William Friese-Greene and the art of collaboration

In the writing of histories of the beginnings of moving pictures, little attention has been paid to how the social status and personalities of key figures have influenced the received accounts of who did what. Instead, these histories have often been driven by advocacy for or hostility towards individual inventors. A fresh assessment is presented of four early collaborations involving a particularly controversial film pioneer, William Friese-Greene, drawing on a wider range of sources than previous research, which reveals a very different picture to the version generally accepted by academics for over sixty years. The work of other early moving picture pioneers who were his contemporaries is then scrutinised for uncredited collaborations, and the manner in which these inventors obscured or disregarded their collaborators is contrasted with Friese-Greene’s attitude towards his. Since uncredited collaborations are to be found almost everywhere one looks in the invention of cinema, it makes little sense to criticise Friese-Greene for being explicit about his. Rather, historians should be more attentive in exploring what the names on patents truly signify.