Santos Dumont Explaining His Air Ship to the Hon. C.S. Rolls

In 2002, USP researcher Carlos Adriano found a reel of 1,339 photographic cards - 658 cards with image and 681 white or black cards - in the collection of the Museu Paulista of the University of São Paulo, without title identification, authorship, date, place or production process. The only information available was his tumble number in the Santos Dumont Collection of the Museu Paulista. The object was catalogued as a "cinedoscope" in the database. In the Dossier of the Collection, it read: "kinedoscope reel with series of photos of Santos Dumont in his office - check". The only informative reference found in the Museum's collection, besides an episodic mention of a lost cut from Jornal de Notícias, was the record in the donation inventory (1935) of the family of Santos Dumont, which classifies the piece as a "cinematographic wheel". Both names (cinedoscope and film wheel) were wrong.^[2]

Through the crossing of excavated data and extensive consultations with Paul C. Spehr, retired curator of the Library of Congress in Washington and an expert on early cinema, it was possible to identify the film that originated the reel of photographs found at the Museu Paulista: Spehr reported that his notes on the projection of the film-mutoscope of Santos Dumont came from a research by Luke McKernan, a British early cinema researcher, on the exhibition programs of the Palace Theatre in London.^[5] In an evening session on December 3, 1901, it was shown, among other films, Santos Dumont explaining his air ship to the Hon. C. S. Rolls.^[6]

In other words, it was possible to identify Santos Dumont's film-mutoscope through the record of its exhibition.^[6]

In short, after extensive research, it was confirmed that it was a mutoscope, a device that displayed in a loop, to an individual viewer, a series of small photographs reproduced from 68mm film and loaded onto a metal reel.^[7] In the original film format, the material was also shown on screen, to an audience, by means of a projector equipped for the magnificent 68mm format.^[6]

The piece was restored. The reel (which was broken) was dismantled, the cards were scanned, and the tiff files of the images were edited in a digital video editing program,^[7] being reordered in sequence and its position in the frame fixed, in order to produce a continuous movement: the photographs of the reel were converted into photograms, reconstituting its cinematographic nature.^[8]

Carlos Adriano classified the restored film as a "singular object from the beginning of cinema, with no equivalence in Brazilian history", calling it "the rare moving record of Santos Dumont".^[8]

• Adriano, Carlos (2018). "O mutoscópio de Santos Dumont e a poética do found footage" [Santos Dumont’s mutoscope and the poetics of found footage]. Anais do Museu Paulista. Nova Série (in Brazilian Portuguese). 26 (8). São Paulo: 1–42. doi:10.1590/1982-02672018v26e08. S2CID 194831934.
• Rosa, Carlos Adriano Jeronimo de (2008). O mutoscópio explica a invenção do pensamento de Santos Dumont: cinema experimental de reapropriação de arquivo em forma digital (PDF) (tese) (in Brazilian Portuguese).

• Colorized
• Santos Dumont Explaining His Air Ship to the Hon. C.S. Rolls at IMDb
• Santos Dumont Explaining His Air Ship to the Hon. C.S. Rolls at the Internet Archive