Edwin Stanton Porter - The Great Train Robbery and After

The Great Train Robbery and After

In his next film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), Porter took the archetypal American Western story, already familiar to audiences from dime novels and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience. The one-reel film, with a running time of twelve minutes, was assembled in twenty separate shots, along with a startling close-up of a bandit firing at the camera. It used as many as ten different indoor and outdoor locations and was groundbreaking in its use of "cross-cutting" in editing to show simultaneous action in different places. No earlier film had created such swift movement or variety of scene. The Great Train Robbery was enormously popular. For several years it toured throughout the United States, and in 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon. Its success firmly established motion pictures as commercial entertainment in the United States.

After The Great Train Robbery Porter continued to try out new techniques. He presented two parallel stories in The Kleptomaniac (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. He also directed trick films such as Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend (1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. For instance he helped to develop the modern concept of continuity editing, and is often credited with discovering that the basic unit of structure in film was the shot rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D.W. Griffith's advances in editing and screen storytelling. Yet he seemed to regard them only as separate experiments and never brought them together in a unified filmmaking style.

In 1909 Porter, in an attempt to resist the new industrial system born out of the popularity of nickelodeons, left Edison and joined with others in organizing Rex, an independent motion picture company. He also took part in launching a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. After three years he sold Rex and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. Porter directed the stage actor James K. Hackett in the first five-reel American film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and also directed Mary Pickford, Pauline Frederick, and John Barrymore in feature films. But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art. His last film was released in 1915 Jim the Penman, the first 3D anaglyph movie. The year before he also showed a short film "Niagara Falls" in 3D anaglyph. He left Famous Players during a reorganization the following year.