Buffalo’s Vitascope Theatre + Edisonia Hall – Free Exhibit

For 130 years, the people of Buffalo have shared stories and dreamed aloud together in the cinema.

In the lower level of the Ellicott Square Building in downtown Buffalo, the first dedicated cinema was designed by brothers Mitchel and Moe Mark, and built from scratch solely to screen motion pictures. Buffalo’s Vitascope Theatre and adjacent Edisonia Hall opened to the general public on October 19, 1896. Buffalo International Film Festival is founded on a celebration of this legacy, and each October over Indigenous Peoples Day holiday week/end, we try our best to honor it by illuminating screens across the city and presenting over 200 films from around the region and the world.

Earlier in 1896 Thomas Edison had demonstrated his latest invention & the Vitascope & at the Buffalo Public Library. The Vitascope was the first commercially-successful celluloid motion picture projector in the US. At the same time, Auguste and Louis Lumière were traveling across Europe with their Cinématographe, a combination camera and projector. This nascent technology, projecting motion pictures of everything from history-making events to scenes from everyday life, fascinated audiences and filled theaters. The films were very short, under a minute long.

The films looping on the monitor are curated from old newspaper articles and advertisements, and are the very same that the people of Buffalo enjoyed .4 miles to south and west of this library 130-years ago. A typical Vitascope program might include dances and boxing matches along with street scenes of Paris, Moscow, and Berlin. Local audiences also saw familiar sights when the Edison Manufacturing Company captured views of Buffalo and Niagara Falls. For roughly two years, films were screened daily at Buffalo’s Vitascope Theatre from 10 AM to 11 PM in a continuous performance.

The curiosity cabinets in this exhibition focus on some of the pre-cinema technologies like magic lanterns and phonographs that one would encounter at a typical Edisonia Parlor.

This exhibition is part of BIFF’s 20th anniversary programming and Buffalo Film History Series & celebrating 130 years of film production and cinematic exhibition in Buffalo, from the Vitascope to WNY’s current renaissance.