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Fred Ott's Sneeze

 

When is a sneeze powerful enough to start a revolution? When it is captured on film, in 1894, by America’s greatest inventor, Thomas Edison, that’s when. Like Baby’s Dinner, Edison’s film, is, admittedly, short: five seconds, to be precise. Yet, there are also a number of subtle differences that separate the two works.

Firstly, where Baby’s Dinner was, for all intents and purposes, an early piece of archival footage, insofar as it lacked any identifiable ‘story’ as such, here, a rudimentary, three-part, narrative can be sketched out: Fred Ott takes a pinch of snuff (an early form of tobacco, inserted into the nostril), sneezes, then recovers from this sneeze.

Secondly, where Baby’s Dinner, unsurprisingly, focused on the face of a baby, here, we are suddenly face-to-face with a grown man. But can we say that Fred Ott’s countenance expresses thoughts and feelings in this short film? Apart from a glimmer of satisfaction (pleasure? relief?) in his eyes, post sneeze, the answer, it seems, is no; and his face exists as a mindless visual spectacle, and that alone.

Want to know more?

Watch the film here.

Read about it here.