Museum Trip

Going to see Charles Musser’s 1982 documentary:
Before the Nickelodeon: The Cinema of Edwin S. Porter




Edwin S. Porter (b. 1870 – d.1941), famous for making the earliest moving image in the US – such as “The Burlesque Suicide (1902)," “Two Chappies In a Box (1903)," “Life of An American Fireman (1903)," and “Nervy Nat Kisses The Bride(1904),” amongst nearly 200 others, was originally hired by Thomas Edison’s company to utilize their, and THE, newest film technology.



The first commissioned works were reenactments of news stories such as: “Columbia Winning the Cup (1889),” about a horse race; and the “Execution of Csologosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901),” where scenes of the assassination of U.S. President Mckinley by Leon Cszolgosz, are followed by the astonishingly real electrocution of the assailant with spasmodic details of the convicted being fried to death. Seemingly heavy voyeurism was the subject for a fledgling film medium.

As the popularity of the nickel film phenomena grew, Edwin departed from news subjects, to create fictional crowd pleasers, such as the “Interrupted Bathers (1902," “The Great Train Robbery (1903," and “The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903),” in which a man fits a woman for a shoe, a close up depicting the intimacy of his hand on her shoe, and the clerk spontaneously leaping up to kiss his customer. The crowd went wild.








Edwin’s skill gained as he operated the camera, directed the actors, and assembled the images for final print. There was no written dialogue for the story, because the films were silent, and it was up to the projector operator to create on the spot narration.

The lack of sound pushed Edwin to use and explore the visual narrative capacity using newly editing tricks. Porter reached beyond the one shot method of keeping the mis-en-scene the ONLY scene, by experimenting with filming the same action from two different perspectives seemingly simultaneously to heighten the drama.
In the “Life of an American Fireman,” he cut a shot of a fireman scooping a woman from her burning apartment out her window down a latter from the apartment’s interior, and an exterior shot of the rescuer and survivor descending the latter outside the building. This “jump-cut” or “parallel editing” technique was radical and is still often used today.







Edwin’s only rival was French filmmaker, George Melies (1861 – 1938), who was an expert in lavish set design and imaginative story lines. His visually dazzling films, generally stuck to one perspective shots, as in “La Voyage Dans La Lune”, (“A Trip to The Moon”) but have been referenced several times for their strong visuals. Highlights include a rocket landing in the eye of the man in the moon (modeled after early kinetiscope imagry) and its little martian men who’s faces emerge from the stars.






Rock band, Queen, used these clips in their 1995 music video “Heaven for Everyone,” and The Smashing pumpkins drew inspiration from this films as well to make their own trip to the moon for 1996 music video “Tonight, Tonight.”




From "Heaven For Everyone"





From "Tonight, Tonight"

Edwin S. Porter enjoyed the challenge Melies provided, and never considered himself an artist, but accepted himself as a master craftsperson contributing to many films techniques used time and again over 100 years later.