By DAVE KEHR
'Edison: The Invention of the Movies'
Motion pictures were invented in the 1890's, more or less simultaneously by several different researchers, including the Lumière brothers in France and Thomas A. Edison in the United States.
But the invention of the movies took a lot longer. The earliest films were simple, animated views - postcards that happened to move - that exhibitors assembled into programs. Just how these collections of unrelated, one-shot films evolved into the full-length features that remain the norm has been perhaps the liveliest focus of film academics for the last two decades.
The splendidly produced four-disc box set, "Edison: The Invention of the Movies," a joint venture between the Museum of Modern Art and Kino International, tells that story from one perspective, that of the Edison Manufacturing Company of Orange, N.J. Just as Edison had done with his earlier blockbuster invention, the phonograph, he was determined to control the software that fed his technological marvel, and in 1894 he became the first to sell films directly to theater owners around the country. The Edison studios were first based at the inventor's laboratory complex in Orange but later moved to East 21st Street in Manhattan and eventually to a large studio in the Bronx.
The views of late 19th- and early 20th-century New York are not the least of the fascinations of "The Invention of the Movies": here, in "The Kleptomaniac" (1904), is a well-dressed woman arriving by horse and carriage at the first Macy's department store at Sixth Avenue and 14th Street; a pair of tourists bustles through Manhattan (including a sleepy Times Square and a bustling Columbus Circle) in the 1910 "New York of Today," a film made for export to European exhibitors. There are also fascinating glimpses of turn-of-the-century popular culture, thanks to the various vaudeville and music hall performers who made the trip to Edison's studios: serpentine dancers, contortionists, even the sharpshooter Annie Oakley, seen picking off a few glass balls for the benefit of Edison's camera.
But the deepest interest here lies in the tremendous growth of meaning produced when individual shots are organized, apparently inadvertently at first, into narrative sequences. When Edwin S. Porter cuts to a close-up of a shapely ankle in "The Gay Shoe Clerk" (1903), he may only be underlining the voyeuristic value of the image, but he is also discovering the fluidity of point of view that would become the movies' first and greatest claim to superiority over the theater. Only a few months later, that simple, instinctive edit became part of a complex narrative system that bound together half a dozen characters and several shifts of location in Porter's "The Great Train Robbery," the one-reel film that became the infant art form's first runaway success.
"The Great Train Robbery" is presented in "Edison: The Invention of the Movies" as a transfer from a first-generation hand-tinted 35-millimeter print held by the Museum of Modern Art, and it should be a revelation to those who have encountered this film only as a dusty, badly duplicated antique. This is the movie as audiences at the time saw it - something modern, dynamic and lightning fast, a plausible birth-moment for a medium that would come to dominate the century.
Produced by two of the leading scholars of early film, Steven Higgins of the Modern and Charles Musser of Yale, the collection lends itself best to computer browsing, where extensive menus help the user navigate through the more than 140 films and extensive supplementary material the discs contain. The set is so fine that it cries out for a companion volume tracing the history of Edison's chief rival, the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, which became the home base of America's first great artist of the medium, D. W. Griffith. $99.95.
) NY Times while reading up on new DVD releases.
I would love to have that. Thanks for the links Zen. You know I love all this classic stuff. 
So cool that someone would put this out as well for all of us to enjoy!