Did a working-class Bristolian eccentric invent cinema?

Given that Bristol is now officially a UNESCO City of Film, perhaps it’s time we re-stated our claim as the birthplace of cinema. This has always been hotly contested, of course, as these things often are.

The debate will be re-opened at July’s fourth annual edition of Cinema Rediscovered, when film director and former Bristol resident Peter Domankiewicz returns to the city to unveil the latest fruits of his decades of research into the enigma that is William Friese-Greene, who went bankrupt three times, was jailed once and died penniless in bizarre circumstances.

Posthumously rehabilitated as a Great British Inventor who beat Edison and the Lumiere brothers in the race to put moving pictures up on screen, his reputation was trashed once again by a subsequent generation of film historians.

The city actually has three plaques celebrating his work, but you might be forgiven for not noticing them. The main one is around the back of City Hall on College Green, marking his birthplace (having been moved there from a house across the road which was demolished to make way for a car park). There’s another one on the Clifton Triangle, marking the site of his apprenticeship. A third can be found outside the Orpheus cinema in Henleaze. Put up in 1939, this celebrates the 50th anniversary of Friese-Greene being awarded a patent for his Kinematograph.

So who exactly was William Friese-Greene and how strong is his claim to have invented moving pictures? It’s a long and convoluted story.

For a start, his name wasn’t William Friese-Greene. William Edward Green was born in 1855. His father was a metalworker who worked on the suspension bridge, but despite his humble origins the young William won a scholarship to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital School in Jacob’s Wells Road. He was then apprenticed to a photographic studio on the Triangle and married a Swiss woman called Helena Friese, unusually taking her name and adding an additional ‘E’ to his own.

By all accounts, Friese-Greene was a wacky guy. A compulsive inventor whose non-starters included the Cinema Hat (an animated sandwich board-style device), he also devised his own phototypesetting machine, chemically powered engine, 3D imaging device, printing-without-ink process and even a gyroscopically controlled airship. Family legend has it that when the British government rejected the latter, he promptly sold it to the more appreciative Germans, who passed it on to a certain Count Zeppelin.

In 1877, the Friese-Greenes decamped to Bath where they ran a photographic shop at 7 The Corridor, which remained in the family until the late 1970s. They also opened a studio at 34 Gay Street. It was here that Friese-Greene experienced his ‘Eureka!’ moment when a magic lantern enthusiast and scientific instrument maker grandly named John Arthur Roebuck Rudge introduced him to a seven-sided device called the Biophantic Lantern. From that moment on, he became obsessed with the challenge of recording motion on film. Whether or not he succeeded has always been in dispute. One thing is for certain: Friese-Greene slowly faded from public view and was almost completely forgotten by the outbreak of the First World War.

Then, in 1921, the now poverty-stricken inventor was gripped by the desire to attend a meeting in London, chaired by Lord Beaverbrook, intended to resolve a dispute over cinema exhibition. He stood up and made a speech about himself and the film industry and why they should settle their grievances, then sat down and died of heart failure.

Robert Donat as William Friese-Greene in The Magic Box

A massive outpouring of guilt over the forgotten man of British cinema ensued, with what amounted to a state funeral boasting a sea of massive, tacky floral tributes. In cinemas across the land, projectors were switched off for two minutes in tribute. Thus was the myth of Friese-Greene born, bolstered by an early collector of cinema apparatus called Will Day and the publication in 1948 of a slim hagiography entitled Close-Up of an Inventor by a certain ‘Ray Allister’, who turned out to be a women’s magazine hack named Muriel Forth.

By the time of the Festival of Britain, the British film industry was keen to celebrate one of its own. Friese-Greene fitted the bill and his story was told in the downbeat biopic The Magic Box (“Patriotic, sentimental, overlong and faintly embarrassing” – Time Out), whose all-star cast included Richard Attenborough, Laurence Olivier and Peter Ustinov.

This was much loved by Martin Scorsese, but typical of its cavalier approach to historical fact is a scene where Friese-Greene is depicted having an earnest conversation with photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot, when in reality the two men never met.

Naturally, all this irked respectable film historians such as the late Brian Coe, who launched a furious backlash, painting Friese-Greene as a scoundrel and a liar who stole other people’s ideas. Here in Bristol, we’re not having that. South West Silents have kept up a tireless campaign to celebrate our local hero. On his birthday last September, they raised a glass (or several) of Friese-Greene Ale (“golden, fruity and hoppy”), created in collaboration with Bristol’s Dawkins Brewery.

Now, Peter Domankiewicz promises to untangle the truth from the mass of contradictions in a talk that reveals the results of the most substantial research to date into the life and work of this great Victorian inventor. It takes place at the Watershed on Sunday, July 28. For tickets and more information, visit www.watershed.co.uk/whatson/9772/victorian-film-inventor-friesegreene

Read more: 15 places in Bristol that once were cinemas