Alfred Clark's "The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots" is pretty much what the title says: a queen being beheaded. I discovered this while watching a strange documentary which included a clip from this film, and something in the image made me want to know more about what it was cause it seemed something real. Thankfully one can find anything on the internet and the result was knowing that it wasn't real. So, history gets represented by the image of a queen being decapitated and having her head exposed to the crowd. The interesting aspect of this is watching a very tricky scene happening, a good editing effect which can be noticed after a couple of views with a mannequin replacing the actor (Robert Thomae) playing the queen. But what really gives away about the editing being made was that the body falls while the head stays on a sort of table (I mean, isn't it "Off with the heads!" and then it falls down? It just stayed there.) Only distracted or easily impressive viewers will think this was a real execution but it's not. Just goes to show that some folks back in the 1800's were interested in making gory films or, perhaps the most fascinating aspect of it and the legacy such experiments gave us, was the filmmakers interest in using films to present history to audiences, retelling famous events of mankind. Gotta consider both ideas as being truly valid. 9/10

. . . do we really need a "plot summary"? Who is IMDb intended for, people with attention span deficit disorder (like the Ellen Degeneris character on FINDING NEMO)? I've only been registered on this site for a few days, but some of the things I already have seen here really makes a person wonder. Are long-time users paid somehow by the word? It takes longer to read some of the reviews than to actually watch the whole movie--twice!! And why is a "Parent's Guide" necessary for every single frame of film ever shot is the history of Planet Earth? I mean, if the title of the movie is VAMPIRE ZOMBIES vs. NAZI STRIPPERS, you hopefully wonnent be tempted to show it to your first grader. Will you? So with this film, if the title is THE EXECUTION OF MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS do you really need a parents' guide to tell you anything else? Do you need an exact count of how many drops of blood are shed in Mary's beheading??P.S.--The answer is: none that I could see, though it is amazing how seamless the transition from an actual person to an apparent chopping dummy is (given this was filmed 118 years ago). Though it is disillusioning to learn a guy played the queen, I still give this 8 points of 10, cuz I like docu-dramas, and this was the very first one!

Film was made in 1895, and of course special effects were very limited and the trick is very obvious.Anyway I found something really interesting in this short. The camera focuses on the beheading, and keeps there until the very end. I don't know any other film where that kind of scene is shown in such a crude way. If you see any modern film were someone is beheaded, they always avoid to show a first plane of the critical moment. May be they just put a black screen while you hear the axe chopping, or at most, they blur the image and after a second you may see the head rolling or in a basket but they always avoid to show a first plane of the axe or guillotine in the moment they cut the head.

1895 was a year of great importance in the history of cinema, the main reason for that is of course the beginning of the Lumière brothers' series of public showings of their movies. The brother's invention of the Cinematographe changed the way moving pictures were seen, as for the first time, images could be projected on a screen for an audience to see them, just like the theater. This event was a significant blow to Edison's Kinetoscope (then the most popular device used for watching moving pictures), as the Cinematographe offered a more comfortable experience when compared to the individual "peep show machine" of the Kinetoscope. In an attempt to save his invention, Edison hired Alfred Clark to make original films of a different subject matter to compete with the Cinematographe. The results were a series of representations of historical events, among them it was this movie, "The Execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of the Scots".In its barely one minute of duration, "The Execution of Mary Stuart" presents a representation of the beheading of Mary I of Scotland (Robert Thomae), monarch of the kingdom of Scotland who was executed in 1587 because of her supposed participation in plots to assassinate the Queen of England, Elizabeth I. The strange circumstances surrounding her trial and execution have transformed the figure of Queen Mary into a legendary icon of a victim of political intrigues (some see her as a martyr), making her life an inspiration for many works of art, and this short movie represents the first time her story was portrayed in film. While historically inaccurate (the real Mary was beheaded with three blows, instead of one), the movie has a very haunting atmosphere that even today looks very realistic and solemn.Despite having been made when Kinetoscope was in its last days, "The Execution of Mary Stuart" is a very important film for many different reasons. For starters, it was among the first movies to use trained actors, and the very first to have a man (Robert Thomae) playing a woman. Before Clark's historical movies, Kinetoscope's shorts were either moving pictures portraying everyday scenes (the Lumière would follow this format) or famous artists like Annie Oakley or Annabelle Moore performing their arts for the camera; Clark's movies changed this by having actors playing characters instead of themselves. While he didn't fully introduced theater's elements in his films (Georges Méliès and J. Searle Dawley would do that), his work was certainly groundbreaking as it was the seed of storytelling in films, and the beginning of the close relationship between theater and film.Finally, Alfred Clark's movie introduced another interesting element to cinema that would become one of its most important features in its future years: film editing. In order to achieve a realistic beheading, Clark decided to use a simple cut to change from the actor to a dummy that could be beheaded without problem. While a very simple device (that in this modern age of effects looks painfully obvious), this meant the first use of the medium's properties to achieve an effect (that was considered so real that some thought a real person was being killed on screen). Later pioneers like Georges Méliès and Edwin S. Porter would further develop this trick in order to create their fantastic magic. Kinetoscope died shortly after the release of this film, but while it wasn't a very successful movie on its release, "The Execution of Mary Stuart" is definitely one of the most important movies of those early years of cinema. 7/10