GREAT SCENES
Mr. Edison at Work in His Chemical Laboratory (William Heise/James White, 1897)

Born today — February 11: American inventor Thomas Alva Edison, whose 1,093 credited patents include the kinetoscope, the first fully functional motion picture camera.

By 1893, construction was complete on the world first film production studio, the Black Maria in West Orange, New Jersey. Here, cinematographers captured Edison at work in a mock staging of his actual chemical laboratory.

For Edison, who often employed ruthless tactics to advance his inventions — including bribing a theater owner in London for a copy of Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, then showing the film in New York City without compensating Méliès — the arrival of sound in motion pictures “spoiled everything.” In an interview with Reader’s Digest in March 1930, he cited D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation as his favorite film.

Happy birthday, Martin Scorsese

The illustrious American filmmaker turns 69 today.

David Liu | 17 November 2011

“Now more than ever we need to talk to each other, to listen to each other and understand how we see the world, and cinema is the best medium for doing this.”

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Late rapper Tupac Shakur, who would have turned 40 today, made his film debut in Ernest R. Dickerson’s Juice (1992).

Happy birthday, Hayao Miyazaki

David Liu | 5 January 2011

The Japanese animator turns 70 today, and if you’re like me, this means sitting back and soaking in each frame of Princess Mononoke again for the umpteenth time. In July of 2009, I was fortunate enough to witness the man in person when he visited Berkeley for a rare stateside appearance. Below is the first in-depth film feature I wrote for The Daily Californian, in which I interviewed a handful of professors, authors and scholars on Miyazaki and his superlative global influence.

And to answer the question that gets thrown around so often: My personal favorite of Miyazaki’s would be the aforementioned Mononoke, followed closely by Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and Howl’s Moving Castle. But since each of his films are all incredible achievements in their own right, perhaps it’s still asking a bit too much!

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