TV REVIEWS : What Did Edison Know? And When Did He Know It?

History is notable for oversights. “The Missing Reel,” shown today at 5 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. on the Bravo cable channel, suggests that one of its most egregious might involve the invention of the motion picture camera.

Usually, it is ascribed to that protean American, Thomas Alva Edison. But perhaps it was actually created by a Frenchman with a British wife, whose descendants settled in Memphis and who disappeared mysteriously en route from Dijon to Paris. His name: Augustin Le Prince.

Who was Le Prince, and why is his name missing from most film encyclopedias--including Emmanuel Katz’s? According to writer-director Christopher Rawlence’s docudrama, the first produced by Bravo, Le Prince was, like William Friese-Greene (“The Magic Box”), one of several inventors working toward motion pictures who were “beaten” by Edison. The film, constructed as a mystery story with restaged scenes and talking heads, raises other troubling questions.

Le Prince’s wife, Lizzie, apparently went to her grave convinced that agents of Edison had caused her husband’s disappearance--and, perhaps, his murder. That their son, Adolphe, was shot to death too, in a presumed accident, during a hearing in which he was testifying against Edison, only darkens speculations. So does the curious fact that Edison initially thought so little of his invention that he assigned the construction to an assistant, W. K. L. Dickson, and consigned its main use, at first, to peep-shows.

Edison, an American hero and true icon, has emerged as a villain of sorts in other recent movies--most notably “The Secret of Nikola Tesla.” Here muckraking is mixed with the pathos of Le Prince’s story. There seems little doubt that he did design some sort of movie camera, successfully demonstrated it in 1888, a year before Edison, experienced difficulty with the American patent bureau, suffered severe economic hardship and vanished before he could exploit it in public.

At the building in Leeds, England, where Le Prince worked, there is now a plaque commemorating his achievement. This movie is another memorial. And, though Rawlence has a somewhat stiff and set-bound style, he raises questions provocatively. Edison was mighty; Le Prince was small. That was the crucial difference between them--and the film raises disturbing thoughts about the validity of an iconography based principally on power and prestige.