The Great Train Robbery, often lauded as one of the first movies to include a linear narrative within its running time, came out of the Edison company over a hundred years ago, following their experiments in the previous decades with shorter topical pieces such as cockfighting, dancers and other limited scenarios.
This short is the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era and established the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium.
In the film's fourteen scenes, a narrative story with multiple plot lines tells the story of a train holdup with six-shooters. The steam locomotive always provides a point of reference from different filming perspectives.
The precursor to the western film genre is based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of George Leroy Parker's (Butch Cassidy) 'Hole in the Wall' gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.
The clerk at the train station is assaulted and left tied by four men, who then rob the train, threaten the operator, take all the money and shoot a passenger while trying to escape. A little girl discovers the clerk tied and gives notice to the sheriff, who at once goes along with his men hunting the bandits.
The action of each scene is told with only one shot. Almost every shot is a static, long shot, confining the action to the perspective of the camera at eye level. Edwin S. Porter used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. Tension and excitement is achieved by moving the players, rather than moving the camera angles.
Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, are there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information.
You can read the script.
You can buy Great Train Robbery - 100th Anniversay
.
This short is the most popular and commercially successful film of the pre-nickelodeon era and established the notion that film could be a commercially-viable medium.
In the film's fourteen scenes, a narrative story with multiple plot lines tells the story of a train holdup with six-shooters. The steam locomotive always provides a point of reference from different filming perspectives.
The precursor to the western film genre is based on an 1896 story by Scott Marble. The plot was inspired by a true event that occurred on August 29, 1900, when four members of George Leroy Parker's (Butch Cassidy) 'Hole in the Wall' gang halted the No. 3 train on the Union Pacific Railroad tracks toward Table Rock, Wyoming. The bandits forced the conductor to uncouple the passenger cars from the rest of the train and then blew up the safe in the mail car to escape with about $5,000 in cash.
The clerk at the train station is assaulted and left tied by four men, who then rob the train, threaten the operator, take all the money and shoot a passenger while trying to escape. A little girl discovers the clerk tied and gives notice to the sheriff, who at once goes along with his men hunting the bandits.
The action of each scene is told with only one shot. Almost every shot is a static, long shot, confining the action to the perspective of the camera at eye level. Edwin S. Porter used a number of innovative techniques, many of them for the first time, including parallel editing, minor camera movement, location shooting and less stage-bound camera placement. Jump-cuts or cross-cuts were a new, sophisticated editing technique, showing two separate lines of action or events happening continuously at identical times but in different places. Tension and excitement is achieved by moving the players, rather than moving the camera angles.
Even shots that approximate the point of view of a character within the fiction and which are now associated with the externalization of thoughts and emotions, are there more to provide visual pleasure than narrative information.
You can read the script.
You can buy Great Train Robbery - 100th Anniversay
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and the vhs 
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; Intolerable Beauty catalog (self-published).
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