was produced by the

Edison Manufacturing Company The Edison Manufacturing Company, originally registered as the United Edison Manufacturing Company and often known as simply the Edison Company, was organized by inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison and incorporated in New York City in May 188 ...

which had begun making films in

1890 Events January–March * January 1 ** The Kingdom of Italy establishes Eritrea as its colony, in the Horn of Africa. ** In Michigan, the wooden steamer ''Mackinaw'' burns in a fire on the Black River. * January 2 ** The steamship ...

under the direction of one of the earliest pioneers to film, William K.L. Dickson. It was filmed entirely within the

Black Maria Black Maria may refer to: Art and literature * Black Mariah (comics), a character in the Luke Cage comics series * Black Maria, a character in the manga series ''One Piece'' * ''Black Maria'' (novel), a 1991 novel by Diana Wynne Jones *''Blac ...

studio at

West Orange, New Jersey West Orange is a suburban township in Essex County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. As of the 2020 United States Census, its population was 48,843, an increase of 2,636 (+5.7%) from the 46,207 counted in the 2010 Census.

, in the United States, which is widely referred to as "America's First Movie Studio." Filming on this work took place between March 10, 1894 and March 16, 1894. According to the

Internet Movie Database IMDb (an abbreviation of Internet Movie Database) is an online database of information related to films, television series, home videos, video games, and streaming content online – including cast, production crew and personal biographies, ...

the film is 15.24 m in length. It was made in a 35 mm format with an aspect ratio of 1.33 : 1. The movie was intended to be displayed through means of a

Kinetoscope The Kinetoscope is an precursors of film, early motion picture exhibition device, designed for films to be viewed by one person at a time through a peephole viewer window. The Kinetoscope was not a movie projector, but it introduced the basic ...

Current status

Given the age of the film, its copyright has now expired and it is freely available on the internet to download. A copy is kept by the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...

and can be viewed on their

American Memory American Memory is an internet-based archive for public domain image resources, as well as Sound recording, audio, video, and archived Web content. Published by the Library of Congress, the archive launched on October 13, 1994, after $13 million w ...

website. An alternative version, with additional footage shot around the same time, used to be found on

Google Video Google Video was a free video hosting service launched by the multinational technology company Google on January 25, 2005. Similar to YouTube, this platform allowed video clips to be hosted on Google servers and embedded on to other website ...

. The film has also come to public attention as the first title listed on the

. The website assigns each title an eight-digit code; ''Carmencita''s index code is ''tt0000001'', though it is not the oldest title listed on the site.

References

External links

Library of Congress
* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Carmencita (Film) 1894 films American black-and-white films American short documentary films American silent short films 1890s short documentary films Black-and-white documentary films Films directed by William Kennedy Dickson American dance films 1890s dance films Articles containing video clips Films shot in New Jersey 1890s American films