The NFR Project #9: Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre

Star Theatre (Building Up and Demolishing the Star Theatre, Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre)

Dir: Frederick C. Armitage

1901

1:46, in its original form

Magic tricks, a game in which time is confounded. A gimmick piled atop another.

“Star Theatre” is the first popular example of American camera play. Frenchman Georges Melies had pioneered the use of stop-trick and time-lapse effects in his special-effects films, beginning in 1896. Armitage, an employee of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, took advantage of the company’s office position at Broadway and 13^th in New York to document the demolition of the title building.

He came up with the idea of bolting the camera down and exposing a bit of film every four minutes during daylight hours while the work progressed. When finished, the film shows the structure coming apart and disappearing with magical rapidity. Meanwhile, a nearby awning snaps up and down like a clockwork toy; pedestrians skitter like thrown jacks along the sidewalks, while traffic shoots past the camera at jet speed. Short establishing shots at the beginning and end of the sequence revert to normal-time, giving the viewer a satisfying sense of completion.

Technology has dissected an event by divorcing it from consensual time and compressing it. Suddenly, the potential for movies to give the viewer a godlike, or at least para-human, perspective, is glimpsed. This technique would later be used extensively by the Disney studios in their True-Life Adventures documentary series; many will remember the rapidly-opening blossoms from “The Living Desert.” George Pal, no stranger to the possibilities of fantastic cinema, also made memorable use in a sequence from his 1960 feature-film adaptation of H.G. Wells’ “The Time Machine.”

Although the original sequence simply tracks the demolition, another level of novelty, and an explanation for the film’s extended titles, is introduced by the company’s recommendation to exhibitors that the film be run backward through the projector. “When this view is shown in reverse, the effect is very extraordinary,” the directions state.

Louis Lumiere had first come up with the idea of running film backward for novelty effect almost immediately, in 1895. Lave it to the imaginations of the filmmakers to double the potential fun here. And why demolish it first, then build it back up? Why not the other way round? The plastic possibilities of the medium were to be rapidly engaged, exploited and expanded upon.

The NFR Project #10: President McKinley Inauguration Footage

President McKinley Inauguration Footage

Dir: prob. Edwin S. Porter, James H. White

1901

2:42 (two sequences)

First question: who are these people? Second: why do we care?

My cynical response to this selection has much to do with my political orientation, although the footage is aesthetically painful as well. People file into a grandstand that is draped in flags and patriotic bunting. Someone on a platform speaks down to the crowd. A befeathered, helmeted troop of horsemen, brandishing ceremonial weapons, trots by. Here come some carriages. A balding man orates, gesticulating with sweeping Victorian-era rhetorical emphasis.

It takes documentation to tell us what we are seeing – scenes from the second inauguration of William McKinley on March 1, 1901. These vague, static frames have no meaning unless they are contextualized. The only inherent interest in the event is the fact that is was the first presidential inauguration to be captured on film – the act of recording endows the event with significance.

McKinley, an advocate of corporate consolidation and empowerment, and an architect of American empire, was perhaps the first media-savvy president. His campaign manager, Mark Hanna, spent tons of money on all forms of media support and promotion for his candidate, blanketing the electorate with pro-McKinley messages. Ironically, McKinley’s high visibility may have made him a more appealing target for his assassin, who shot him during McKinley’s well-publicized visit to the Pan-American Exhibition on Sept. 6, 1901.

The urge to record significant moments isn’t new. The new technology of film simply invests the moments recorded with vividness. The hunger for “reality” means that McKinley’s assassination was later restaged for the cameras and presented as “real,” as were the execution of McKinley’s assassin, scenes from the Spanish-American War, and countless pseudo-documentary moments thereafter. Our hunger for verifiable, true-life entertainment continues today, with countless title cards that proclaim a hit movie is “based on a true story,” although the dull everyday facts are transmogrified into dramatic beats and inspirational or sensational plot lines.

From now on, the camera ennobles the mundane, and politicos and other fame-seekers begin to strut and preen for a chance at celluloid immortality.

The NFR Project #6: "Rip Van Winkle"

Rip van Winkle

Dir: William K.L. Dickson

1896

Length: 4 minutes

Now, for the first time in the National Film Registry, we get instead of a sequence a story. Or pieces thereof.

“Rip Van Winkle” represents a lot more than just this advance. It is the transmission of an American secular myth and it is a record of an enduring theatrical achievement. The immensely popular film succeeds because it appeals to our fantasy concepts of America, and our desire to see a prestigious performance preserved, albeit in silence.

The 1820 story by Washington Irving is an invented fable (link to original story here, courtesy Bartleby.com) -- part science fiction, part ghost story, part henpecked husband’s fantasy. Rip, a ne’er-do-well but happy, well-meaning and harmless villager in the American colonies is chased out of the house by his harridan wife. He goes hunting in the Catskills, and runs across a little man carrying a large keg. Rip takes up the burden and goes with the man, finding himself in a hollow where Henry Hudson and the souls of his doomed men (in June, 1611, the explorer’s crew mutinied and set him adrift with his son and six faithful crewmen in the bay later named for him) quaffed ale and bowled ninepins, generating flashes of lightning and peals of thunder to the valleys below.

Rip drinks, succumbs, and wakes up 20 years later. His hair is gray, his rifle has rusted away, and his dog is long gone. He limps back to the village to find that 20 years have passed. America is independent, and so is Rip – his wife died when “she broke a blood-vessel in a fit of passion at a New-England peddler.” Time travel? The passive vengeance of surviving a difficult spouse? Hmmm.

Actor Joseph Jefferson adapted the story and, beginning in 1865, played Rip for almost 40 years, becoming the nation’s most recognized and honored thespian in the doing. A read of the script shows the essential story encased in an outer plot of melodrama – Rip’s unscrupulous neighbor marries his shrewish wife after Rip’s supposed death, and treats her so badly that she repents and only wishes to have Rip back again. There is some to-do with Rip’s property being valuable as well, in order to assure him and his reconciled spouse with a comfortable living thereafter.

It wasn’t surprising that director William K.L. Dickson sought out Jefferson for a chance to make and sell snippets of “Rip Van Winkle” for his new company, Biograph, formed after his breakaway from Edison.

Conveniently, the eight 45-foot, 30-second sequences were produced so that the consumer could splice them together in whatever order he or she chose – an act of empowerment that could have resonance in today’s world of edit-it-yourself capabilities. (In 1903, Biograph finally edited the sequences together in proper order and issued as one “full-length” film.)

The eight static shots were filmed at Jefferson’s Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts estate. The pantomimed sequences are “Rip’s Toast,” “Rip Meets the Dwarf,” “Rip and the Dwarf,” “Rip Leaving Sleepy Hollow,” “Rip’s Toast to Hudson and Crew,” “Rip’s Twenty Years’ Sleep” “Awakening of Rip” and “Rip Passing Over Hill.” The desultory setting, a rock and some trees, is put to proscenic work.

Jefferson looks sufficiently rustic here, radiating a cheerful presence. It would be useful to hear his voice as well – and here you can, as Jefferson recorded a passage from the last act of the play here:

Each reel plays out for its entire length, even when during the sixth sequence the action ends and one of the “dwarves” rises from behind a rock and sweatily whips off his pointed hat and massive wig and beard. Evidently, it wasn’t considered a bad enough slip to warrant another take.

It’s confounding now to think of the impact it had. Back then, there was one narrative about America, the official one, crowded with myths and semi-myths such as Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed, and a Christ-like Custer. Everyone knew the story, knew of the actor, and could hook into it immediately. Magically, great moments were captured and preserved, to be viewed over and over and ground into the collective unconscious. Rip and the dwarves will always clamber over the crags above Sleepy Hollow.