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.

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 Biograph 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.

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 "sensational and 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.

Silent Film 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. 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.

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.

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 eroors 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."

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Scott Lord Silent Film: The Deluge (Vitagraph, 1911)

Exhibitor's Trade Review lured projectionists to screen a Bible series during 1922 by promising the distribution of "direct propaganda" to ministerial bodies and schools. Perhaps a modern account would prefer the term "hype".

Little is known as to whether the films based on the Holy Bible exhibited during the 1920's are entirely lost films, with no surviving copies or not. It is often noted that the cinematic depiction of Jesus Christ was not entirely allowed during the silent film era. Not incidently, Vitagraph during 1910,not long after the cinema of attractions and Nickelodeon , questioned the venue available to the flanneur for theatrical release of film, remotely querying as to audience reception in spectatorship, by asking while advertising in the periodical The Film Index, "Have you written to your exchange to engage the series for extra exhibitions in churches and halls?" The advertisement also offerred a printed lecture and "elaborate beautiful posters" for the "greatest drawing card for an entire entertainment, the greatest since the Passion Play", Vitagraph's five reel biblical drama series,"Life of Moses". The studio advertised that all five reels were to be released in early Lent.

Previously, Vitagraph studios, during 1909 had produced versions of "Jeptha's Daughter", and "Solomon's Judgement", the advertising for which highlighted its costumes and scenery. Both films were directed by J. Stuart Blackton, the former having starred actress Annette Kellerman, the latter actress Florence Lawrence. Universal followed with a three reel version of "Jeptha's Daughter" in 1912 directed by J.Farrell MacDonald and starring actress Constance Crawley.



"The Deluge", "Vitagraph Portrayal of the Great Flood" was reviewed with a synopsis and publicity stills by the periodical The Film Index in February of 1911 and appears in advertisements placed in French periodicals. "This indescribably beautiful release is not a mere phantasy; it is a matter of careful research and Biblical record. Its costumes are designed from Tissot."

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Noah's Ark (Vitagraph, 1911)

Adam and Eve (Vitagraph, 1912)

Scott Lord Silent Film Biblical Drama: Flight into Egypt

"The Flight into Egypt" appears in The New Testament in the scriptural passage Matthew 2:13-23.

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Noah's Arc

Shadow of Nazareth

Scott Lord Silent Film: The Shadow of Nazareth (1913)

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Flight to Egypt
Biblical Drama

Scott Lord Silent Film: Biblical Drama, Sign of the Cross (Frederick A T...

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Scott Lord Silent Film: Biblical Drama; Christus (Guilio Antamoro, 1916)

When first read the analytic interpretation of the biblical drama "Christus" (Guilio Antomoro, 1916) by Chandra Han, Pelita Harpan University in the paper Jesus in Film: Representation, Misrepresentation and Denial of Jesus' Agony in Gospels, is fascinating when pointing out the nature of Jesus is depicted as divine in the film in that the dove over him in the portrayal is symbolic of the Holy Spirit, Jesus as "fully God"; this is used to distinguish the divine and human natures of Christ in both the Canonical Gospels and the Apochryphal Gospels and the contrasting agaony of the Savior in both (the human form of Christ having suffered or experienced sorrow for the love of mankind, the divine nature implied to always have existed). silent film silent film

Scott Lord Silent Film: Biblical Drama; Jesus of Nazereth (From The Manger to the Cross,...

It has been noted that "From The Manger to the Cross", directed by Sidney Olcott for the Kalem Company and shot on location in Egypt and Palenstine in 1912 and scripted by actress Gene Gauthier who played The Virgin Mary in the film, owes a debt visually to a Bible illustrated by Joseph Jacques Tissot. Accordingly, the expository intertitles preceding each scene from the Holy Bible introduce the passage with quotations from scripture cited by their respective chapter and verse.

Author W. Barnes Tatum, in his volume Jesus at the movies, a guide to the first hundred years, differentiates between Jesus story films and Christ figure films, Sidney Olcott's biblical drama "From the Manger to the Cross" belonging to the former, the cinematic Jeusus, a visual form dating back to the passion play. Tatum expands his analysis by conveniently differentiating between the Synoptic portrayal of Christ and the Johannine portrayal. He names the film to be a "silent pageant".

Linda Arvidson, wife of D.W. Griffith, remembers Gene Gauthier in her autobiography "When Movies Were Young". She explains that Gauthier had been a "location woman" for D.W. Griffith who "dug up locations and wrote scenarios." Arvidson writes,"Miss Gauthier's aptitude along the location line did not satisfy her soaring ambition, so she left Biograph for Kalem."

Author Leslie Wood, in her volume The Miraacle of the Movies, claims that Sidney Olcott had decided to direct an account of the life of Christ after the copyright to hia film "Ben Hur" had been contested by the author of the novel. "Ben Hur" had been a one reel film of sixteen scenes and the indignant Olcott, in need of a cooyright free story, saw the New Testament produce a more epic drama and travelled to Jerusalem, where he built a temporary studio, to shoot on an authetic location.

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