The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend
Wonderful look at early special effects in film.
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Edwin S. Porter
Films
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The Kiss
THE KISS revisits (and recreates) the kiss between actors John C. Rice and May Irwin from the play THE WIDOW JONES. However here it stars Fred Ott (arguably known best for his earlier sneeze) and an unknown woman. Romantic, in its way, but also coy. The film has been described elsewhere as an actuality but, as a dramatic...Start your free trial to watch
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Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken
Gilbert Saroni was a well-known vaudeville performer and female impersonator who specialized in playing unattractive old maids in vaudeville sketches like "The Giddy Girl." The old maid's features are so horrific that when confronted with her visage, mirrors crack and cameras explode.Start your free trial to watch
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Pan-American Exposition by Night
"This picture is pronounced by the photographic profession to be a marvel in photography, and by theatrical people to be the greatest winner in panoramic views ever placed before the public," declared the Edison catalog. The panorama as a genre pre-dated the cinema by more than a hundred years and found...Start your free trial to watch
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Trapeze Disrobing Act
The performer in this studio production was probably Charmion, whose "risque disrobing act on the flying trapeze" was popular at the turn of the century. Although her striptease was performed for the camera and cine-viewers, the two male spectators inside the mise-en-scène authorized the film spectators'...Start your free trial to watch
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What Happened on Twenty-Third Street, New York City
At first, this film appears to be an ordinary street scene, as a woman and her male companion casually approach the camera. Unexpectedly, her dress is blown up around her legs when she steps over a sidewalk grate (anticipating Marilyn Monroe by more than fifty years).Start your free trial to watch
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Photographing a Country Couple
A comic intersection of various early stock characters that frequently appear in popular American culture. The photographer is about to take a portrait of the country couple, when the rube wants to look through the camera. They switch places. The photographer demonstrates what he wants the rube to do‹and...Start your free trial to watch
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Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show
This is a remake of the 1901 British film by Robert Paul, titled alternately COUNTRYMAN AND THE CINEMATOGRAPH or COUNTRYMAN’S FIRST SIGHT OF THE ANIMATED PICTURES. Porter substituted Edison scenes for the films within the film, including PARISIAN DANCE (1897) and a version of BLACK DIAMOND EXPRESS (1897)....Start your free trial to watch
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Jack and the Beanstalk
Fairy tales constituted one of the earliest and most successful forms of elaborate storytelling on film, notably Georges Méliès's CINDERELLA (1899) and BLUE BEARD (1902). Inspired by such European achievements, Porter made this ten-shot fiction film that told its story in a clear, yet elaborate manner. It...Start your free trial to watch
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The Burning of Durland's Riding Academy
Fires reported on the front page of New York newspapers routinely brought filmmakers to the scene. Such films were popular in vaudeville houses and fulfilled the cinema's mandate as a "visual newspaper." The fire at Durland's Riding Academy, on Manhattan's west side, between Sixty-first and Sixty-second...Start your free trial to watch
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Burlesque Suicide
Facial expression films continued to be popular in the early 1900s. In one, a man contemplates suicide but takes a drink instead. In a second version, presented here, BURLESQUE SUICIDE NO.2, the same man threatens suicide and then points his finger at the camera (and the audience) and laughs.Start your free trial to watch
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The Life of an American Fireman
The fire rescue was a popular subject across many forms of popular culture (songs, painting, journalistic essays, photography), but particularly in the early cinema. As early as 1896, traveling showman Lyman H. Howe had assembled five short films to tell the story of a fire rescue. The genre was so popular...Start your free trial to watch
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
In May of 1903, Edison's chief American rival, Biograph, assembled a series of scenes featuring famed actor Joseph Jefferson as Rip Van Winkle that they had originally filmed and released in 1896, offering them for sale to exhibitors as a special release. The Edison Company responded with a much more...Start your free trial to watch
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What Happened in the Tunnel
This one-shot film was designed to be inserted into a railway panorama (a long tracking shot taken from the front of a moving train) for comic relief. G. M. Anderson (later known as "Broncho Billy") plays the "masher" who attempts to kiss a well-to-do white woman when the train they are riding enters a...Start your free trial to watch
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The Gay Shoe Clerk
This film is often noted as an early example of the interpolated close-up. However, while the action moves smoothly across the shots, attentive viewers will notice a remarkable set of discontinuities. The woman's underskirts are white in the close up but dark in the long shot. The shot in the cross-cutting...Start your free trial to watch
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The Great Train Robbery
More than a crucial historical artifact, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY reveals the foundation from which the styles and stories of the contemporary cinema would later arise. Known for using such innovative filming techniques such as double exposure, cross-cutting and camera movement, THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY is...Start your free trial to watch
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Electrocuting an Elephant
Topsy, the original "Baby Elephant," had been a featured attraction across the United States for 28 years. She had killed three men in her time, the last one after he gave her a lit cigarette butt as a treat, and for this last death she had to pay the ultimate price. The event was front-page news in the...Start your free trial to watch
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Rector's to Claremont
This picture remains one of the mystery films in The Museum of Modern Art's collection of Edison negatives. Though often dated 1903, this film probably made in the summer of 1904 or even the summer of 1905. Never released commercially, it was almost certainly commissioned by a showman, perhaps to be...Start your free trial to watch
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European Rest Cure
This spoof on the popular travelogue genre follows an American tourist across Europe and the Middle East on a "rest cure," in which one physically or emotionally wrenching disaster follows another. Foreign locales were actually pasteboard sets of pyramids, Roman ruins and a French cafe, while additional...Start your free trial to watch
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How a French Nobleman Got a Wife Through the New York Herald Personal Columns
Edison's principle domestic rival in 1904 was once again the American Mutoscope & Biograph Company. Biograph was then producing a series of popular story films, which it used as exclusives for its exhibition circuits. Edison affiliated renters and exhibitors were deeply frustrated that they could not...Start your free trial to watch
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The Ex-Convict
An uncredited but quite obvious adaptation of a well-known vaudeville piece, Number 973, by Robert Hilliard and Edwin Holland. Starting from the Hilliard-Holland one-act playlet, Porter visualized the storyline into a total of eight scenes. Unlike UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, THE EX-CONVICT was not filmed theater but an adaptation that...Start your free trial to watch
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The Strenuous Life
A lighthearted spoof of family life and fatherhood. President Roosevelt, who had just won reelection, believed Americans had to lead "the strenuous life" (it was the title of one of his books) if the United States was to retain its position of world leadership. He also declared that married women of...Start your free trial to watch
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Nervy Nat Kisses the Bride
Sold as "WEARY WILLIE" KISSES THE BRIDE, this three-shot comedy is built around the popular stereotype of the tramp, a character that exists outside of proper society and is comically under socialized. Here, he takes advantage of a spat between a bride and groom to sneak a kiss, only to be thrown off the...Start your free trial to watch
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Life of an American Policeman
Photographed with the cooperation of the New York City Police Department, this film was first shown at two vaudeville benefits for the Police Relief Fund in early December 1905. The opening scene, which presents an officer at home with his wife and child, identifies the police with the institution of the...Start your free trial to watch
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The Kleptomaniac
This condemnation of the class bias found in the American justice system works within a Progressive political framework. Porter juxtaposes the situations of two women. The impoverished woman is shown at home, in the context of her family. The barren room, the absence of a husband/provider, and the weighty...Start your free trial to watch
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The Little Train Robbery
In this parody of THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, Edwin S. Porter burlesqued his own landmark film by substituting children for adults and using a miniature railroad and playhouse as sets. The young robbers don't take money but candy and dolls. Perhaps unintentionally, this film supported the argument made by...Start your free trial to watch
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The Miller's Daughter
The sinful, decadent city is contrasted to the simple, honest countryside in this fascinating reworking of Steele MacKaye's ever-popular melodrama "Hazel Kirke" (1880). Events occurring off-stage are shown in the Porter film, including Hazel's suicidal jump and her rescue. And yet, while Porter and...Start your free trial to watch
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The Seven Ages
Here, Porter photographed a series of short vignettes reminiscent of kiss films such as THE JOHN C. RICE-MAY IRWIN KISS (1896), structuring them around a premise provided by Shakespeare's "seven ages of man," a theme often illustrated in nineteenth-century lantern shows. Beginning with toddlers and concluding with old people,...Start your free trial to watch
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The White Caps
In 1905 White Cap vigilante groups were particularly active in rural areas of the Border States and the Midwest. Members, generally faced with declining income and political power, acted as agents of social control, punishing offenses that the state and local governments failed to address adequately. The film offers a view of...Start your free trial to watch
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The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog
One of several Edison films from this period that used animated intertitles. It continued "a popular fad which has been widely advertised by lithographs and souvenir mailing cards." These postcards showed portraits of various members of the Dam family, with their names: I. B. Dam, U. B. Dam and so forth....Start your free trial to watch
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Train Wreckers
Porter's most violent expression of the conflict between constituted society and its outsiders. The outlaw band, with its apparently irrational desire to destroy all social order, is finally eliminated by a combined force of railroad personnel and select passengers. With order finally restored, a romance between the engineer...Start your free trial to watch
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The Night Before Christmas
"A Visit from St. Nicholas," the memorable holiday poem by Clement Clarke Moore, is adapted for the screen by longtime Edison Manufacturing Company director Edwin S. Porter. "'Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro' the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse." Though, in this version,...Start your free trial to watch
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Waiting at the Church
WAITING AT THE CHURCH was inspired by a 1906 hit song of the same name, which was often sung by a woman dressed in a wedding gown. Porter and McCutcheon turned the song’s con artist into an overeager pater familias whose efforts to get married are prevented not just by his wife but a horde of children, who...Start your free trial to watch
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Getting Evidence
A jealous husband visits the Hawkshaw Detective Agency (a redundant naming device in its own right) and asks the detective to obtain evidence of his wife's supposed infidelities. Only a photograph is deemed acceptable evidence and the private eye's attempts to secure it provide a series of comic incidents,...Start your free trial to watch
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Kathleen Mavourneen
An adaptation of Dion Boucicault's popular stage play "Kathleen Mavourneen; or St. Patrick's Eve," though with significant modifications. Much of Porter and McCutcheon's Irish melodrama was shot as if the audience could understand the absent dialogue. Likewise the collaborators used conventional theatrical...Start your free trial to watch
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The Terrible Kids
Part of the popular bad boy genre that would soon come under heavy criticism for providing young viewers with undesirable role models. Porter's comedy shows two boys disrupting a neighborhood's routine with the help of their dog, played by Mannie. Every scene is a variation on a mischievous prank, as they...Start your free trial to watch
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Three American Beauties
Often hand-tinted, this short film was typically used by exhibitors to conclude their programs. It elaborated on a popular practice among exhibitors of the 1890s. They ended their programs with a film of the American flag waving in the breeze. The flag is the last of the "American Beauties" to appear; the...Start your free trial to watch
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The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend
A stunning visual fantasy adapted from the comics of Winsor McCay, which had appeared in the New York Telegram since 1904. Edwin S. Porter not only borrowed McCay's title but his dream-based narrative structure. Likewise, McCay's surreal imagery is convincingly realized on the screen using a variety of...Start your free trial to watch
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College Chums
Loosely based on Brandon Thomas' farce-comedy play CHARLEY'S AUNT, the last two-thirds of COLLEGE CHUMS may seem unique in that it shows one scene entirely in an establishing shot. In fact, the film was often screened with live actors behind the screen providing synchronous dialogue for the on-screen characters, a popular...Start your free trial to watch
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Laughing Gas
With African-American Bertha Regustus in the principle role, this comedy seems to depart from conventional black stereotypes. Indebted to other comedies of the period (Vitagraph made a film with an identical title less than a year earlier), LAUGHING GAS is based on the premise that laughter is contagious.Start your free trial to watch
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The Rivals
THE RIVALS was based on a comic strip by T.E. Powers that ran in the New York American. The strip (like the film) regularly showed two male rivals continually fighting for the attentions of a desirable woman. In one scene, Charlie escorts Tootsie only to have her stolen away by George. In the next scene, George escorts the...Start your free trial to watch
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Cohen's Fire Sale
Based on a caricature of a Jewish businessman for whom fire was "our friend" and the fire company was "our enemy," a view rendered in iconographic form on a comic postcard of the period. The story itself is quite simple and clearly depicted but character motivation, narrative logic and audience...Start your free trial to watch
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The Trainer's Daughter
THE TRAINER'S DAUGHTER has a plot similar to Theodore Kremer's A RACE FOR A WIFE (hence the similarly-themed alternate title, A RACE FOR LOVE) in which the victor of a race between the hero and an unscrupulous villain wins the bride. Unless spectators were familiar with A RACE FOR A WIFE or the exhibitor...Start your free trial to watch
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The "Teddy" Bears
Starting out as an adaptation of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears," the picture moves outside the confines of the studio, suddenly changing moods and referents. The bears chase Goldilocks across a snowy landscape until "Teddy" Roosevelt intervenes, kills the two full-grown pursuers, and captures the baby...Start your free trial to watch
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Fireside Reminiscences
Evoking the storyline of a well-known song of the era, "After the Ball" (in which a man explains why he is single and has no children), FIRESIDE REMINISCENCES details one night when a man and his sweetheart were at a ball and he found her in the arms of another man. He abandons her without waiting for an...Start your free trial to watch
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Rescued from an Eagle's Nest
RESCUED FROM AN EAGLE'S NEST features D. W. Griffith in his first major screen role, that of a father who battles an eagle while attempting to rescue his child from the bird's nest. The story for this family-centered drama was taken from a famous incident that had been enshrined in waxworks. The film...Start your free trial to watch
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Tale the Autumn Leaves Told
This short fragment demonstrates the ways that Edwin S. Porter continued to seek visual novelties favoring a stylistically audacious image over straightforward storytelling. Here he uses different camera mattes (each in the shape of a leaf) for every scene. At a moment when the industry was seeking to...Start your free trial to watch
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A Suburbanite's Ingenious Alarm
A SUBURBANITE'S INGENIOUS ALARM's slapstick humor centers on a commuter's attempts to find a foolproof way to wake up in the morning. Once again, director Edwin S. Porter tells a simple story using a widely recognized situation. Overlapping time and action are employed as the scene moves between the...Start your free trial to watch
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Before the Nickelodeon
Noted film historian Charles Musser (author of "The Emergence of Cinema") co-wrote and directed this definitive tribute to Edwin S. Porter, Thomas Edison’s mechanic and cameraman, who is now recognized as America’s first important filmmaker and a major contributor to the evolution of film structure. Porter...Start your free trial to watch
Genres
- Short / Actuality
- International / Americas / North American / American
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- International / Americas / North American / American
- International / Americas / North American / American
- International / Americas / North American / American
- International / Americas / North American / American
- Sport / Baseball
- Documentary / Biography
- Crime / Transgression / Caper/Heist
- Crime / Transgression / Caper/Heist
- Adaptation / Cinematic
- Adaptation / Subliterary / Comic Strip
- Adaptation / Subliterary / Comic Strip
- Crime / Crime-fighter
- Crime / Crime-fighter / Detective
- Action/Adventure / Disaster
- Action/Adventure / Disaster
- Short / Documentary
- Short / Documentary
- Short / Documentary
- Short / Documentary
- Fantasy / Dream
- Drama / Dysfunctional Family
- Fantasy / Fairy Tale
- Fantasy / Fairy Tale
- Comedy / Farce
- Holiday
- Holiday
- Sport / Racing / Horse
- Crime / Transgression / Kidnapping
- Adaptation / Literary
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Drama / Melodrama
- Documentary / Art / Visual Arts / Motion Pictures
- Short / Narrative
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- Comedy / Parody
- Comedy / Parody
- Comedy / Parody
- Short / Performance
- Adaptation / Literary / Poetry
- Adaptation / Literary / Poetry
- Crime / Crime-fighter / Police
- Crime / Crime-fighter / Police
- Documentary / Propaganda
- Adaptation / Literary / Prose
- Cult / Psychotronic
- Comedy / Romantic Comedy
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- Silent / Silent Crime
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- Silent / Silent Documentary
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- Silent / Silent Drama
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- Silent / Silent Drama
- Silent / Silent Fantasy
- Silent / Silent Fantasy
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- Silent / Silent Fantasy
- Silent / Silent Western
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Comedy / Slapstick
- Drama / Social Realism
- Adaptation / Theatrical / Stage
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- Suspense
- Documentary / Travelogue
- Western
- Action/Adventure / Wilderness
Recent Reviews
Before the Nickelodeon
Interesting and informative. A must for film historians.
Life of an American Policeman
I guess the message is that cops are awesome, but that is an incoherent film.
The Dream of a Rarebit Fiend
Remind me to never drink heavily while eating rarebit.
The Terrible Kids
This film reinforces my disdain of two things--adolescent boys and dogs.