Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

évoquées : le premier studio de
cinéma (Black Maria), les premières
vedettes, les premiers films
publicitaires, etc., etc.
Les notes d’accompagnement
de Charles Musser abondent
d’informations ; on peut les consulter
sur écran, ou imprimer avec son
propre programme.
Et Antti Alanen de conclure : « Cette
riche mosaïque constitue un véritable
survol des années fondatrices du
cinéma. Trésor national pour les
Américains, tout aussi précieux pour
un public international, ce coffret
répond aux plus hauts critères
scientifiques et archivistiques. Et
les films ici rassemblés constituent
même un très bon divertissement
pour un très large public. »
Thomas Edison and his 1904 home
projecting Kinetoscope.
The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903), cinema’s power of storytelling by The Great
Train Robbery (1903), and the art of fantasy by The Dream of a Rarebit
Fiend (1906). The Edison Company lost its position as the creative leader
of film art, but continued as a major mainstream player to the end.
Included in the box set is probably the last Edison film, the feature-length
The Unbeliever (1918), directed by Alan Crosland and co-starring Erich von
Stroheim in a prototypical hateful Hun role, crushing a sensitive soldier’s
violin for starters.
The great artists of the Edison company are properly introduced: W.K.L.
Dickson, the first movie director, and Edwin S. Porter, Edison’s most
important house director. Other major film personalities started their
careers with Edison, such as the pioneer of the Western, Gilbert M.
“Broncho Billy” Anderson, and Wallace McCutcheon, who hired the eaglenosed
actor, D.W. Griffith, whom we see in an early appearance, as the
lumberjack in Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest (1908).
The Edison film story also covers 30 years of history and society, including
the war in Cuba, the Boer War, the First World War, personalities such
as Theodore Roosevelt, and the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906.
There are instances of social consciousness, both
conservative, as in The Public and Private Care of
Infants (1912), and critical of social injustice, as
in The Ex-Convict (1904) and The Kleptomaniac
(1904). The drama of vigilante “justice,” The White
Caps (1905), is highly disturbing because of its
ambivalence.
The DVD’s editors do not hide embarrassing sides
of the Edison legacy.The most painful is the racist
attitude to black Americans, in films such as
Watermelon Eating Contest (1896) and A Morning
Bath (1896). Since Edison also produced Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, one cannot blame the company for
an anti-Negro agenda, even though the Harriet
Beecher Stowe subject is also patronizing. Cohen’s
Fire Sale (1907), where fire is “our friend” and the
fire brigade “our enemy,” is a display of anti-
Semitism, although the subject is in the Jewish
tradition of self-irony, in later films ranging from
Max Davidson’s Jewish Prudence to Billy Wilder’s
The Fortune Cookie.
A wonderful feature of this DVD set is that a
number of films from ca. 1894 can be experienced
as Kinetophone simulations. Edison of course was
a pioneer of sound recording as well as of cinema,
and to me these simulations are the heart of this
publication. Included is the Dickson Experimental
Sound Film (1894-95), which was famously restored by Walter Murch
and Rick Schmidlin a few years ago. Most of the other films have piano
or organ accompaniment, some with other instruments, composed and
performed by Philip Carli, Jon C. Mirsalis, Ben Model, Donald Sosin, and
Clark Wilson. The video introductions are by Steven Higgins, Charles
Journal of of Film Preservation / / 71 70 / 2006 / 2005