The NFR Project #12: "The Great Train Robbery"

The Great Train Robbery

Dir: Edwin S. Porter

1903

12:02

At last. We’ve finally arrived at a selection that can really be called a movie, in the popular sense of the word. Surprisingly, it still holds the viewer’s attention. For better and for worse, it’s the template for all the commercial films that come after it.

“The Great Train Robbery” works because it has one thing to do and it does it – it tells a story. As a bonus, it piles on techniques and genres with gleeful abandon. It’s a Western, a crime film, a caper flick, an action movie, a suspense film, a melodrama, a cautionary tale – and there’s a touch of comic relief as well.

It mashes together studio work, location shooting, cross-cutting, a moving camera, special effects, stunt work, and even double-exposure composite editing (or matte shooting, as it came to be known).

Although influences such as English filmmaker Frank Mottershaw’s “A Daring Daylight Robbery,” a multitude of pioneering efforts from England’s “Brighton school” and Porter’s own earlier narrative shorts like “The Life of an American Fireman” have been cited, “The Great Train Robbery” is really unique in itself.

There are none of the later-typical title cards with narration or commentary to guide the viewer. There’s nothing extraneous. The pacing and the framing are top-notch. Each shot leads logically to the next, pulling us along with the narrative. It’s practically a how-to film.

The action begins immediately, as two bandits hold a railroad-station telegrapher at gunpoint (studio) while a train is seen pulling in through the station window (matte shot). The mix of realism and make-believe is still startling. The stage door flaps as they exit, requiring a second pull – as the scenery wall shudders.

More high points:

• A mail-car worker on the train hears the bandits breaking in, gesticulating to beat the band; after he is shot, he performs the melodramatic leap-twirl-and-dive death.

• The hand-tinting on some prints, giving us such things as a vibrant puff of red smoke when the train’s strongbox is blown open;

• A great stop-cut when the engine’s fireman is replaced with a dummy, which is tossed off the train;

• The small child cutting loose the railroad clerk; supplicating to heaven for aid for just a moment before she throws a glass of water in his face to wake him;

• The short, parenthetic scene of the hoedown, interrupted first by the comic relief of the tenderfoot forced to soft-shoe while the locals prang bullets at his feet, next by the alarmed clerk when he alerts the crowd about the robbery;

• A long, deep-focus diagonal shot as the robbers gallop down a trail toward the camera, pursued by the posse.

Two last notes: 1) the great, iconic and seemingly nonsensical clip of the chief bandit emptying his six-shooter directly into the camera takes a great threatening leap forward and backward at the same time – scaring the untrained minds of the first audiences, and finding currency with its celebration of gratuitous violence (a shot echoed deliberately at the end of Scorsese’s “Goodfellas”). Helpfully, distributors were informed that they could splice the shot onto the beginning or the end of the film.

2) The passenger shot by the bandits, the tenderfoot who is forced to “dance” by gunshots (and executes a pretty nifty shuffle towards the camera), and the bandit who falls from his horse is the man who will become the first American movie star. Max Aronson, an aspiring Jewish actor from Little Rock, Arkansas, did the work. He was so enamored of what he made with Porter that he Anglicized his name to Gilbert M. Anderson and became “Broncho Billy” – the star of 148 short Westerns between 1907 and 1916, and a hero to the boys of that generation.

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.