User Reviews

A man flies his small, dirigible-like craft above Paris, occasionally waving his hat at the audience in this early movie by Ferdinand Zecca.

It's an improbable-looking airplane from the modern viewpoint, but people were already flying dirigibles two years before the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk.

Zecca came to films from the stage. Charles Pathe originally hired him to set up Pathe's pavilion at the 1900 Paris exposition, then at Vincennes as a direcorial assistant. He soon was in charge of the film-making division, supervising other directors. He went to America to handle Pathe's affairs there, made his last film in 1913, and worked for the company until he retired in 1939. He died in 1947 at the age of 83.

A man flies on a machine that looks like a submarine and a flying bullet in an overview over Paris.

A well-dressed gentleman pilots a strange, pedal-powered, flying machine (a 'fend-l'air') over the rooftops of Paris. The short silent film, made by early French auteur Ferdinand Zecca in 1901, may be both the first to depict a flying machine and to use a split-screen to achieve a special effect. The pilot (Zecca?), was suspended from the ceiling of the studio and the image captured on a segment of film with the bottom-half masked off. The masking was reversed, the film rewound and the lower half of the image (a Paris scene) was filmed. The combined image, a man flying over the city, must have been a marvel to contemporary viewers. Oddly, the machine's propeller and steering wheel are parallel to the direction of motion, likely to allow viewers to understand how the strange contraption could 'fly'. Also odd: the pilot is using only one pedal to propel the machine (the left side pedal is seen rotating but there is no foot on it). A unique and historic short from the earliest days of film-making. The IMDB date of 1906 may refer to the release date in the U.S. (three years after the first flight of an actual heavier-than-air flying machine, which likely made Zecca's contraption look pretty silly).