The Perils of Pauline (1914 Serial)

The Perils Of Pauline (1914 Serial)

The Perils of Pauline is a 1914 American film serial shown in weekly installments, featuring Pearl White as the title character. Pauline has often been cited as a famous example of a damsel in distress, although some analyses hold that her character was more resourceful and less helpless than the classic damsel stereotype. The serials were produced by Theodore and Leopold Wharton, who pioneered the popular melodramatic cliché of a heroine tied to the railway tracks by a mustache-twirling villain.

She is menaced by assorted villains, including pirates and what were then called "Indians" but are today known as Native Americans. Neither Pauline nor its successor, The Exploits of Elaine, used the so-called "cliffhanger" format in which a serial episode ends with an unresolved danger that is addressed at the beginning of the next installment. Although each episode placed Pauline in a situation that looked sure to result in her imminent death, the end of each installment showed how she was rescued or otherwise escaped the danger.

The serial had 20 episodes, the first being three reels (30 minutes), and the rest two reels (20 minutes) each. After the original run, it was reshown in theaters a number of times, sometimes in edited, shortened versions, through the 1920s. Today, The Perils of Pauline is known to exist only in a shortened 9-chapter version (approximately 214 minutes), released in Europe in 1916. '

In 2008, The Perils of Pauline was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry, as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."