Philippe Mora's Richard III: the World's first internet film

The fragility of digital files

Sally Jackson

Despite its relatively short history, it’s hard to imagine that the internet had a beginning and a list of first times. The first releases and broadcasts of recorded sound, cinema, radio and television have become iconic, so the ‘firsts’ of the internet can and should take their place amongst their predecessors.

Philippe Mora’s Richard III was acknowledged by Apple at the moment of broadcast in 1996 as being the first film made for and broadcast on the internet as part of a program they had initiated. That the film should survive almost two decades when so much of the internet’s content is lost on a daily basis is astonishing. That it should surface just as the world’s film production, distribution and exhibition has almost moved wholly to the digital realm is opportune. The film provides a marker in film and cinema history that we can now look back on to see where we have come.

For a film archive the challenge is to collect, preserve and make accessible films regardless of their original format, and ensuring the film’s original intention and integrity is paramount. What is obvious is the challenges with any analogue format are as important in the digital world. Digital files are just as fragile as other film formats, perhaps more so because a 0 or 1 out of place can cause the film to be transformed into something else. Every pixel has to be accounted for so we can continue to watch the film.

Richard III was produced on Betacam SP, a well-known format able to be preserved but not without its problems. The 58-minute film was transferred to MPEG (this is the first MPEG, not MPEG 2 or MPEG4 or JPEG2000 or any of the other myriad of digital encoding types) to be loaded up or down through a dial-up modem – a buffering nightmare by today’s standards and an endurance test for audiences.

Although we have a transcript of the online chat that accompanied the screening it would be wonderful to know who was watching, where they were and what they thought. Did they find significance in the fact that this ‘first’ of the digital age is one of the regularly still performed plays by 16th century playwright William Shakespeare, or did they ponder the parallels between the timing of the screening and the beginning of the concept of the cinema a tad over a century earlier in 1895-96? Questions which can’t be answered in an article but as the history of the internet unfolds can perhaps be considered for another time.

Download: Richard III - Apple chat transcript 1996

Philippe Mora