Educational Media Reviews Online

This beautifully packaged and produced collection of the earliest films produced by Thomas A. Edison’s company from 1888-1918 is essential viewing for film history and popular culture enthusiasts, as well as for historians, anthropologists, and sociologists. From camera tests several seconds long to The Unbeliever, a stirring 80 minute film directed by Alan Crosland in 1918, this chronology charts the evolution of the motion picture art and business.

An introduction offers an overview of Edison’s film production career. Edison developed the first motion picture camera, and in 1892, built the first motion picture studio in the world in West Orange, New Jersey. Known as the “Black Maria,” his manufacturing company and laboratory pioneered recorded sound and movie devices. The first public showing of motion pictures using the Edison-invented Kinetoscope was in 1894, and Edison followed it by overseeing innovations in cameras and equipment as well as the development of content. From single shot camera motion picture images to “actuality” films, to more complex stories and more complicated shots, Edison oversaw all production, though, interestingly he never directed.

Each one of the DVD’s, highlights of which I describe below, offers the option of playing the films only or the films with interviews. I recommend listening to the erudite scholars and archivists, including Charles Musser, Paul Israel, Richard Koszarski, Patrick Loughney, Steven Higgins, Eileen Bowser, and Michele Wallace, who contextualize the films and offer fascinating background information. The paper print collection at the Library of Congress, intended to document films for copyright value to protect them from piracy, turned out to offer a treasure trove of lost films. Most of the films have accompanying piano music, much of it performed by Ben Model. All film notes by Charles Musser are free and available in PDF form on the Kino web site.

Disc One: 1888-1891

The disc opens with a discussion of the various motion picture technology that various inventors around the world were working on. Edison gets credit for being the first to make film commercially viable. The first two films shown, Monkeyshines 1 and Monkeyshines 2 (1891), directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise, were camera tests using the Kinetoscope in 1891. Films show barbers shaving, boxers boxing, a couple kissing. Edison’s Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894) is the first copyrighted movie.

Many 50 feet (four minute) films survive, including the strongman Sandow (1894) and the dancer Carmencita. Boxing, illegal at the time, was a popular subject, as were cock fights and serpentine dancing. Films feature vaudeville and burlesque performances, Native American dances, and a Japanese imperial dance. Dickson plays the violin on Experimental Sound Film (1895), which is, according to Musser, the “world’s first known experiment in producing a motion picture with a recorded synchronized sound track.”

By the end of 1895, motion pictures had ceased to be profitable, perceived by many to be a passing novelty or fad. Then, projection renewed interest, and expanded income and the need for leisure activities and business was booming again. The Black Diamond Express (1896), featuring the train coming directly at the camera, was such a sensation that it directly led to filmmakers copying and preserving films. The director Edwin S. Porter, Edison’s studio head and production chief, was a pioneer of sequential continuity editing who borrowed from the French filmmaker Georges Melies, as shown in his Jack and the Beanstalk (1902). While American films showcased sex and violence, films made in France were more about family.

Porter’s seven-minute Life of an American Fireman (1903), an early narrative film, shows a fireman rescuing a woman and her child. Porter also directed the first film version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Slavery Days in 1903. The first film to use intertitles, this nineteen-minute film is a series of “tableaux” or scenes from the ubiquitous Tom shows, the play adaptations of the seminal novel, with which audiences were familiar. The anti-slavery message, though watered down, is still palpable in this film. African-American cultural practices, like the cakewalk, for example, are shown. Little Eva’s ascension to heaven is one of the first scenes using expressive light, and there’s a wonderful scene of a steamboat race filmed in miniatures. Michele Wallace notes that “You had some of the most racially progressive people in entertainment.” Race is also dealt with in What Happened in the Tunnel in which a black maid switches places with a white woman a man has been flirting with. He’s horrified when he realizes he’s come close to kissing a black woman, but the black and the white woman get a good laugh out of it. A Scrap in Black and White shows a black and a white boy boxing; the black boy wins.

Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903), Edison’s most famous film, was the first blockbuster, and it still excites. Using cross cutting, on location shooting, as well as other innovative camera techniques, Musser says “It’s not only a crime film, but a railroad film—establishing the convention of viewer as passenger. There’s less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places.” The film includes color tinting, which was done one frame at a time.

Disc Two: 1904-1906

Films made during this time began to take on weightier matters and social themes, while still, of course, providing entertainment. Porter’s film The Ex-Convict (1904), adapted from a stage play, is a nine-minute film about an ex-con struggling to get a job. Even after saving a young girl from being run over by a car, he strives for people to trust him. Michele Wallace notes that, “Porter was saying that once you served your time, you should no longer be stigmatized for your crime.” Porter’s eight-minute The Kleptomaniac (1905) explores class issues. A parallel story about a bored rich woman who shoplifts for excitement and a poor woman who’s stolen a loaf of bread that’s left out on the street for her child meet in court. The rich woman has a lawyer and is excused, but the poor and unrepresented woman is sent to jail.

The wacky How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns (1904), features a dozen women who show up to meet the nobleman; one ends up following him into a lake. And Porter draws on lithographs and postcards that were quite popular for The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog (1905). Porter parodies and remakes his The Great Train Robbery in The Little Train Robbery (1905), featuring juveniles as bandits. But “bad boy films” became problematic and couldn’t be made after ’08 or ’09, Musser says. The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906) directed by Walter McCutcheon and Porter adapted the popular cartoonist Winson McCay, whose work had appeared in the New York Telegram. The film’s sophisticated special effects include a wonderful sequence of a man in his bed flying over the city.

Disc Three: 1907–1912

Anti-Semitic stereotyping is on display, along with the hats, in Cohen’s Fire Sale (1907), which Porter co-directed with Walter McCutcheon. When a milliner merchant’s hats are mistaken for garbage, the merchant runs through the streets desperate to retrieve them, at one point jumping into a garbage pit. When he can’t sell them because they’re damaged, he starts a fire in the store to sell them cheaply. While Porter collaborated with many Jews, McCutcheon’s films often portrayed Jews and blacks negatively. Michele Wallace contrasts black stereotypes, which she refers to as “the enemy from afar” and Jewish ones as “the enemy close by.” Northerners, she says, made the films, and she sees the stereotyping in films like this as portraying Jews as “more adult” than blacks eating watermelon and stealing chickens, gambling, and the various “vices of poor people” shown in films like The Watermelon Patch (1905), also directed by Porter and McCutcheon. In this film, blacks, Wallace says, blacks are portrayed as “childlike and economically marginalized.”

Laughing Gas (1907) features the black actress, Bertha Regustus, as Mandy Brown, who gets laughing gas at the dentist. Everywhere she goes she laughs, and everyone follows suit. The film is quite an anomaly as it has nothing to do with race. Wallace speculates that the filmmakers wanted to find a vehicle for this tall and beautiful actress whose infectious laugh and charisma light up the screen.

The film New York of Today (1910) is a touristic view of New York City featuring Wall Street, Broadway, Coney Island, and The Plaza Hotel, and it’s fun to watch today to see how the city looked one hundred years ago. Musser says that “This film was not part of Edison’s regular U.S. release schedule but was meant principally for sales overseas. Europe, particularly Great Britain and Germany, had become a crucial market for the Edison Manufacturing Company.” The intertitles, in German, are translated into English.

In 1912, Edison produced The Public and Private Care of Infants. Directed by Carlton King and Charles M. Seay, it was produced in co-operation with the Russell Sage Foundation, Department of Child-Helping. A cautionary tale in which a child, a twin whose widowed mother is forced to choose work over childcare, is placed in an orphanage where he dies ostensibly because he is “love-hungry.” The film is “Unexpectedly critical of orphanages,” says Musser, who goes on to note that “Underneath its apparently low-key informational message lurks a powerful condemnation of the socio-economic system.”

Disc Four: 1913-1918

According to Musser, Edison sold his company in 1918 for “fire sale prices.” Business was down in his last few years, and many of his feature films lost money. The war affected European markets, an essential component of Edison’s profitability. Also, his films continued to appeal to a “genteel, moralistic sensibility that was out of touch with changing audiences.” Additionally, Edison lost the patent war against two of his main competitors, leading to the demise of his Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in 1918 and the move by many independent filmmakers to Hollywood.

The Lone Game (1915) directed by Edward C. Taylor, was “A Red Cross Seal Drama--produced by the National Association for the Prevention and Treatment of Tuberculosis,” is based on a story by Mary Rider. A cautionary tale combining romance with disease, it’s about how to survive the potentially deadly illness that killed so many. Again, Edison’s noble aim was to instruct viewers.

The Unbeliever (1918), most likely the last film the Edison Company released, was based on the novelette The Three Things by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews. (It’s interesting to note that many of Edison’s films were based on source material written by women.) Directed by Alan Crosland, it had the cooperation of the United States Marine Corps. Featuring Erich von Stroheim as a sadistic German who kills women and children, it is quite watchable and compelling. The rich protagonist, Philip Lundicutt, played by Frank de Vernon, seen playing golf in the opening sequence, is a classist who has no interest in God and outright disgust for the lower classes. But when he goes off to fight in World War I side by side with men like his chauffeur, he finds God and comes to have respect for the common man. It’s well-paced and acted, and while its patriotism is somewhat propagandistic, it works as a coming of age story and as a war-inspired romance. And, its battle scenes are quite compellingly complex. Edison’s final silent film resonates. Its director, Alan Crosland, would direct The Jazz Singer in 1927, the first feature film “talkie.”