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A Remembrance of Early Movies prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Another type of film being developed, decidedly in the fiction category, was the trick film. J. Stuart Blackton, a cartoonist and columnist for the New York World, met Mister Edison and got so enamored with the movie business that he wanted to get into it himself. The Edison Company didn't sell cameras, only projectors. This kept production in their own hands, but let others do the exhibiting. Mister Blackton bought a projector and his partner, Albert Smith, modified it to be a camera as well. Mister Blackton made some films supposedly of the Spanish-American War, but it later turned out that he had made them in New York on his own rooftop! This was the first hint that the camera could lie. Mister Blackton also did a film about the burning of the Windsor Hotel in 1899 by photographing the remains of the burned hotel, and then building a model of it in his studio and burning it on film! These were probably the first special effects to be put on film. But Mister Blackton didn't carry trick films to their limit. It took a French magician named Georges Méliès to do that. He found out that he could stop the camera, add or take away something on screen, and restart the camera, and it would look like the something had just magically appeared or disappeared. Méliès also was one of the first to have several different scenes in his movies. Before this, movies had usually had only one scene, with only one camera set-up. He combined these two discoveries to fantastic effect in his best-known picture, A Trip to the Moon, which was even shown over here! Made in 1903, A Trip to the Moon showed a group of astronomers deciding to go to the moon. They board a rocket ship, shoot up to the moon (landing in the eye of the man in the moon!) and meet up with some moon creatures that burst into smoke when they are hit by the astronomers. I tell you, when we thought that pictures that moved were the most amazing thing we'd ever see, we hadn't seen nothing yet, to misquote from a recent talking movie. But realistic narrative fiction films, and also basic film editing, are the legacy of Edwin S. Porter, who made motion pictures for the Edison Company. Mister Porter, who had been an exhibitor, realized that the single-scene films being produced weren't going to keep the people coming to see them forever. In fact, he was right. Motion pictures entered its first commercial slump in the late 1890s. Mister Porter saw narrative pictures, pictures that told a story, as the next logical step to keep the audiences happy. So he made a picture about a fireman rescuing a family from a burning building. But this wasn't just a narrative film: The Life of an American Fireman made two great leaps forward in technique. It was the first movie that had different shots in the same scene. I don't know whether the movie producers simply hadn't thought of doing this yet, or if they didn't think we would understand it-but in this movie, there's a shot of a fireman waking up in the firehouse, then a close-up of a hand ringing the alarm, then a shot of all the firemen getting out of their beds. It was all very logical and natural, but it hadn't been done before. I have to admit that I had never thought of it before myself, but I can tell you that the audience had no trouble figuring out what was going on-it was so obvious. The rest of the movie was like that, too, with logical cuts easily linked by the viewer's mind. Another thing of interest about The Life of an American Fireman was that Mister Porter, I read later, had interspersed old newsreel shots of firemen running down the street in a long shot in with his new shots of his actors. We in the theatre couldn't begin to guess that they weren't the same firemen. Mister Porter had figured out that if we were told what we were seeing, we wouldn't question it--much as had Mister Blackton with his Spanish-American War movies. Here's where Mister Porter's much-touted film The Great Train Robbery comes in. No, it wasn't the first narrative film (The Sprayer Sprayed), or the first edited film (The Life of an American Fireman). What it was, was the first film to use what they call a "cross-cut." This means, cutting from one thing that is happening to something else that is happening at the same time. Before, every film, even Mister Porter's, had happened in sequential order. The Great Train Robbery cut back and forth between the robbers and their capturers. After we saw the robbers knock out the train operator and rob the train, we had to know how the robbers would be caught-the necessary end, of course. Mister Porter cut back to the train operator being found and his sounding the general alarm. He also used a little bit of cross-cutting between the escaping robbers and the pursuing posse, but not to the extent and impact that D.W. Griffith would later. prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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