William Heise Movies

Long before Hollywood started painting white men red and dressing them as 'Injuns' Edison's company was using the genuine article! Featuring for what...

The busiest corner in Chicago. Cable cars and street traffic of all descriptions. Hundreds of shoppers. Fine perspective view looking north toward...

William K.L. Dickson brings his hat from his one hand to the other and moves his head slightly, as a small nod toward the audience. This was the...

In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of...

The sinister mesmerist Svengali hypnotizes a group of people and compels them to perform various humorous acts in a Trilby segment from David...

A referee and five fans (including a waiter in his apron) look on as two young men box. The dark-haired, slightly taller boxer throws a right and the...

“A scene representing Southern plantation life before the war. A jig and a breakdown by three colored boys.”

The Glenroy Brothers perform a portion of their vaudeville act, "The Comic View of Boxing: The Tramp & the Athlete", which depicts a boxer with a...

Imagine ten pickaninnies turned loose and on mischief bent. Farmer catches one leaving but Nine. Nine Happy Snowballs on a Swing elate. One gets...

1897 version of Annabelle Moore performing a serpentine dance.

“The watchful father disturbs a dream of bliss, and the bucolic lover is taught a lesson. He made a great hit.” (Edison film catalog)

Produced May-June 1891, this experimental film fragment was one of the first made in America at the Edison Laboratory in West Orange, N.J. The...

Hadji Cheriff, a performer known for a variety of unusual abilities, demonstrates part of his act in the Thomas Edison studio. He has a large knife...

Experimental film fragment made with the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, using 3/4-inch wide film.

"The famous parade ground of Metropolitan fashion. Exquisitely gowned women, club men, actresses, millionaires pass by on their afternoon stroll." -...

The dancer Fatima, well-known for her dancing shows at the World's Exhibition in 1893, performs for the camera. She opens her act by twirling around...

One of the pictures to be seen in the machine, for example, was that of a blacksmith shop in which two men were working, one shoeing a horse, the...

Experimental film made to test the original cylinder format of the Kinetoscope and believed to be the first film shot in the United States. It shows...

The pursuit of Hop Lee by an irate policeman.

Two gamecocks are fighting inside a wire cage, while two spectators look on in the background. The two men agree to make a bet on the outcome. One of...