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.

An early film, made before G. M. Anderson who does in fact appear in the film, was credited for having initiated the genre of the Western, may have importance in spectatorship theory, not for female spectatorship and the male gaze, but for the off-screen look, the subjective view of offscreen theatrical space. Author John L. Fell, in his volume A History of films, chronicles the 1904 Edison film "Western Stage Coach Hold Up", shot on location in Oklahoma, as having a shot where a bandit stares offscreen in expectation before the following shot of a train appearing in the frame. Like female spectatorship, the object of the look is given importance.
Crosscutting and paralell editing in A Narrow Escape Silent Film D. W. Griffith

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Girl and Her Trust (D.W. Griffith, Biograph, 1912)

During 1912 actress Dorothy Bernard starred in for director D.W. Griffith at Biograph in the one reel "The Girl and Her Trust". The cinematographer to the film was G. W. Bitzer.

In regard to the grammar of film, shot structure prefiguring, that is to say before, considerations of narrative or mise-en-scene, Kemp R. Niver, in his volume D.W. Griffith, the Biograph films in perspective, writes, "In the space of five years, Griffith progressed from directing 'Adventures of Dollie' with 13 scenes and 12 camera positions to 'The Girl and Her Trust' with 130 scenes photographed from 35 camera positions and the suprising thing is the projection time of both films is about the same." This sentiment is reiterated by Robert M. Henderson in his volume D.W. Griffith, the years at Biograph. "This film is a remake of 'The Lonedale Operator' and a comparison quickly shows how far Griffith's editorial and camera techniques have progressed...Additional shots were made from an automobile riding parallel to the handcar and pursuing the train. These last came to be known as 'tracking' shots."

Author John L. Fell in his volume A History of Films credits D.W. Griffith with using camera movement to follow action in "The Girl snd Her Trust" and "The Lonedale Operator" but finds the 1912 D.W. Griffith film "Beast at Bay" "more impressive" as two moving vehicles are filmed by a third.

Dorothy Bernard went on to film for the Fox Film Corporation, beginning with the 1915 film "The Song of Hate" (seven reels) directed by J. Gordon Edwards.The film is presumed to be a Lost Silent Filmwith no surviving copies.

Silent Film

Scott Lord Silent Film. The False Faces (Thomas Ince, 1919)

The Paramount Artcraft publicity releases for 1918 divided their review into three columns, one announcing a "Startling Theory Suggested", another announcing a "Brilliant Leading Lady for Henry B. Walthall" and another announcing "Exciting Incidents Pictured in Production". (The starling theory was of a German UBoat submarine base off of Martha's Vineyard and as the present author was born and raised on Cape Ann, now and long since living on the Charles River, it remains entirely a matter of imaginative speculation.)

The script to "The False Faces" was adapted from a then current serial story printed in The Saturday Evening Post. "Irvin Willat directed the picture with unusual skill." The periodical Wid's Daily during 1919 wrote, "Adaptation of popular serial...offers plot of many complications suitable to screen presentation." Its direction was "responsible for numerous thrills in registering full force of dramatic climaxes."

Lon Chaney as well as having starred in the seven reel silent film “The False Faces”, during 1919 starred under the direction of Tod Browning in the seven reel film “Wicked Darling”.

Although not a Lost Silent Film with a copy existing in the Chezech Film Archive in Praugue, an admittedly seldom screened Lon Chaney film is the 1919 "Paid in Advance", written and directed by Alan Holubur and starring Dorothy Phillips and Priscilla Dean for Universal Film. During 1919, Lon Chaney also appeared in the five reel lost silent film "A Man's Country" (Henry Kolker) starring actress Alma Rubens.

Silent Film

Lon Chaney

.Lon Chaney Lon Chaney