DVD review: Edison: The Invention of the Movies.
Kino Video and the Museum of Modern Art in cooperation with the Library of Congress present 140 Edison Company films, 1891-1918.
Curated by Steve Higgins and Charles Musser; film notes by Musser.
Interviews with and commentary by Higgins (Film Curator, Museum of Modern Art), Musser (Professor of Film and American Studies, Yale University), Eileen Bowser (MoMA), Paul Israel (Director and editor of the Edison Papers at Rutgers University), Richard Koszarski (Associate Professor of English, Rutgers), Patrick Loughney (Head, Moving Picture Section, Library of Congress), Michele Wallace (Professor of English, The City College).
4 disks. 2005.

This is not so much a review as what was once called a notice – a call for attention to something that might otherwise be overlooked. The Edison: The Invention of the Movies collection surveys the 28 years of the Edison Motion Picture Company’s film production chronologically, beginning with camera tests conducted in 1891 and a sound film experiment in 1895 – about 140 films. They have been remastered for DVD and I have never seen any of these titles look better: fine attention to contrast and to tinting and toning (in fact, I hadn’t seen quite a few of these films at all). Scores have been composed and performed by a group of silent film music scholar/artists, a specialty which has flourished in the recent renaissance of silent film studies – Philip Carli, Jon C. Mirsalis, Ben Model, Donald Sosin, and Clark Wilson.

For those familiar with the early film scholarship of Musser, Bowser, Thomas Elsaesser, John Fell, Tom Gunning, Charles Keil and their colleagues, these films are primary source material demonstrating the phenomena, issues, and developments at the center of this branch of film history. It belongs with the DVD sets The Movies Begin (Kino), The Origins of Film (Library of Congress Smithsonian Video), The Lumiere Brothers First Films (Kino), Treasures from American Film Archives and More Treasures from American Film Archives(National Film Preservation Foundation), and D. W. Griffith’s Biograph shorts (Kino) at the base of all serious historical collections. For those not familiar with the literature, Musser’s notes provide a compact, well-detailed account and analysis of the films themselves and the Edison Company’s operations and strategies (during most of the period, the Edison Company and its rival, Biograph, were the two largest film producers in the U.S.). While Edison did little of the actual filmmaking, his work in two areas was of central importance: first, his engineer’s vision of integrating many discrete elements, mechanisms, and techniques into an integrated, efficient production system established a dynamic model for film studio organization to follow; second, he built, expanded, and sustained a business empire based on the motion picture, responding quickly to changes in the market, in public taste, and technical innovations.

Filmmakers represented include generous samples of W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise’s collaborations, and subsequently, Edwin S. Porter, along with J. Searle Dawley, Charles S. Brabin, and Alan Crosland. The chronological presentation takes one step by step from from very short films composed of a single shot, the development of editing to enable multi-shot films, developing techniques for constructing complex scenes and then multi-scene films, to Crosland’s full-length 1918 feature, The Unbeliever. The standard examples are all here: The Great Train Robbery (1903), the Rice-Irwin Kiss (1896), The Life of an American Fireman (1903), The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908).

The unfamiliar films are the surprising and enlightening treat here. Viewers witness an unfolding catalogue of public taste in popular entertainment across three decades, the development of genres, the pursuit of audiences: a catalogue of what people watched – vaudeville performers, promotional films for Edison himself, boxing matches, abundant steamtrains and firefighters, dancers, westerns and crime dramas, sentimental vignettes, adaptations of popular poems, plays and stories (useful because audiences already knew the plots), fairytales, newsreels, an example of 1896 censorship, Fatima, Muscle Dancer in the original, then the censored versions), fantasies, trick films, many street scenes, historical reconstructions, spectacle or attraction films (the beautiful Coney Island at Night, 1905), sequels to big hits (The Life of an American Policeman, 1905), comedies and proto-sitcoms, the politically incorrect (Watermelon Eating Contest, 1896), beautifully intense early colored films (Annabelle Serpentine Dance, 1895; Three American Beauties, 1906), horror/grotesque/exploitation (Electrocuting an Elephant, 1903, not for the squeamish; to be fair, the elephant had run amok at an amusement part and stomped a customer to death).

Because the earliest films were quite short (but not as short as we sometimes think: by 1903, Edison was making films 11-13 minutes long), the representation of films before 1906 is impressive in this collection: 90 titles in all, a great eye-opener to the first decade of cinema. All in all, this is the best one-volume introduction to Edison and his company, to the first decades of American film, and to the development of early cinema full-stop that I have seen in a long time. You need to see it. You need to get your Library to order it. If you are at all interested in the area, you need your own copy. Against my anxieties and expectations, undergraduate students were very successfully drawn into these films. The set is an education and a pleasure.

Rick Thompson
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006 | Last Updated: 7-Mar-06