Australia's first film to roll | Ipswich Movies | Movie Reviews and Cinemas in Ipswich

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AUSTRALIA'S earliest known surviving film has been screened on home soil for the first time more than 110 years since its creation.

It has been lauded as an historic moment - one that portrays the origin of Australia's long love affair with film.

Captured in 1896, Patineur Grotesque - or the Humorous Rollerskater - features a bearded, top-hatted, cigar-smoking gentleman as he rollerskates before a crowd.

The busker lifts his waistcoat to reveal a white hand on the seat of his trousers and later trips and falls in the comical sketch, which took place in an unknown Melbourne park.

An intern at Canberra's National Film and Sound Archive discovered the film was in an archive in France when examining those made by Frenchman Marius Sestier, the man credited with bringing movies to Australia.

The old 35mm film was sent to archivists - along with another 1896 film showing the weighing in for the Melbourne Cup - and painstakingly adapted to digital format.

An Australian crowd, including Sestier's great-grandchildren and Arts Minister Peter Garrett, watched Patineur Grotesque for the first time on Wednesday.

Surprisingly, the footage had been watched in Europe and as far away as Mexico, but never in Australia, Mr Garrett said.

He called the restoration of the film, as well as the Melbourne Cup footage, an important piece of Australian cinematic history.

Both will now be housed at the national archive.

"We do have a love affair with film in this country," Mr Garrett told the crowd.

"And (both films) show two things very close to our hearts - humour and the Melbourne Cup."

They may have been simply documentaries of events at the time, but over a century, their meaning and significance has grown exponentially, Mr Garrett said.

The archive's chairman Chris Puplick said Patineur Grotesque captured the beginnings of Australia's film culture, back when "Hollywood was still a cow paddock".

Sestier opened Australia's first cinema in Sydney's Pitt Street in 1896 as a representative of pioneering movie company, Freres Lumiere.

The former chemist made films in India and Australia before returning to France.

Some of his personal documents - handed to the archive by his descendents and including preserved scrapbooks, diaries, account and log books - have been put on display at the archive.

The film can be viewed at http://aso.gov.au/titles/patineur-grotesque/clip1/ on the archive's website.