The Great Train Robbery

So it turns out that one of the first narrative films in all of cinema history was a Western. The Great Train Robbery (1903) is largely remembered for its technical achievements--early approximations of cross-cutting, double exposure, and, you know, moving the camera. The director, Edwin S. Porter, had served as the cameraman at the world's first movie studio, Thomas Edison's Black Maria. The films Porter helped produce at the Kinetographic Theatre in West Orange, New Jersey are extraordinary little gems of art and science. I found this one, of Annie Oakley, endlessly captivating (I mean, it's Annie Oakley! Shooting a gun!):

But to watch these seconds-long clips is to understand the director's ambition in undertaking a film with fourteen separate scenes.

The story follows a band of villains as they hijack a steam engine, nab all the loot on board, force the passengers out on the side of the tracks, and escape into the woods. Aesthetically, the film is a transparent reflection of its time, perceptively caught between the conventions of the stage and the innovative capacity of a new medium. The movements of the actors are dramatic and theatrical, but real trees speed past open railway car doors. Thanks to Porter's habit of meticulously recording action from start to finish, I was struck by the realization that tying someone up probably takes much longer than anyone expects. Producing a rope can now be taken as shorthand for binding and gagging, and directors tend to cut away. I'd be willing to bet that, subsequently, most modern young men and women, when tying up their first victim/hostage/consensual sex partner, are surprised to find it tedious and time consuming process. Let The Great Train Robbery set the record straight.

When a little girl finds the railway dispatcher on the floor of the telegraph office and sets him free, he heads immediately to a dance and rallies the townspeople.

***SPOILERS***

The film's famous surprise ending is terrific. The townspeople locate the outlaws at their hideout in the woods and proceed to gun them down. Suddenly, the camera cuts to a close-up (the film's only) of the last villain standing. He points the gun at the camera and fires--at you! I can't really imagine what that must have been like for audiences in 1903. It's such a severe and threatening instance of breaking of the fourth wall that is in no way predicted by the film's preceding structure. We are wrenched violently from our roles as spectators and then we are dead. Frankly, I found it vaguely unsettling.

You can watch The Great Train Robbery in its entirety, here: