Edwin S. Porter: Edison's Mainstay

Edwin S. Porter: Edison's Mainstay

The American Mutoscope Company
1) did particularly well during the late 1890s, partly because of its sharp 70mm images,
   displayed by the company’s own touring operators in vaudeville houses.
2) By 1897, American Mutoscope was the most popular film company in America, and it
    attracted audiences abroad as well. American Mutoscope began filming in a new rooftop
    studio.
3)The firm changed its name in 1899 to American Mutoscope and Biograph (AM&B),
   reflecting its double specialization in peepshow Mutoscope reels and projected films.
4)Over the next several years, AM&B was hampered by a lawsuit brought against it by
    Edison, who consistently took competitors to court for infringing patents and copyrights.
5)In 1902, however, AM&B won the suit, because its camera used rollers rather than
   sprocketed gears to move the film.
6)The company’s prosperity grew.
7)In 1903, it began to make and sell films in 35mm rather than 70mm, a change that boosted

Side Note from Wikipedia on American Mutoscope
The company was started by William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at Thomas Edison's laboratory who helped pioneer the technology of capturing moving images on film. Dickson left Edison in April 1895, joining with inventors Herman Casler, Henry Marvin and businessman Elias Koopman to incorporate the American Mutoscope Company in New Jersey on December 30, 1895.
The Biograph Company, also known as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, was a motion picture company founded in 1895 and active until 1916. It was the first company in the United States devoted entirely to film production and exhibition, and for two decades was one of the most prolific, releasing over 3000 short films and 12 feature films.[1][2] 
    sales.
The company was home to pioneering director D. W. Griffith and such actors as Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore.

The rise in production at AM&B and Vitagraph
1) in the wake of Edison’s failed lawsuit obliged Edison’s company to make more films to
    counter their competition.
2)One successful tactic was to make longer films shot in the studio.
3)In this endeavor, it had the assistance of the most important American filmmaker of this
   early period, Edwin S. Porter.
4)Edwin S. Porter was a film projectionist
5)and an expert at building photographic equipment.
6)In the late 1900s, he went to work for Edison, whom he greatly admired.
7)He was assigned to improve the firm’s cameras and projectors.

Edison builds a Studio
1)That year the Edison Company built a new glass-enclosed rooftop studio in New York,
    where films could be shot using the typical painted stage-style scenery of the era.
2)In early 1901, Porter began operating a camera there.
3)At this point in cinema history, the cameraman was also the film’s director, and soon
4)Porter was responsible for many of the company’s most popular films.

Porter has often been credited with virtually all the innovations of the pre-1908 period,
1) including making the first story film (Life of an American Fireman)
2) and inventing editing as we know it.
3)In fact, he often drew on techniques already used by Méliès, Smith, and Williamson.
4)He imaginatively developed his models, however, and he undoubtedly introduced some
   original techniques.
5)His position as the foremost filmmaker of the preeminent American production company
   gave his works wide exposure and made them popular and influential.

Post Porter (1903) 100's of staged fictional films made
1)There had been many, indeed hundreds, of staged fictional films made before Life of an
   American Fireman (1903).
2)Porter himself had done several, including a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (1902).
3)He had access to all the foreign films that the Edison Company was duping, so he could
    study the latest innovations.
4)He examined Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon closely and decided to copy its manner of telling
   a story in a series of shots.
5)From 1902 on, many of his films contained several shots, with significant efforts to match
   time and space across cuts.

Film Intro - Life of an American Fireman (1903)
1)Porter’s Life of an American Fireman is a notable attempt at such storytelling.
2)It begins with a long shot of a dozing fireman dreaming of a woman and child threatened by
   fire;
3)the dream is rendered as a sort of thought balloon, a circular vignette superimposed in the
   upper part of the screen.
4)A cut to a close-up shows a hand pulling a public fire alarm.
5)Several shots, mixing studio and location filming, show the firemen racing to the scene.
6) The film ends with two lengthy shots that show the same action from two vantage points:
7)in the first, a fireman comes in a bedroom window to rescue a mother and then returns to
   save her baby;
8) in the second, we see both rescues again, from a camera position outside the house.
9)To a modern audience, this repetition of events seems strange,
    but such displays of the same event from different viewpoints were not uncommon in the
    early cinema.
10)(In Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, we see the explorers’ capsule land in the Man in the
      Moon’s eye and then see the landing again from a camera position on the moon’s surface.)

Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
Film Clip

Porter’s most important film, The Great Train Robbery (1903)
1) Also made in 1903, used eleven shots to tell the story of a gang of bandits who hold up a
   train.
2) A telegraph operator, whom they tie up at the beginning, alerts authorities, and a posse
   ambushes the thieves as they divide the loot.
3)After the lengthy robbery scene, the action returns to the telegraph office seen earlier,
4)then moves to a dance hall as the telegraph operator runs in to alert the local townspeople,
5)and finally switches back to the robbers in a forest.
6)Although Porter never cuts repeatedly among these locales, a few years later filmmakers
   would begin to do so, thus creating a technique called crosscutting (see pp. 36–37). 7)Porter’s film was, nonetheless, gripping in its depiction of violent action.
8)Indeed, a novel extra shot, showing one of the robbers in a close view firing a gun toward
  the camera, was included;
9)exhibitors had the option of placing it at the beginning or end of the film.
10)Perhaps no film of the pre-1905 period was as popular as The Great Train Robbery.

The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S. Porter, 1903)
Film Clip

Porter 1902 - 1905
1) From 1902 to 1905, Porter was one of many filmmakers who contributed to an
    industrywide concentration on fiction filmmaking.
2) Unlike topicals, which were dependent on unpredictable news events,
3) fiction films could be carefully planned in advance.
4)While scenics involved expensive travel to distant locales,
5)fiction films allowed their makers to stay at or near the studio.
6)Both of these factors enabled companies to create films steadily and on schedule.
7)Moreover, audiences seemed to prefer films with stories.
8)Some of these were still one-shot views,
9)but filmmakers increasingly used a series of shots to depict comic chases, extravagant
   fantasies, and melodramatic situations.

1904 Fictional Films
1)By 1904, major changes were taking place in the new medium and art form of the cinema.
2)Fiction films were becoming the industry’s main product.
3)Increasingly, movies were rented to exhibitors, a practice that established the division among
   production, distribution, and exhibition that was to shape the expansion of the film industry.
4)Exhibition was spreading internationally,
5)So films would soon be seen in most countries.