BEHIND THE BIG SCREEN, BEHIND THE STORIES UNFORLD, 2024

This article was written by Daniel Prince (more about him below) for our online magazine, published on the occasion of the second annual edition of Bitcoin FilmFest (aka BFF), and originally distributed in April 2024 exclusively to event attendees.

The Earliest Movie Ever Produced: The Mystery Of A Vanishing French Inventor and Prehistoric Caves

Can we go to the movies tonight?

How often did you, as a kid, utter a sentence like the one above?
How many families have heard that request over the years of bringing up their children?

Going to the movies has been integral to modern-day family life for many of you reading this article. You can likely link many favorite moments to certain films and even see yourself back to where you were and who you were with for the ‘first time’ that you saw a particularly emotive scene.

A scene that might have made you laugh or cry.

A scene that might have changed your life forever.

A whole movie that might have completely changed your worldview that you have had to watch a dozen more times in a bid to fully digest and reinforce your instinctual reaction.

It was during a recent podcast interview with filmmaker Pierre Corbin that we started going down the rabbit hole of why movies are so powerful and how they came to be such a useful tool to entertain, educate or propagandize the masses.

How and when did we become so enthralled with moving pictures on a wall?

Apparently, the first ever movie is often credited to ROUNDHAY GARDEN SCENE, filmed by French inventor Louis Le Prince in 1888. It’s a short silent, black-and-white film depicting a few seconds of footage showing four people in a garden.

Who was Louis Le Prince and why do we know nothing about him? Well, Le Prince mysteriously disappeared before showing his movies to the masses, seems strange, right?

Let’s dig a little further with ChatGPT:

“Unfortunately, Le Prince’s contributions to the development of cinema were cut short when he mysteriously disappeared in 1890, just before he was set to demonstrate his invention in the United States. As a result, Le Prince’s role in the history of cinema has been somewhat overshadowed, but his work laid important groundwork for the future development of motion pictures.”

So, either Le Prince realized the impact of his invention and pulled a Satoshi by disappearing from the public eye or somebody else realized the power of his invention and ‘disappeared’ him so as to capture the technology for themselves and their own purposes.

Another search for the first movie ever made caught my attention as it resonated with the conversation Pierre and I had during the previously mentioned podcast interview.

‘Sallie Gardner at a Gallop’ (THE HORSE IN MOTION): The film depicts an animal in motion, which started connecting the dots to which we had previously theorized.

“Eadweard Muybridge’s THE HORSE IN MOTION is widely cited as the first movie ever made, but was it the first movie ever made? Well, yes, but perhaps not in the way you think. THE HORSE IN MOTION was initially a series of photographs; it didn’t turn into a motion picture until 1880, when Muybridge began projecting it onto a zoopraxiscope disc.”

(Source – Chris Heckman: studiobinder.com/blog/what-was-the-first-movie-ever-made/)

NOW, prepare for a ‘mind-bender’, for this is where the story goes a little ‘Graham Hancock’ on you.

What if movies had been invented way earlier in human history than we had ever thought?

A year ago Pierre and his girlfriend came to the area of France in which we live and visited the famous Lascaux Caves. These caves are famous for their Paleolithic cave paintings, which date back over 17,000 years. The paintings depict primarily large animals that were native to the region at the time, such as horses, aurochs, deer, and mammoths, along with some abstract symbols and human figures.

When you stand and look at the paintings on any of the ancient cave walls you can’t help but go through a series of questions.

Who painted them?
Was it the men, women or young members of the tribe?
Why did they paint them?
Was it purely out of artistic desire?
What tools did they use?
Why choose that specific area of the cave?

The most amazing fact about these cave paintings and many other sites found across the world, dating back tens of thousands of years, is that when viewed under a hand-held flickering fire light, such as tightly bound and burning reads, the images move!

“The flickering light, the dancing shadows, the warm glow from the fire, many people have argued that this creates a sense of theater, that you’re looking at an ancient version of cinema.”

(Source – https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/atxurra-cave-art-experimental-archaeology)

I told you this was a mind-bender! Our ancestors were watching movies, always have been!

As a Bitcoiner focused on the education of others I have been hugely impressed with the work of all the filmmakers in the Bitcoin space who are finding or refining their passion for making movies on the subjects of money, inflation, energy, love, mystery, hope and much more.

As we move into this new era of human evolution together let’s embrace the fact that cinema is not a way to simply suspend our disbelief, but a primal method in which to educate and uplift us to… a higher shared consciousness. Together we can support the work of the artists and share their work as wide as we can to reach as many people as humanly possible whilst we still have the chance to rise up against the modern-day slavery of fiat currencies and financial repression.

We got this.

Daniel Prince

P.S. Let’s talk about movies for a moment…

I hope you’ve dived into the world of indie cinema, where film meets sound money. If you have, what’s your take on the stuff this scene churns out? I’m curious how it’ll grow in the coming years and if the next generations will dig into these early films and their stories, just like I did in this piece, stirring up some thoughts or maybe even reflections in others…

Did you enjoy this article? Go to Nostr, and zap Daniel some sats.

Daniel Prince: Host Of The ‘Once Bitten’ Bitcoin Podcast. Author of ‘Choose Life’.

X: @Princey21M

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