Library of Congress posts 1891 film footage (and ancient LOLcats)

It's shorter even than most YouTube clips, and we don't see any Oscars in its future, but a 29-second snippet from the voluminous Library of Congress archive has the honor of being one of the oldest known videos still extant.

The silent clip, embedded below or downloadable from the LoC, shows a young man swinging a set of Indian clubs. The event was filmed sometime during the spring of 1891 on an Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera, using 3/4-inch wide film.

The clip is believed to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, film clips still extant from Edison's New Jersey studios. The oldest known film footage, the two-second "Roundhay Garden Scene," is of British origin and dates from 1888.

Sadly, it took just three years after the Indian-club footage for early filmmakers to be infected by the scourge of LOLcats, proving that any promising technology will sooner or later be infected by an excess of cute:

(HT to Mashable.)