One of the significant aspects of this film is not in the film itself but what it represents in terms of Edison's Kinetograph and Kinetoscope. Instead of bringing performers to the camera, the camera was going to the performers on a farm. Many others were making films including: Lumiere, Paul and Melies in Europe; and American Mutoscope, Vitagraph and the (short lived)International Film Company in the United States. People now were preferring projected movies to those found in peep shows. Edison had sold about 900 Kinetoscopes but realized that the future was in projected movies; so he started projecting films in March of 1896. There were many other films on the market - even though Edison was trying his best to legally prevent it - that were much better than this one of a woman and a child feeding birds. The woman and the child are moving only their arms to throw the seed and it is the flurry of birds in the foreground that provide the 'action'. Movies like this could not compete against movies such as the railroad scenes or scenes of Niagara Falls.
Review of Feeding the Doves
