Life of an American
Fireman
Dir: Edwin S. Porter,
George S. Fleming (both uncred.)
Prod: Edwin S. Porter
(uncred.)
Scr: Edwin S. Porter
(uncred.)
Phot: Edwin S. Porter
(uncred.)
Premiere: January,
1903
6:46
The first original narrative film in America . . . was
plagiarized, of course. Nonetheless, it serves as the starting point for the
generation of ideas that would lead to full-length stories on film.
Edwin S. Porter is best known as the director of The Great Train Robbery, but he filmed Fireman before it. It’s a rip-off of, or
“tribute” to, English filmmaker James Williamson’s Fire! Of 1901. Plagiarism ran rampant in the film industry of the
time (as it still does), as pioneers searched for stories and formulas that
would make money.
In this case, what could be a better choice for a visual
medium than the excitement of a fire, and easier to film? Amateur and professional
firefighting companies were prominent sources of civic pride at the time. The
heroics of firemen made them larger-than-life figures, and their aggressive,
macho ways created a “Bowery b’hoy” subculture that dominated the rough-and-tumble
New York City of the early 19th century. In theaters, a series of
plays about the rough but sentimental Mose the Fireman drew consistent crowds
of rowdies, such that theatre was considered suitable only for men for decades in
the city.
So, firemen were ready-made heroes, and the charging teams
of horses pulling pumps and hoses to the scene were perfect for the camera.
Porter freely mixes staged, “narrative” shots and outdoor, “documentary” shots,
bestowing verisimilitude to the stagey scenes and giving the “actuality”
footage context and narrative heft.
The opening scene is a trick, split-screen shot. We “read”
the shot from left to right, as a fireman in a firehouse sits and indicates he
is “thinking,” as the vision of a mother and child going to bed fade in and out
on the right. Is the fireman thinking of his own family? Is this a premonition?
Foreshadowing?
We fade immediately into the picture of a fire call box.
(Porter uses dissolves, not sharp cuts.) Someone rings it, we never see who. We
are treated to very functional, straightforward scenes of firemen suiting up,
sliding down the firehouse pole, harnessing their teams. A long, continuous
shot shows an array of fire equipment coming at a slant past the camera, from
right rear to left front, an old Lumiere trick that emphasizes the speed and
changing size of the approaching vehicles.
The fire and rescue and then shot twice, once from the
interior perspective and one from the exterior, the actions matching as closely
as possible. What’s so frustrating here is that all the elements are in place
for parallel editing — the cutting back and forth from different perspectives
to create a narrative. In fact, for many years scholars thought Porter had
invented that with this film, as someone later took the footage and cut it
together in precisely that way. It took an examination of the film’s paper
prints in the Library of Congress to dispel that myth.
The NFR
Project is an attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film
Registry, in chronological order. Next time: D.W. Griffith invents the gangster
film in ‘The Musketeers of Pig Alley.’
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