Scott Lord Silent Film: The Great Train Robbery (Porter,1903)

In the autobiographical reminiscences William N. Selig printed in Photoplay Magazine during 1920, Selig, perhaps almost graciously, credits Edison with the "first single reel picture containing a story in continuity", although he adds that "The Great Train Robbery" was only 800 feet and that he was soon on Edison's coattails with films of his own of length equal to it. Interestingly, Selig recounts in the article director Frank Boggs as "the real pioneer in photographic reproduction", his during 1908 releasing a one reel film every week; Selig claims Boggs was assasinated on the Selig Studios during 1912. Vladimir Petric in A Visual/Analytical History of Silent Film (1895-1930), Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, notes Porter's "The Great Train Robbery" as a "primitive use of parralel editing to dramatize the narrative". Not only is this in sharp contrast to the earlier cinema of attractions that relegated storytelling to the act of display, but the film is significant as the first film made in the Western genre. It is uncanny that the closing shot, as a subjective shot, is an attraction, something static and something dispalyed, urging the spectatator to draw and shoot back. Patric Vonderau and Vinzenz Hedigar have written, "The visuality of the display, however, is still indispensible to its effect."- albeit their recent volume, Films That Work, is primarily concerned with international industrial films.

Author Nicholas A. Vardac opines that it was the films of Edwin S. Porter that D.W. Griffith aquired the technique of viewing the shot within its context as a "syntax for the melodrama". Whether crosscutting began with Edwin S. Porter and "The Great Train Robbery", a film which is attributed as having used croscutting in the volume The Film Idea, written by Stanley J. Solomon, or whether it was more properly developed by D.W. Griffith around 1908, as with the parallel editing in the 1907 films "The Greaser's Gauntlet" and "The Fatal Hour" (Phillipe Gauthier, Harvard University), author Stanley Solomon points out that crosscutting was intrinsiclly cinematic, rather than dramaturgical or theatrical by describing it as "a technique suitable to the form of cinema but unnatural to the form of nineteenth century stage drama, which was at that time a significant influence on the new media." A recent online film class on how to "read" a film from described the film as being comprised of "seperate shots of non-continuous, non-overlapping action" while being careful to designate the film as an early example of crosscutting. Of "The Great Train Robbery", author Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, writes, "The movement, as well as the narrative, was carried over from one scene to another." Cowie mentions the film "Runaway Match", directed in 1903 by Alf Collins as being an early narrative silent in which "camera movements and positions are exploited to advantage". The film is fast paced, depicting a couple hurriedly en route to their betrothal, but includes a close up insert shot of their wedding rings. John L. Fell, in his volume A History of Film, chronicles, "Tracking shots, as from a moving vehicle, appear in The Runaway Match (1905), where a shot from a moving car is followed by one from the auto chasing it."

While viewing The Chase FIlm as filmic drama and as one of Hollywood's earliest developing genres, "the true chase- which because of its very nature can't help being cinematic", Kenneth McGowan in his volume Behind the Screen, the history and technique of the motion picture, provides a reference to Georges Sandoul having claimed that "The Robbery at the Mail Coach (1903) had been an inspiration for Edwin S. Porter before his making the film. Kenneth McGowan noted Porter's use of matte shots during "The Great Train Robbery".

After having defined a seminal theory of the cinema of attractions to fit early examples of pioneer cinema, Tom Gunning goes further to see it surplanted by a cinema of narrative integration-during a discussion on early Biograph films Gunning mentions that the films "A Trip to the Moon" and "The Great Train Robbery" are in fact narrative by virtue of being storytelling, but lack the characterization involved in later films. Tom Gunning goes further to imply that a cinema of narrative integration began with D.W. Griffith, leaving out Edwin S. Porter, Gunning citing two of Porter's films, "College Chums" (1907) and "Cupid Pranks" (1908), which employed a split screen, as having lacked the "articulation of the dramatic content through filmic means." Gunning writes that even Porter's later films, "Although narrative films, they seem more related to the cinema of attractions' display of technological novelties." Athur Knight, as early as 1957 in his volume The Liveliest Art, matter of factly records that Melies' 1902 film "A Trip to the Moon" antedated "our own" "The Great Train Robbery" of 1903 in having "demonstrated the narrative powers of the new medium",but credits the cinema of attractions with adding the novelty of seeing real things in motion, ie. locomotives thundering down the track and ocean waves crashing towards the audience. Knight then credits Edward S. Porter as having eclipsed Melies as a director by his film having "revealed for the first time the function and the power of the cut in telling a story on the screen.....No less important to the success of 'The Great Train Robbery' was its freshness of camera placement." D.W. Griffith would be credited with breaking the standard distance between the actor and authorial camera's view of the actor as seen by the audience, the Vitagraph nine foot line, by changing the placement of the camera mid-scene, as when cutting to a closer angle- characterization integrated with narrativity. It should be noted that prior to 1908, the director at the Biograph Film Company was Wallace McCutcheon, who directed with Edward S. Porter and was responsible for two Westerns filmed during 1903, "The Pioneers" and "Kit Carson" and the 1907 film "Daniel Boone". With its pedestrian lack of plot, the 1906 film "A Winter Straw Ride", filmed by Edward S. Porter with Wallace McCutheon for Edison, features the attraction of movement within the frame, diagnol movement from the background of the shot to the foreground, which intentionally or unintentionally, reverses screen direction from left screen to right to right screen to left and then later in fact reverses screen direction from background to foreground to foreground to background. The entirety of the one reeler is kept in exterior long shot. Tom Gunning has written, "The cinema of attractions, rather than telling stories, bases itself on film's ability to show something". Gunning almost goes so far as to describe it as exhibitionist rather than voyueristic and this nearly accounts for the characters in McCutheon's film quickly approaching the camera and quickly retreating from it. It would be D.W. Griffith that would pioneer the cinema of narrative integration.

Iris Barry included 'The Great Train Robbery' in her volume D.W. Griffith, American Film Master, "Edwin S. Porter in 'The Great Train Robbery' had taken a vital step in introducing a rough form of crosscutting, thus introducing a radically cinematic method of telling a story quite unlike the stage-bound method employed earlier. Porter had discovered the film's ability to juggle with time and space or to follow a continuity unlike that of normal experience."

Film historian Charles Mussur, looking at "The Great Train Robbery" in Before the Nickelodeon :Edwin S. Porter, writes, "Porter's film meticulously documents a process...The film's narrative structure, as Gaudreault notes, utilizes temporal repetition with an overall narrative progression." As narrative it was essentially a reenactment film. He adds that "Porter exploited procedures that heighten the realism and believabilty of the image" (David Levy).

It is apparent that "The Great Train Robbery" was filmed not only in the studio, but on actual locations, including in fact a train Porter had borrowed in New Jersey; it also apparent that "The Great Train Robbery" released during 1904 by Sigmund Lubin also combined scenes filmed both outdoors and inside the studio, the film also concluding with a close up of an outlaw. Catalougues "free upon request" featuring "Lubin's Latest Hits" list Lubin's "The Great Train Robbery" as running 600 ft, there being sixteen seperate scenes to the film. The 1903 Edison Manufacturing Company catalougue lists the running legnth of Edison's "The Great Train Robbery", a "sensationaland highly tragic subject", as 740 ft, the film divided into fourteen scenes.

The sequel to "The Great Train Robbery", titled "The Little Train Robbery" (1905) although directed by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Company, is a parody, and features an all child actor cast. Film historian John L. Fell notes a use of horizontal camera movement, "pans that serve the purpose of more distant camera angles or else functionally to follow the action", in the film, but laments the lack of deep space that could have been created by diagnal movement within the frame. Fell points out that during "The Great Train Robbery", "Porter's camera swivels and angles diagnally to follow the action." when, during an exterior shot the outlaws leap from the locomotive down an embankment.

In regard to the concluding shot of the film with the outlaw, a shot that quickly reminds us of The Syndics of the Drapers' Guild by Rembrandt, Tom Gunning, writing about Attractions in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded edited by Wanda Strauven, sees the end shot as an "interruption to narrative coherence". Charles Musser writes that the cinema of attractions was a cinema of astonishment that evolved quickly into multi-shot narrative having as a common denominator of "actions", the filmed event. He continues that in the "The Great Train Robbery" the action of the bandit pointing at the audience and then later shooting one of the characters in film was intended to bring an occaision of spectatorial identification.

Crosscutting and paralell editing in A Narrow Escape Silent Film D. W. Griffith

Scott Lord Silent Film: Linda Arvidson in The Adventures of Dollie (D.W....

Actress Linda Arvidson, writing in the periodcial Film Fun during 1916, includes the "now historic" film "The Advntures of Dollie" (one reel) directed by D.W Griffith for the Biograph Film Companyin 1908. Arvidson wrote under the name Mrs. D.W. Griffith. In one installment she reminisces about travelling to film exterior scenes, claiming they hadn't automobiles yet and visited locations by train or by boat. In a later installment she dicusses her salary for the film, "How much money I made! Twenty eight dollars in two weeks, enough for a whole spring outfit." What is more enjoyable is the autobiography of Mrs. D.W. Griffith, When Movies Were Young, published in 1925. Much of the material from the Film Fun periodical is repeated, worded similarly, as she gives an account of D.W. Griffith the actor being offered a provisional chance to direct his first film, "The Adventures of Dollie", given that he could return to acting if necessary. Mrs. D.W. Griffith exlains Griffith having been accepted as a director for Biograph, "For one year now, those movies so covered with slime and so degraded would have to come first to come first in his thoughts and affections....agonizing days when he would have given his life to be able to chuck the job." She includes not only the studio on East Fourteenth Street but the theaters on Third and Ninth Avenues as places into which one would not be seen going.


Author Edward Wagenkneckt, in his volume The Films of D.W. Griffith, chronicles that 'The Adventures of Dollie", filmed in July of 1908, was the first of 450 films directed by D.W. Griffith for the Biograph Film Company before leaving in September of 1913 all but eleven having been one reelers. The cinematographer to the film was Arthur Marvin. Arthur Marvin also during 1908 photographed the film "Behind the Scenes" for D.W. Griffith, the film having starred Florence Lawrence, Kate Bruce and Gladys Egan.

Lillian Gish, i her autobiography The Mr. Griffith and Me, with writer Ann Pinchot, chronicles that "The Adventures of Dollie" was the film that had begun Griffith's catapult to fame, "Although Billy Bitzer was not the photographer to the film, he helped with the direction...Soon everyone wanted more films by the man who was responsible for 'Dollie' . On the momentum of his first success, he turned out ten more pictures in a month." Lillian Gish quotes G.W. Bitzer in the chapter, but note that Bitzer's autobiography was published four years after Gish's.

Author Roger Manvell, in his sixty page introduction to the anthology "Experiment in the Film" credits "The Adventures of Dollie" as the first film in which D.W. Griffith had used the flashback.

Film historian John L. Fell claimed that the film "gains stregnth from the vertical and diagnal mobements of a barrel flaoting down river, over a fallsand to the water's edge with a little girl trapped inside."

Peter Cowie, in his volume Eighty Years of Cinema, notes that it was in 1908, in the film "For Love of Gold", that D.W. Griffith had first used the close up shot in film.

Robert Fell, in his volume A History of Film notes that "all but eight" of the films D.W. Griffith made fir the Biograph Film Company survived and were available for screening in 1979, virtually removing him from the subject of lost silent film. In regard to my webpage series "Lost Films, Found Magazines", begun at a time when film preservation was unearthing many unseen masterpieces from the silent era, author Tom Gunning, in his volume D.W. Griffith and the origins of American Narrative Film, lends a caution that supports the premise of needing a film history detective while dismissing the perfect accuracy of historiography and the endeavor. "The accounts of Griffith's biograph films given by Lewis Jacobs, George Sandoul and Jean Mitry are filled with descriptions that do not correspond with the actual films. Based primarily on written descriptions rather than on the films themselves, these errors are recycled in textbooks on film history." Gunning cites in particular the autobiography of the wife of D.W. Griffith, Linda Arvidson. According to Gunning, the point of departure used by Lewis Jacobs was primarily the editing that Griffith employed; while looking at Terry Ramsaye and his analysis of shot structure, Gunning adds the phrases "screen grammar" and "pictorial rhetoric" to the familiar "syntax of film narration". "For Sandoul, Griffith's stylistic innovation shattered the theatrical unity of space by introducing the ubiquity of the camera and a unity of action." Gunning also advances the semilogical analysis of Christian Metz as a review of Griffith at Biograph having brought a "liberation of film from theatrical tradition" with the creation of a "film language.", the cinema of attractions bringing new "codified constuctions" to accomadate the cinema of narrative integration, "syntagmas in which individual shots depend on their relation to other shots in the chain for their meaning." Tom Gunning writes, "Dollie's story forms a perfect match with Todorov's "minimal complete plot" although Griffith structures the story through a "spatial as well as narrative circuit". Gunning is referring to the writing of Tzvetan Todorov on narrative equilibrium, progress and resolution who places plot among the elements of narrative, which also include characters, point of view, setting, theme, comflict and style.

Arthur Knight, in his volume The Livliest Art gives one summary of the importance of D.W. Griffith, "He created the art of the film, its language, its syntax. It has often been said that Griffith 'invented' the close-up, that he 'invented' cutting, the camera angle, or the last minute rescuse...He refined these elements already present in motion pictures."

G.W. Bitzer gives an account of "The Aventures of Dollie", due to its public audience reception, as having had been the film which had secured D.W. Griffith a contract as director with the Biograph Film Company in 1908, athough the exhibitor's had not predicted it would be a success. He then attributes the earlier film "A Calamitous Elopement" as being the first film he had photographed for Griffith, perhaps an account which supports auteur theory rather than genre in regard to commodification, "With that picture the team of Griffith-Bitzer came into existence."

Silent Film

Cover Letter: Scott Lord on Silent Film https://garbo-seastrom.blogspot.com

The website hosted at garbo-seastrom.blogspot.com is a specialized digital archive, scholarly repository, and critical blog authored by researcher Scott Lord. Dedicated primarily to the history, aesthetics, and cultural impact of early international cinema, the site focuses heavily on the golden age of Swedish and Danish silent film, alongside the artistic trajectories of legendary figures such as Greta Garbo, Victor Sjöström (often referred to historically in American contexts as Victor Seastrom), Mauritz Stiller, D.W. Griffith, and other pioneers of early motion pictures.

Core Themes and Subject Matter

• The Golden Age of Swedish Cinema: The blog provides deep-dive analyses into the monumental era of Swedish silent film, particularly the pioneering work produced by studios like Svenska Bio and Biograph. It explores how directors like Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller transformed cinematic art through deep integration of landscape, naturalism, psychological intensity, and folkloric motifs.

• Greta Garbo and Early Collaborations: A significant focus of the archive centers on Greta Garbo's transition from her formative Swedish roots—such as her breakthrough performance in Stiller's Gösta Berling's Saga (1924)—into her iconic Hollywood career. It investigates the intricate web of creative influences between Garbo, Stiller, and the broader Scandinavian cinematic diaspora.

• Lost Films and Archival Recovery: Much of the commentary engages with the phenomenon of "lost films in found magazines," utilizing historical print culture, contemporary reviews, trade papers, and photoplay editions to reconstruct, analyze, and contextualize deteriorated or entirely vanished celluloid artifacts. This extra-textual approach examines how contemporary audiences, critics, and novelists experienced and interpreted early cinematic adaptations.

• Cross-Cultural and Transnational Influences: The essays map the reciprocal artistic exchanges between European cinemas and Hollywood, exploring how Scandinavian directors and actors shaped American film grammar during the silent and early sound eras, as well as how American directors like D.W. Griffith influenced international filmmaking techniques.

By merging rigorous historical scholarship with a deep appreciation for archival ephemera, the blog serves as an invaluable digital resource for film historians, silent-era enthusiasts, and researchers studying the transnational history of early narrative cinema.