Fred Ott's Sneeze

Fred Ott (1860-1936) worked as an assistant in Thomas Edison's laboratory around 1890, and in a sense, he was the first movie star in history. On a filmstrip, just five seconds long, called “Fred Ott's Sneeze”, we can watch him taking a pinch of snuff and sneezing. Such a mundane “plot” was apparently interesting enough for Edison to present the new film technology to the public for the first time. I liked the idea that Fred Ott's sneeze became in some ways a “big bang” for the history of film. But the composition is neither a film score, nor a “snuff orgy”. Rather, general aspects of film technology play a main role, e.g. the direct transformation of short-movie dialogues (respectively their computer analysis) or abrupt cuts. This leads to breathless interactions among live performance and electronics in video-clip-style.

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