Case Study: Edwin Porter
Edwin S. Porter has been described as ‘ America ’s first major film-maker’. In the 1890’s Porter worked as an equipment manufacturer and exhibitor and made a name for himself combining short films, magic lantern slides, lectures and songs into a 40 minute programme at the Eden Musee entertainment complex in New York . From 1900, after a brief interlude as a travelling showman, Porter was hired by Thomas Edison as a technician to improve his Kinetescope projector. Later he was employed as principle cameraman for the Edison Studios in New York . Like many ‘cameramen’ at this time Porter was responsible for almost all aspects of production including developing the negative and ‘editing’, which traditionally meant simply trimming single shots for sale to exhibitors.
By 1903, however, responsibility for editing individual shots into longer films was moving from the cinema operators to the production companies. Men like Porter and Méliès, who had experience in production and exhibition, led this important change. Initially this meant producing simple two and three shot films that told topical or humorous stories. The topical films, according to Musser (1999) ‘fitted into a general conception of cinema as a visual newspaper’. They included ‘The Execution of Czologosz’ (1901) which cut from a long panning exterior shot of the prison where President McKinley’s assassin was held to two interior shots of Czologosz, played by an actor, being led from his cell to his execution by electric chair.
‘Life of an American Fireman’ (1903) consisted of a number of shots, some of which showed ‘overlapping’ action filmed from different angles. The rescue of a mother and child from a burning building is shown twice in the film, shot from both inside and outside the building. The action is repeated in much the same way as we see replays of sporting highlights on television today (Musser 1999).
‘Life of an American Fireman’ used readily available ‘documentary’ footage of fire engines in addition to acted scenes to tell the dramatic story of a family’s rescue. The film is also regarded as having one of the earliest examples of a close-up (in this case, of a fire alarm) used to advance the narrative, rather than as a curiosity in itself (as in Edison ’s one-shot film ‘The Sneeze’). In fact most of the films from this era are lost and Porter may well have copied the close-up technique from one of the English directors such as James Williamson whose ‘Fire !’ (1901) Porter had admired. In ‘The Life of an American Fireman’ Porter used readily available ‘documentary’ footage of fire engines in addition to acted scenes to tell the dramatic story of a family’s rescue.
However, it is with ‘The Great Train Robbery’ (1903) that Porter made his mark on film history. The film recounts the exploits of the real life ‘Hole in the Wall’ gang which was still at large at the time of its making. ‘The Great Train Robbery’ is regarded by several critics to be the first Western and the first film to exploit violent crime for entertainment purposes. Whether this claim can be upheld is disputable, but the film’s phenomenal popularity and influence on other filmmakers is not. At around eleven minutes in length ‘The Great Train Robbery’ is one of the earliest films to show the power of editing in telling a story on screen. The plot is simple and exciting: the hold-up of a train, the formation of a posse and the shooting of the villains. Each of the fourteen scenes leads logically into the next without titles or dissolves.
Much of the action was filmed outdoors on location. Away from the controlled studio spaces Porter was forced to put the camera at an angle to the action rather than flat on. In the film, actors enter from behind the camera or exit towards it and the camera is required to pan or tilt to follow the thieves as they escape. There is an example of ‘parallel editing’ (where action in two locations is shown to be happening) when the robbers make their escape from the scene of the crime as the telegraph operator is discovered bound and gagged by his daughter. Cutting between two scenes occurring simultaneously in this way was an innovation that D.W. Griffith was to refine and use repeatedly.
Where Méliès had mastered a variety of trick shots and rudimentary narrative development, Porter and other contemporaries of his, such as the British director/producer Cecil Hepworth, began to make films that depended on the continuity of shots and not on the shots alone. Nevertheless, The Great Train Robbery’s fourteen scenes were made up of only thirteen long shots and a single medium shot. There were no cuts within scenes (to show the facial reactions of characters for example) and the single medium shot of the villain’s leader Barnes shooting directly at the camera could be placed by the exhibitors at either the beginning or end of the film, according to Edison’s catalogue. The image of a villain firing his pistol directly at the audience was highly effective for its shock value but was quite separate from the narrative of the film, as in the distributed print (which ended with the medium shot) Barnes himself had been killed in the previous scene. This in no way diminished the impact of ‘The Great Train Robbery’ for contemporary audiences and it remained the most commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era, and perhaps of any film prior to ‘The Birth of a Nation’ (1915).