Mark’s storiesEveryday life

The only moving picture of me

Some young men from Mr. Edison's company came out to the house with a camera that takes pictures that move. I moved. Here is the result. I am told it will outlast me, which will not take much.

Mark Twain10 August 1909 · 1 min readFollow

This summer two young men came out from Mr. Edison's company in New York with a camera on legs and asked whether I would walk about the garden for them. I said I had been walking about gardens for seventy-three years without anybody wishing to see it, and they said that was why. So I put on the white suit and walked about, and they turned a handle, and here it is.

Stormfield, 1909: me, the white suit, the porch, and later my daughters and I at cards. The flicker is the film. The rest is me. · Watch on YouTube

I have watched it three times. The first time I thought: what a distinguished old gentleman. The second time I thought: he walks like a man who has been told about his liver. The third time I left before the end, which I recommend. It is a great thing, a moving picture. It shows a man exactly as he is, which no newspaper has ever done, and which no man should be asked to sit through.

A hand holding a lit cigar, smoke rising — Not in the film, by special arrangement with my daughter Clara. But present.

They tell me this film will be shown long after I am gone. I hope the audience is better behaved than the one I had.

That is all. It is a short picture. I am told the young men are going to use some of it in a play about a prince and a pauper, which is a book of mine, so I shall be in the pictures twice, once as myself and once as a stranger, and I will leave it to the public which is the better performance.

Stormfield, Redding, Connecticut