First cat video ever? 1899, colorized & speed corrected.
I am always blown away by this. Like. This little girl was alive and laughing and wearing her little hat and in the sunshine over 100 years ago. And her cat was eating little treats from her hands and having a fun little time over 100 years ago. Like. Their existence in history is recorded as so much more than the moody and serious black and white Victorian family portraits. AND WE GET TO SEE IT AND FEEL AS HAPPY AS THEY WERE! I have so many feelings!
If anybody wants to look it up, it’s called “La Petite Fille et son Chat”.
Sound was added as well as colour, and the whole thing was sharpened.
However, it’s got an incorrect caption, and there are comments which point this out as proof the clip is “fake” because “it can’t be a video…”
Of course it can’t. The original clip isn’t a video, it’s a film.
Video tape wouldn’t be invented for another 50 years (1951) and home video cameras wouldn’t appear until 1983. However the ponderous Edison Kinetograph camera was working with photographic film in about 1890, and much smaller cameras using the same kind of film became available in Europe from about 1895.
One of those cameras took this clip, and here’s the original - silent, uncolourised, unsharpened and looking its age.
*****
There are also comments claiming “fake” because “the chair is plastic”, and in mitigation there are several instances when shifts in colourisation suggest this, especially with the table turning grey-ish just after the cat jumps off.
These three examples of similar high-chairs from the same 1895-1900 period are not plastic.
They’re wood, not plastic.
The clip is film, not video.
It’s real, not fake.
*****
Speed correction was done because that clip, taken by one of the French movie pioneers Auguste or Louis Lumiére with a camera something like this…
…would have been mounted on a tripod and worked by a hand-crank which, no matter how good the camera operator, would have created tiny variations in speed.
(AFAIK working that crank is still the hand-sign for “film” when playing charades.)
Take a look at 0:34, where I suspect that after the cat jumped down - possibly curious about the sound or motion of the cine-camera in action - someone out of frame picked it up and tossed it back onto the table, because its arrival certainly didn’t look like any cat jumping from ground level.
After which it concluded that since the next few seconds included treats, then treats it would be… :->
