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Contrary to what the title of this set
may suggest, Thomas Alva Edison never directed a film for
the company he created, much preferring the mechanical side
of the business that went into developing the tools needed
to actually make films. Through a series of ground-breaking
inventions, including the first motion picture camera (initially
horizontal-fed), a viewing machine, equipment for printing
and sprocket punching, the first projector, and even a rough
experiment that resulted in the first synchronized sound film
(included on disc one), Edison and his associates financed
and devised the art-form that we now commonly refer to as
Cinema. Kino’s 4-DVD set encompasses the entire breadth
of this studio’s output, from the rough camera tests
of 1889 to the last feature length film that the studio released
in 1918. Assembled and curated by Steven Higgins, Department
of Film at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) and Charles Musser,
Professor of Film and American Studies at Yale University,
Edison: The Invention of the Movies is a fascinating
time capsule of the rise and fall of what is generally considered
to be the very first motion picture company.
With the option of being able to play the films along with
a series of interviews from the likes of Higgins, Musser,
and other noteworthy authors and professors, or to watch the
films separately, disc one contains the primitive undertakings
that first resulted in moving pictures. Monkeyshines,
No. 1 (1889-90) and Monkeyshines, No. 2 (1889-90)
both begin and end with flickering ghost-like images of a
figure that only last for twenty seconds apiece. The next
film, Dickson Greeting (1891), is the earliest concrete
representation of actual moving people on film that’s
wholly perceivable. It is only fitting that the person captured
on these frames would also happen to be the very first film
director. William Kennedy-Laurie Dickson (1860-1935) was an
associate of Edison’s that long-harbored the dream of
making photographs move. He was crucial for both the development
of the emulsion process and the size of the 35mm wide frame,
which is still being used today. He would leave the Edison
Co. in 1895 and form the rival American Mutoscope and Biograph.
These aforementioned works were never intended for public
viewing, but the next several dozen films that appear on the
disc were produced upon the invention of the peephole kinetograph.
This was a device in which the customer would dispense of
a nickel and watch an image move for the length of fifty feet
of film stock. These works would later be deemed ‘Actuality’
films because of the uncomplicated way they attempted to capture
reality. A famous example would be the Edison Kinetoscopic
Record of a Sneeze, January 7, 1894 (18940, which featured
an Edison employee, Fred Ott, doing just that. Almost all
of the subjects captured in this period (1892-1900) were either
Coney Island attractions (Annabelle Butterfly Dance
[1894]), vanilla acts of sex (The John C. Rice-May Irwin
Kiss [1895]) or violence (Corbett and Courtney Before
the Kinetograph [1894]), elementary tableaus of beautiful
scenery (American Falls from Above, American Side
[1896]), blazing fires (A Morning Alarm [1896]),
fast-moving trains (Black Diamond Express, No. 1
[1896]), the Boer War (Capture at Boar Battery by British
[1898]), or, before their departure for a European tour, acts
from "Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show" (Annie
Oakley [1894]). It is undetermined to what extent both
Dickson and William Heise divided the chores in directing
these early works, though it is widely believed that Heise
operated the camera. Indeed, the term "filmmaker"
is loosely used in regards to the Edison movies until the
early 1900’s, when the roles of who did what are more
discernable. There were very few fiction films within this
time frame and the few that were (The Lone Fisherman
[1896]; A Wringing Good Joke [1899]) are either uninvolving
scenes from popular stage plays (the former) or remakes of
popular hits from other companies like Biograph (the latter).
The majority of the company’s output was filmed inside
"Black Maria", Edison’s studio built solely
for the reason of making motion pictures. And almost entirely
throughout these short works, the camera stays at a fixed
position in an establishing shot (though there are deviants
such as The John C. Rice-May Irwin Kiss [1895] which
takes place entirely in an intimate medium close-up).
After almost selling the Edison Manufacturing Company in
1900, Edison then built a studio in New York and the films
begin to get longer and more captivating. The first projectors
are introduced and Edwin S. Porter, a former exhibiter, begins
to direct more accomplished films for the company. Burlesque
Suicide, No. 2 (1902) takes place entirely in a medium-shot
and features a mustached, middle-aged gentleman playfully
contemplating suicide with the use of a handgun being pointed
to his temple out-of-frame. At the film’s close, he
places the gun on the table and takes a drink. Pan-American
Exposition At Night (1901), though classified as an "Actuality"
film, is noteworthy for the inventive early use of the pan/tilt
and the utilization of a dissolve from day to night. Such
methods of film grammar are taken for granted nowadays but
back then such ingenuity was surely something to marvel at.
Inspired by Méliès’ Cinderella
(1899) and Blue Beard (1902), Edison & Co. made
the nearly ten-minute, ten-shot Jack and the Beanstalk
in 1902 with painted backdrops helping to illustrate the fantasy.
The Life of an American Fireman (1903) is considered
to be, along with The Great Train Robbery (also 1903),
a supreme early achievement in film narrative. The former
relies on showing temporal overlaps from different perspectives,
instead of intercutting for suspense, at nearly every transition
in order to not confuse the then neophyte viewer. The latter
is presented in a gorgeous hand-tinted print that helps to
express how truly important it is in the history of cinema,
especially to those only familiar with it through black-and-white
transfers. The bandit facing the camera to hold-up the audience
in the film’s final seconds has not lost its punch in
the any of the ensuing one-hundred-years plus since its premiere.
Disc two covers the company between the years of 1904 and
1907, from several short-minute, light-hearted comedies like
How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York
Herald Personal Columns (1904), which illustrates Porter’s
fascination with the chase, to longer, more melodramatic fair
like The Ex-Convict (1904) and The Klepto-Maniac
(1905), the latter being a treatise on the discriminations
between the rich and poor in the justice system. Another highlight
is Edwin S. Porter’s The Little Train Robbery
(1905), a spoof of his blockbuster with children in the all
of the lead roles. Kino, MoMa, and the Library of Congress
have chosen to include some of the more racist works for historical
purposes, such as The White Caps (1905) and The
Watermelon Patch (1905), both of which are admittedly
more playful about stereotypes than that of rival company
Biograph. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) is
probably one of Porter’s most invigorating works and
certainly his most accomplished in technical aspects. Based
on Winsor McKay’s comic-strip "Little Nemo in Slumberland"
and a Pathe film entitled Rave a la Lune (Gaston
Velle, 1905), the story opens with a young gentleman feasting
on rarebit and having a bit too much to drink. After exiting
the restaurant, he attempts to balance himself on a lamppost
as the camera recording the event seemingly swings wildly
out of control. In the next scene, the gentleman has found
his way home and readies himself for bed. We are then transported
inside his dream and watch as he holds onto his bed for dear
life (obviously appropriated from the famous image in McCay’s
strip). Porter takes out all the stops and uses split-screen,
stop-motion, and superimpositions to highlight different areas
of his flight over New York. In the last sequence, the man
crashes through his building’s floor and, after a dissolve,
finally wakes up in bed. The disc closes with The "Teddy"
Bears (1907), a take-off on "Goldilocks and the
Three Bears" mixed with an incident involving Theodore
Roosevelt and his refusal to shoot a baby cub. Porter showcases
an early use of POV as Goldilocks looks through a keyhole
to see the three bears dancing (captured through the means
of stop-motion).
Disc three includes an early appearance of D.W. Griffith
as a father attempting to rescue his captured baby from an
eagle in Rescued From an Eagle’s Nest (1908).
Fireside Reminiscences (1908) is told in three simple
set-ups. Set-up #1: a husband discovers his wife in the arms
of another man and immediately leaves without discovering
that it was actually her brother. Set-up #2: after finishing
dinner, the husband sits next to a fireplace where the events
that came after what happened in set-up #1 are projected as
super-impositions into the fireplace representing his subjective
thought. Set-up #3: back to the same camera placement as #1,
as the wife and husband are reunited with their child acting
as catalyst.
The works of Edwin S. Porter, which began near the end of
disc one and encompass disc two entirely, begin to taper off
in the middle of the third disc. He became a studio head for
the Edison Manufacturing Co. for a short period in January
1909 but never directed a film again. Meanwhile, Edison’s
business began to pick up in the years of 1911 and 1912 with
one-reel westerns, melodramas and comedies representing most
of their product. The Passer-By (Oscar C. Apfel,
1912) is a somber tale about lost love but it also features
an exhilarating early use of a push-in on the lead as he begins
to tell his hard luck tale, pushing back out once again after
a dissolve on his now much younger face.
Disc four closes with the only feature-length film included
in the set, 1918’s The Unbeliever (1918), directed
by the man who would later make The Jazz Singer (1927),
Alan Crosland. Based on the novelette "Three Things"
by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews, The Unbeliever tells
the tale of Philip Landicut (Raymond McKee), a rich boy from
Long Island who goes off to war and learns how to respect
the "lower classes", many of which become his friends.
Philip finds God on the battlefront as he collapses in a Christ-like
pose after being wounded. He wakes up in a hospital bed and
questions the nurse as to the age of the boy in the bed next
to his. As the intertitle explicitly tells us, Philip expresses
empathy for this injured young man, but only until he sees
the man cry out in pain in his native tongue -- he’s
a German. Despite being part of a propagandist series of films
(Griffith’s Hearts and the World [1918]; William
Nigh’s My Four Years in Germany [1918]; Allen
Holubar’s The Heart of Humanity [1918]), a
scene such as this leads one to think that the filmmakers
involved didn’t necessarily think in black and white.
Erich Von Stroheim is also featured as a detestable German
officer who murders women and children without a moment’s
notice. Apparently, Von Stroheim was quite proud of his performance
here as it’s mentioned in one of the supplemental interviews
that he took the woman he was to later marry to see it during
one of their first dates. He had already been directing second-unit
at the time, for Douglas Fairbanks, but was fired at the outset
of World War I simply because of the German connotations of
his name. Crosland’s direction breaks conventionality
and theatricality in such scenes as the one in which Philip
returns home after his stay at the infirmary. Crosland has
it so that both Philip and his mother stare straight into
the camera and directly at us, as the intertitles tell us
just how far Philip has come in his journey.
The writing was on the wall much earlier in the early 1910’s
when Edison had decided to spend most of his time and money
working on such experimental notions as a home-theater projector
and films with synchronized sound. He finally sold his company
lock, stock and barrel in 1918. The rights, equipment, the
name, almost everything went in the deal. Many of the scientists,
engineers, and filmmakers involved with his studio were considered
fossils by that time; they had already made their grand achievements.
Nonetheless, their contribution in these thirty years took
the industry from its initial conception to the blossoming
of feature length films by the time of its closing.
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© Copyright Aaron W. Graham 2005. No part of this article
may be reprinted without permission of the author.
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