11
The Transition to Story Films: 1903–1904

The American film industry was entering a new phase of rapid expansion by mid-to-late 1903, and a key factor in this revival was the popularity of story films. If such subjects had yet to become the dominant product for American manufacturers, they had at least become the kind of cinema emphasized at urban theaters. In their Sunday newspaper advertising, Kohl & Castle announced the featured pictures at their three Chicago theaters where Spoor's kinodrome service was used. An analysis of these announcements in terms of actuality or documentary-like subjects on the one hand and acted or fiction subjects on the other yields the progress charted in the graph on page 338. As discussed in the previous chapter, a similar shift had taken place at Keith theaters only a few months earlier, when Vitagraph was hired. By mid 1903 successful exhibition companies and the theater managers who hired them recognized the enthusiasm with which audiences greeted story films. Although making story films required a substantial investment, American producers felt ready to meet this demand with original subjects now that they were clearly protected by copyright law.

Biograph and Its New Fourteenth Street Studio

Biograph was in the forefront of this revival. Production had slowed to a virtual standstill during late 1902 and early 1903 while personnel devoted much of their energies to building a new indoor studio at 11 East Fourteenth Street. This ambitious and expensive undertaking was the first motion-picture studio in the world to rely exclusively on artificial light, depending on banks of long, tubular lights, supplied by Cooper-Hewitt, to illuminate the stage.¹ These powerful lights had a greenish cast that made them highly desirable for photography and cinematography since film emulsion was orthochromatic and insensitive to the red end of the light spectrum. As one trade journal subsequently described this new technology:

The very quality of eliminating the red rays is what makes the Cooper-Hewitt lights so valuable in photography. Pictures made … [with them]

stand out as clear and sharp as any daylight pictures ever made (Film Index, 15 December 1906, p. 4).

The lighting, however, tended to be flatter and more diffuse than sunlight.

The first tests were made in late March with For the Upper Crust (No. 2342) and Spilt Milk (No. 2343), but it was not until May that the studio went into full operation, perhaps with A Shocking Incident (No. 2355), a one-shot, 85-foot film in the bad-boy genre. According to the Biograph Bulletin, "Willie attaches the wires of an electric battery to the legs of a turkey which Bridget is preparing for dinner. Bridget takes hold of the legs with disastrous results." Many ensuing comedies dealt with risqué subjects; The Pajama Girl (No. 2366), for example, presented "a young and shapely girl in pajamas taking her morning bath." But at the other end of the spectrum, "I Want My Dinner" (No. 2362) showed Wallace McCutcheon's two-year-old son Ross "first crying for his dinner and then devouring a big bowl of bread and milk with the utmost satisfaction." The film was a hit. According to one manager, it was "scoring as much laughter and receiving as much applause, proportionately, as any act on the bill."²

Once Biograph had its new studio in working order, its production output easily exceeded that of the Edison Company. Between 1 May 1903, and 1 May 1904, Biograph listed 653 new subjects in its production records (Nos. 2351–2904). These were not only more numerous than at the turn of the century but in many cases much longer and more ambitious: during the same period, Edison copyrighted only 129 films.³ Although Robert K. Bonine left the Biograph Company when the new studio was being put in working order, Biograph retained a large staff of photographers. Its two principal cameramen, G. W. Bitzer and A. E. Weed, not only worked extensively in the studio but also took actualities and other films on location. At times Wallace McCutcheon assumed control of the camera, perhaps when these two were otherwise occupied. In addition, Fred Armitage and Arthur Marvin were sent afield for special projects, and Herbert J. Miles continued to provide Biograph with a few films taken on the West Coast.

A remarkable burst of creativity came out of the Biograph studio in the year and a half following its opening. This flowering was the responsibility of a collaborative team, with Wallace McCutcheon and Frank Marion, his friend and one-time housemate, playing crucial roles in the production process.⁴ McCutcheon sometimes wrote (with or without Marion), usually directed the actors, and occasionally even did the camera work. Marion wrote and frequently produced. Bitzer, now an experienced electrician, and Weed undoubtedly contributed as well. Freed from the restrictions of a large-format film and the conception of cinema as a visual newspaper, Biograph quickly regained its reputation for quality productions.

While the first films made under electric light were primarily short comedies, Biograph was eager to sell more ambitious "headliners," which an exhibitor could use to promote his show. This was evident in the release of Rip Van Winkle in mid May. This 200-foot, eight-shot subject featuring Joseph Jefferson was a collection of scenes taken in 1896. When first made, they were shown separately on vaudeville bills, but now Biograph released them as a single package. The first fiction headliner to be made in the new studio was The Haymarket (No. 2400), shot on 20 June. According to the Biograph Bulletin, "It depicts in six scenes, six lively hours at New York City's famous Tenderloin dance hall." The spatial and temporal relations between the shots

remain imprecise; even though they clearly exist as action moves from one location to another, these relationships lack the kind of obvious continuities that Porter and Méliès had laid out. Beginning with the opening of the dance hall and ending with a police raid, The Haymarket emphasizes daily life and the re-creation of a real world rather than melodramatic narrative.⁵

Other multi-shot dramatic films quickly followed, though the company did not always assume control over the editorial process. The Divorce, shot 2 July 1903, was a three-part narrative in which each scene was listed and sold individually. In the opening "Detected" (No. 2410), the husband bids his wife and child good-bye but drops a compromising letter that she reads. In "On the Trail" (No. 2411), the wife visits a detective agency and makes the necessary arrangements. In "Evidence Secured" (No. 2412), the detective is in a hotel corridor and peeks through a keyhole. Calling the wife to the scene, the sleuth bursts into a bedroom, exposing the husband and his lover. These scenes were sold separately, in part, so that the exhibitor could introduce each one with a lantern-slide title, as Biograph had been doing since its inception. These title slides, which could be made up inexpensively by the exhibitor, were used like intertitles in later silent films. The Unfaithful Wife (Nos. 2427–2429) was a similar three-part subject that focused on a wayward woman. Both films conveyed a strong moral message.

The American Soldier in Love and War (Nos. 2418, 1575, 516, 2419, 2420) consisted of three newly filmed studio scenes that were "used in connection with two war views to make a complete story in one film for projection."⁶ During the United States' war in the Philippines, a soldier bids farewell to his sweetheart as he goes off to fight. The recycled second scene (Fifteenth Infantry, USA, No. 1575) shows troops at Governor's Island as they march off to war, while the third (Practice Warfare, No. 516) is realistically staged battle footage. These segments provided a credible milieu for the story, especially in contrast to the following studio-created jungle scene in which the wounded soldier is saved from certain death by a Filipino woman who intercedes with his captors. In the last scene, two native women are caring for the convalescing soldier when his sweetheart arrives. After learning that one of the women saved his life, the American woman gives her a necklace. As at Lubin and Edison, the filmmakers displayed little interest in trying to create a consistent mimetic world. The picture's system of representation thus relied on disparate, syncretic elements and was rooted in the practices of exhibitor-dominated cinema.

In all three of the films discussed above, continuity operates almost exclusively on the level of narrative and performance. Although this continued to be the case with other multi-part subjects, such as The Kidnapper (Nos. 2442–2444) and The Wages of Sin (Nos. 2445–2446), Biograph placed increasing emphasis on constructing a spatial/temporal world through the organization of shots, as Porter, Méliès, G. A. Smith, and others were already doing. The two-shot A Discordant Note (No. 2404), which was taken by Bitzer on 26 June, uses a temporal overlap to show the climactic moment from two different perspectives. It begins with the interior of a private house where a pleasant party is interrupted by an amateur singer. After a frustrated listener throws the singer out, through the window, the film cuts to an exterior view of the house, where the singer again crashes through the window and lands in the street. A similar construction is used in Next! (No. 2678), a live-action comedy that was shot in early November. Cartoon characters Alphonse and Gaston are in a barbershop. When each repeatedly defers to the other rather than exiting through

the door, the barbershop patrons throw both through the window, one after the other. An exterior view of the shop shows them again crashing through the window in the same fashion.⁷ The Burglar (No. 2491), taken by A. E. Weed in August, was described by Biograph as "a very humorous picture in two continuous scenes."⁸ The burglar sneaks from the bedroom to the adjoining room. Again there is a temporal overlap, although this is apparent to spectators only if they assume that the two rooms are contiguous spaces, as the catalog specifies.

A Search for Evidence (No. 2433) used a visual device similar to the looking glass in Grandpa's Reading Glass, in this case a keyhole. Elaborating on the scene "Evidence Secured" from The Divorce, a detective and a woman search a hotel corridor for her husband. Each time she looks through a keyhole, the scene cuts to a new view with a keyhole mask. From her point of view, the spectator sees a young man taking care of a baby, a rube trying to light a match on an electric lightbulb, and so forth. The same set and shot-setup and are repeated (with only the numbers on the door changing) as the wife and detective move down the hall. Finally, at room 13, she discovers what she is looking for—her husband. Point-of-view motivation is used twice as the wife and then the detective peer through the keyhole. The final shot, from inside the bedroom as the wife and detective confront the husband and his lover, is from an angle perpendicular to the previous scene of the hallway. The temporal relationship between the shots is not precisely delineated (it could be a match-cut with linear continuity but it also could involve some overlap of time).

Biograph's commercial situation was affected by the fate of its sister companies overseas. The British Mutoscope & Biograph Company made little effort to adopt the 35-mm format and continued to supply the parent American company with 70-mm films well into 1903. When American Biograph made a complete switch to standard gauge, the British company rapidly faded. In 1904, the rights to its films were taken over by Gaumont, and Dickson returned to inventing.⁹ Biograph retained good contacts in Britain, however, particularly with the American Charles Urban, who left the Warwick Trading Company to start his own enterprise, the Charles Urban Trading Company, early in 1903.

As Biograph switched to a 35-mm format, it introduced a three-blade shutter that greatly improved projection quality. Previous shutters had blocked the projected light whenever the film in the gate was moving, so that the alternation of image and its absence coincided with the number of frames per second. As the number of frames per second became fewer, the flicker effect became worse. With the three-blade shutter, the picture was blocked for fractions of a second even when the film strip was not being moved. This tripled the alternation of image and non-image, and since the eye synthesized this rapid alternation more readily, the flicker effect was considerably reduced. The device was developed by John Pross, working with Marvin and Casier in Canastota, New York; Biograph submitted a patent application on 19 January 1903, and it was granted on 10 March 1903. Biograph, though not making its own 35-mm projectors, adapted the shutter to its Urban bioscopes.¹⁰ The use of a three-blade shutter in conjunction with its new and often exclusive productions soon gave the company an opportunity to revive its exhibition service.

By mid July, Biograph had won a new contract with Keith and returned to his circuit's Boston and New York theaters on 27 July; the following week, it was in Keith's Philadelphia theater as well. The reaction from the managers was initially mixed. In Boston, M. J. Keating complained:

The show was greatly hurt by the inability of the Biograph people to perform this work. For two weeks I have been at them anticipating some trouble, and felt that I had forestalled any possible accident but after promising me that they would be ready to give a performance today, at the last moment they failed. As a consequence the entire show was delayed twenty or twenty-five minutes (Keith Reports, week of 27 July 1903).

The New York manager, meanwhile, stated, "While there is no question but that the biograph machine pictures are very fine from a mechanical standpoint, the list of views that they sent us this afternoon is rather ordinary." But the following week, the Philadelphia manager reported, "Pictures are smaller than Vitagraph; pictures are clearer. Views this week were good," and the New York manager announced, "The selection of views they have furnished us this week is a great improvement over that of last week, nearly all of them are new and all are good."¹¹ After two years of disruption and declining prospects, Biograph's commercial position was once again on the rise.

The Edison Company Resumes Production

The Edison Manufacturing Company resumed production activities in the United States in late April 1903, shortly after the copyright issue was resolved. In the meantime, James White had left for Europe to represent Edison's phonograph and film interests. William Markgraf, brother-in-law of Edison general manager William Gilmore, assumed White's title if not his role. Markgraf, who had little motion-picture experience, could not offer the know-how and experience that White had provided. By this time the Edison Manufacturing Company had three cameramen: Edwin S. Porter, Alfred C. Abadie, and James Blair Smith. Fleming had left and been replaced by William Martinetti, a scenic designer, but Porter was now in full charge of the studio, and the only one to photograph subjects made within its confines. Outside the studio, he usually worked only in the New York City area. Abadie, who had been responsible for Edison's motion-picture interests in Europe, was freed from these obligations with White's arrival. After filming in the Middle East and Europe from mid March to mid May 1903, he returned to the United States. In June, he was sent to Wilmington Springs, Delaware, to take local scenes for the exhibitor N. Dushane Cloward, who had a summer motion-picture theater at the local park. Abadie subsequently devoted most of his efforts to taking news films and actualities, including a flood in Paterson, New Jersey, the ruins of a fire in Coney Island, and the Princeton-Yale football game. Smith filmed a few news films and actualities but spent most of his time supervising the development of negatives and the production of prints at Edison's factory in Orange.

When Edwin S. Porter returned to filmmaking in late April 1903, he collaborated with J. Blair Smith on a series of actualities showing the "other half" of city life with views such as New York City Dumping Wharf; Sorting Refuse at Incinerating Plant, New Yor City; and New York City "Ghetto" Fish Market. Studio production resumed on 16 July with Porter filming a young vaudeville performer for Little Lillian, Toe Danseuse. Short comedies, including The Gay Shoe Clerk, followed. In this three-shot film, a shoe clerk helps a young woman try

on some shoes, while her chaperone settles in a chair and reads the paper. This is followed by a close view of the woman's leg as she discreetly raises her skirt and the shoe clerk's hands slowly move up her calf. In a return to the establishing shot, the two kiss, but osculatory pleasure is interrupted as the chaperone hits the shoe clerk over the head with her umbrella. Presentational elements occur on several levels as the woman displays her ankle to the shoe clerk and, in turn, to the spectator. The close view takes place against a white background rather than the set, further focusing the spectator's attention.

The Gay Shoe Clerk is the site of two intersecting genres typified by What Demoralized The Barbershop and The May Irwin Kiss. On one hand, the comedy makes use of the voyeurism of a hypothetical male spectator. Unlike the shoe clerk, who can touch and even kiss the girl but gets punished, the male viewer can see but runs no risk of chastisement. He can enjoy the shoe clerk's fate in contrast to his own safety. The Gay Shoe Clerk thus savors the spectatorial position of the male cinematic voyeur. The position of the female spectator is harder to construct (unless the woman assumes the role of a mock male self), for the camera's point of view is male oriented. The film suggests the woman's pleasure at being seen (at least the young woman in the picture seems to enjoy displaying her leg) and perhaps a slight sadistic satisfaction as she entices the young man toward his defeat. At the same time, The Gay Shoe Clerk can be seen as a kiss film that places the young couple in opposition to the chaperone and Victorian norms of propriety. In this sense the camera exalts this intimacy taken on the sly.

None of these short studio productions was released for distribution as Porter and the Edison staff prepared for the making of Uncle Tom's Cabin, completed in late July. Like Biograph's Rip Van Winkle, Edison's Uncle Tom's Cabin was an example of filmed theater. Even more than Rip Van Winkle, this fourteen-shot "feature," or principal film, evoked a story that native-born Americans outside the South knew intimately. The play was regularly presented in the nation's small-town opera houses by touring companies, and it was just such a company that was hired to perform in the Edison studio. Porter's skill came in adding a few special effects (such as Eva's spirit ascending to heaven) and most important, in reducing the evening-length performance to approximately fifteen minutes. Taken at twenty frames per second, this yielded 1,100 feet of film, which was longer than any studio subject Porter had yet produced and too large for the standard 1,000-foot reel that equipped most projectors. Despite its length, the sets had already been built and the play staged, so it undoubtedly cost significantly less than Jack And The Beanstalk. While production decisions made it difficult to create a spatial/temporal world as Porter had done in several earlier films, this was not a notable failing since audiences, like the producer, recognized that the film was operating in a different genre from either Life of an American Fireman or The Gay Shoe Clerk—that of filmed theater.

Uncle Tom's Cabin did inaugurate one important innovation in American production by borrowing a representational technique from the English fairy-tale film Dorothy's Dream, made by G. A. Smith. Each scene was prefaced by a title on film, which helped the audience follow the story by identifying the scene and some of the principal characters. While films and scenes within multi-shot films had been previously announced by titles, they were the responsibility of exhibitors, who either purchased the necessary title slides or made their own. (Some exhibitors, of course, had simply provided an on-the-spot commentary to identify films and add needed information.) With Uncle Tom's Cabin and many subsequent films, the producer assumed control over the titles. This was not the case with every film (short comedies from this period still generally lacked main titles), but for the most ambitious ones, producers soon followed the lead of G. A. Smith and Porter.

Porter was responsible for two other notable multi-shot "features" during that summer, Rube and Mandy at Coney Island and A Romance of the Rail. Both used actors and tentative stories yet remained tied to the travelogue and its repertoire of techniques (for instance, the frequently panning camera). Rube and Mandy at Coney Island was designed to show off the famed New York amusement park,

which fascinated Americans. Like Biograph's The Haymarket, it emphasized everyday events at one of New York's famous "resorts." A Romance of the Rail worked within the popular railway subgenre of the travelogue. Exhibitors frequently assembled programs of passing scenery, viewed from the front end of a train, with vignettes of actions taking place at the station or in the trains. Many of the vignettes were, of course, comic in nature. Whether or not a showman intercut A Romance of the Rail with railroad-travel films, the conventions would have been immediately recognized by audiences. Yet the picture differs from other such comedies because of its cultural specificity. This 275-foot, six-shot travel film lightheartedly spoofed the Lackawanna Railroad's extensive advertising campaign, in which Phoebe Snow rode the company's trains in a white gown. Despite the fact that the Lackawanna was known as a major coal carrier, her clothing never became soiled. Porter created a male counterpart, also dressed in white, who appears at the station and meets Phoebe Snow. They board and the train pulls out. Traveling through the Delaware Water Gap, the couple watch the scenery from the observation platform at the rear of the train: the camera is framed to present the passing scenery as much as their interaction. Romance blossoms and a minister—also in white—promptly marries them from the rear platform. Here a documentary genre is reoriented around the emerging story film.

Fiction "Features" at Biograph and Edison

The three Edison "features" discussed above were specifically American in their subject matter and depended heavily on the domestic market for sales. Although the Uncle Tom's Cabin narrative was known overseas in book and even play form, its audience was much more limited there than in the United States. Since familiarity greatly facilitated the spectators' understanding of the film, many foreigners must have considered the film a puzzling American curiosity. A Romance of the Rail would have been even more puzzling, since it depended on familiarity with an advertising campaign that only Americans could be expected to have seen. Biograph often took a similar U.S.-oriented approach. The ten-shot Kit Carson (NOS. 2538–2547) and the six-shot The Pioneers (NOS. 2555, 2557–2561)—both made by McCutcheon in early September—revolved around heroic actions of the famed American scout, who was the subject of various plays and many dime novels that were particularly popular in the United States.

In Kit Carson, the scout and his companion are trapping in the woods and are attacked by Indians. Carson is captured and escapes, then is recaptured. Tied to a tree in the Indian village, he is rescued by an Indian maiden who cuts him loose. In the last scene, he is reunited with his family. In The Pioneers, Indians kill a family of settlers except for one girl who is taken captive and eventually freed by Carson and his band of scouts. All the scenes were photographed in the Adirondack Mountains in an effort to provide appropriate scenery. Nonetheless, their mise-en-scène is highly theatrical: the performances are frontal, the camera is at eye level, and the landscape is often treated as a stage. As a result, the potentially dramatic impact of the scenery is largely lost, revealing the limitations of McCutcheon's camerawork. While there is one camera pan, the scenes are disconnected spatially and temporally. Though later Biograph brochures offer introductory titles for each of the scenes, they were not copyrighted with the images. For almost a year, Biograph's exhibition service retained exclusive use of these pictures and continued to use slides for titles rather than switching to filmed intertitles as Edison had done.

In November, Biograph and Edison each made a picture that synthesized many of the advances apparent in their previous film practice: The Escaped Lunatic (NO. 2693) and The Great Train Robrery. Both films were strongly influenced by a group of English imports—story films of violent crime in which burglars, thieves, and poachers are pursued by representatives of the law. In Biograph's ten-shot The Escaped Lunatic, these elements are employed for comic purposes. Photographed by Weed, but also the responsibility of Wallace McCutcheon and Frank Marion, the film was the first American production to be structured around the chase. In addition, it displays continuities of space, time, and action at opportune moments. In the opening, interior scene, the title character, who believes himself to be Napoleon, breaks his cell window and climbs through it. The action overlaps slightly with the following exterior shot as he climbs out of the window, drops to the ground, and makes good his escape—with the guards in close pursuit. Several chase scenes follow as the lunatic eludes his pursuers. The lunatic loves the chase: when he discovers the guards asleep on the grass, he wakes them up so their "game" can be continued. Internal cuts often occur within shots. A "take" photographed in reverse motion and another using regular forward motion are incorporated into a single shot using an "invisible" cut. This allows the lunatic to climb quickly and easily up a rope, creating a crazy world that distorts normal expectations.

The Escaped Lunatic contains one particularly notable scene in which a guard grapples with the patient on a bridge. Here, the filmmakers cut to a distant shot of the two combatants taken from a different angle, with a dummy substituted for the guard. The cut, recently experimented with in Off His Beat (NO. 2679) and A Guardian of the Peace (NO. 2680), is a perfect match. The change of angle functions within the trick-film repertoire and conceals the substitution more effectively than if executed using a single camera position. After the guard is thrown off the bridge and into a rocky stream, a conventional stop-action substitution (executed from one camera position) replaces the dummy with the actor, who continues on his way. Eventually the lunatic returns to his cell, where the exhausted guards find him reading a newspaper. The chase, violence, a simple but effective narrative as well as a coherent spatial and temporal world: all these mark the film as a significant breakthrough.

Edison's The Great Train Robbery was—and still is—the best known and most commercially successful film of the pre-Griffith era. Edwin S. Porter was responsible for producing and photographing it in November 1903, but the young actor G. M. Anderson probably helped him with the staging. Anderson, who had just appeared as the man trying to steal a kiss in What Happened in the Tunnel, played several small roles (the passenger who is shot trying to escape, the tenderfoot dancing to the sound of six-shooters, and an outlaw). Another actor, Justus D. Barnes, played the bandit chieftain Barnes, while many of the passengers were employees at Edison's factory. Professional and nonprofessional actors were used, and Porter, as he had done earlier with Fleming, worked collaboratively.

The film had a plethora of antecedents. The title and basic story were inspired by Scott Marble's play The Great Train Robbery (1896). Some scenes, such as the fight on the tender in scene 4, were modeled on train robberies in the Far West.¹² The film carefully analyzes the robbery and the bandits' getaway in the first nine scenes, starting with the false message that the outlaws force the telegraph operator to hand the engineer. The outlaws board the train at the water tank (scene 2) and overpower

the messenger in the express car (scene 3). Another bandit hurls the fireman off the tender (scene 4); the engine is uncoupled from the rest of the train (scene 5); passengers are forced onto the tracks and relieved of their valuables (scene 6). The bandits escape on the engine (scene 7), scramble down the embankment (scene 8), and race across a stream to their horses (scene 9). An operational aesthetic, with its emphasis on process, was at work.

Although The Great Train Robbery lacks repeated actions that signal temporal overlaps, the film nevertheless returns to earlier points in time. The catalog description indicates that scenes 3 and 4 occurred simultaneously. As André Gaudreault has pointed out, a second line of action developed in scenes 10 and 11 (the freeing of the telegraph operator by his daughter and the raising of the posse at the dance hall) is unfolding while the robbery takes place.¹³ These two lines of action come together in scene 12 as the posse chases the bandits on horseback. The opportunity for chase, maximized in Biograph's The Escaped Lunatic, is limited to this single shot. The final scene is the shootout, in which the posse is victorious.

In making his famous film, Porter included one emblematic shot of the outlaw leader Barnes shooting his gun directly at the camera and audience. Labeled "Realism" in the catalog, this extra shot could be placed at either the beginning or end of the film. At the beginning, it introduced the leading character just like the opening shot in Edison's earlier Laura Comstock's Bag-Punching Dog. Shown at the end as an "apotheosis," it abstracted a single moment from the narrative as had been done with Rube and Mandy at Coney Island. In either position (but more effectively at the beginning) the shot added realism to the film by intensifying the spectators' identification with the victimized travelers. It reiterated and intensified the vieweras-passenger convention of the railroad subgenre.

The term "realism" can also be applied to the entire film, reflecting the ways in which the filmmaker integrated common cinematic practices into an effective whole. Although the opening scene was filmed at the studio, a view of the train pulling into the station was matted into a window frame. This striking ability to show outside activities through the window set the tone for later scenes. As David Levy has pointed out, camera movement, particularly in scene 7, where the cinematographer struggled to keep the outlaws in frame by panning and tilting simultaneously, provided a cinematic technique that was already associated with the urgency of news films.¹⁴ The careful attention to the details of robbing a train, the emphasis on process as narrative, almost takes The Great Train Robbery out of the realm of fiction and suggests a documentary intent.

While the Edison Company was working on The Great Train Robbery, Biograph made yet another story film, The Story the Biograph Told (NO. 2705). As with Porter's epic, Biograph confronted the problem of depicting actions occurring simultaneously in two distant locations. The film was loosely inspired by a vaudeville skit, In the Biograph (© 29 May 1901 by Wilfred Clarke). In this nineteen-minute playlet performed by Wilfred Clarke and his acting troupe, a motion-picture camera catches a doctor in a compromising situation:

"In the Biograph" is full of action and calls for a new laugh each moment. It deals with the adventure of a prominent physician who, seated on a bench by the seaside, suddenly has an infant thrust into his arms, the mother of the child hastening away. It develops that the incident has been photographed for biograph reproduction. The physician's wife, who is jealous, and the father of the child, said father being a professional strong man, chance to see the picture reproduced and recognize the principals. Stormy scenes follow, but, of course, all ends happily (Washington Star, 28 January 1902, p. 10).

The act "goes briskly and creates a great deal of laughter," reported one vaudeville manager.

In The Story the Biograph Told, the office boy at a film company is shown how to use the camera. When the boss and his pretty "typewriter" (i.e., secretary) arrive, work is forgotten as she sits in his lap and they kiss passionately. Meanwhile, the proprietor's wife calls on the phone, and the naughty office boy surreptitiously uses his new talents to grind away with the camera. In the next shot, the husband and wife are in box seats at the theater and a card onstage announces the biograph. The third shot shows the close-up of the screen: the kissing scene taken by the "bad boy." In shot 4, the outraged wife beats her husband and leaves the theater. In the fifth and final shot, the wife enters the husband's office and replaces the "typewriter" with a young man.

In the first shot, the producers were faced with the problem of showing the husband and the wife in two locations as they spoke to each other on the phone. Neither a split-screen effect nor a narrative repetition seemed suitable, and crosscutting between the two scenes, which would be the logical procedure at Biograph within another five years, was not yet possible. Instead, the two scenes were shown simultaneously by double exposure: the image of the wife begins when the husband pick up the phone and ends when it is placed on the hook. In certain respects, this

solution is more "advanced" than the one offered by Porter in The Great Train Robbery, where viewers had to infer the temporal relations between shots. Here the temporal relationship between the two shots is made explicit. Yet, what Biograph gained in specificity it lost in clarity; the image became muddied and hard to decipher. For this reason, Biograph's experiment was discarded, and overlapping action and temporal repetition remained the dominant means of spatial/temporal and narrative construction through 1907.

Both Edison and Biograph made fewer "headline" fiction films during the winter and spring of 1904. In this respect, Edison output was particularly meager, and one factor may have been the dismissal of kinetograph department head William Markgraf after he had gone on a drunken binge in late December. It was not until March that a replacement, Alex T. Moore, was found, and he lacked any previous filmrelated experience. The commercial success of The Great Train Robbery also may have kept the Edison factory operating at full capacity to produce positive prints, thus allowing several months to pass before the need for new negatives was felt. At any event, it was not until early March that Porter completed Buster Brown And His Dog Tige (copyrighted as The Buster Brown Series), a 710-foot, seven-shot film that was based on the well-known Buster Brown cartoon strip. The opening scene showed the strip's creator, Richard F. Outcault, making a charcoal sketch of Buster and Tige. Remaining scenes were live-action vignettes of Buster creating his comic mayhem. It was sold "in one length only," a departure from the marketing of earlier comedy series on an individual-scene basis. A common character thus provided the production company with sufficient justification to assume editorial control, suggesting that the centralization of production and postproduction under one roof was rapidly advancing, at least when fiction filmmaking was involved.

Biograph, meanwhile, moved most of its production activities into the studio for the winter and likewise curtailed its efforts to create ambitious fiction films. A modest exception was Out in the Streets (NO. 2864, copyrighted as The Waif), the story of a desperate, impoverished woman who is unable to feed her children, and abandons the youngest on the doorstep of a rich but childless couple. Four studio sets—two interiors and two exteriors—depict the woman's garret apartment and the house of the wealthy family. The abandonment and subsequent discovery of the infant at the mansion occur simultaneously with the eviction of the woman's older child in the middle of a snowstorm. A policeman befriends the child and takes him home.¹⁵ Discovering this second loss, the bereft mother collapses on the wealthy couple's doorstep, is brought inside, and is reunited with her baby. At the end, the rich couple take the mother to her dwelling, the policeman returns the child, and all is well. The Waif is filled with the characteristic elements of nineteenth-century melodrama: contrasts, extremes of emotion, coincidence, and a moral ending. The causes of the woman's impoverishment and the couple's wealth are never suggested, and class barriers are easily bridged, though only in a charitable, paternalistic fashion.

While Weed and McCutcheon worked in the studio, Bitzer filmed scenes of daily life at St. John's Military Academy in Syracuse, New York. During his stay there, he also made The Battle of the Yalu (Nos. 2846–2848, 2855), in which the military cadets reenacted a battle in the recently begun Russo-Japanese War. Costumes were credibly authentic, and its four scenes trace the ebb and flow of battle with attack and counterattack. The film received extensive publicity, including a full-page article in the Hearst newspapers, and was a featured presentation in Keith theaters.¹⁶ Rather than keep it as an exclusive for the exhibition circuit, Biograph quickly put it on the market in both 400-foot and 623-foot lengths. The Edison Company quickly responded by making Skirmish Between Russian and Japanese Advance Guards (565 feet), which was virtually identical.

Production records testify to the diversity and scope of Biograph's other filmmaking ventures. Of the 653 films made from 1 May 1903 to 1 May 1904, more than 120 were sponsored by large corporations or the United States government. In late July, Weed was sent to Washington, D.C., to film United States Post Office Department employees sorting letters, loading cars, and delivering mail. Other agencies of the federal government soon wanted to promote their services. Extensive series were made for the United States Navy, showing recruitment, training, the administration of first aid, and the auctioning of personal property left behind by deserters. The Department of the Interior commissioned films of its Indian schools (Fire Drill, Albuquerque Indian School, No. 2654) and daily life on the reservation (Navajo Squaw Weaving Blankets, No. 2659), as well as views of the Grand Canyon and Yosemite National Park. Films taken for the Missouri Commission showed students from various schools across the state; these were probably made for exhibition at the forthcoming St. Louis World's Fair (Louisiana Purchase Exposition).

Bitzer photographed the Westinghouse works in East Pittsburgh, Wilmerding, and Trafford, Pennsylvania, in April and May 1904. Many of these films show factory interiors with women punching their time cards and winding wire on armatures for generators (Girls Taking Time Checks, No. 2887 and Coil Winding, Section E, No. 2889). Several stunning traveling shots were taken from overhead cranes that moved the length of these huge buildings. Today they offer some of the earliest film documentation of the American workplace. Designed for lecture formats rather than amusement, the pictures then enjoyed significant sales overseas. Frank Marion reported:

Among all the nations of the world the Japanese are among our best customers. They are intensely keen in regard to everything that shows the interior workings of American establishments, the factory, the hotel, the store, the municipal and Government buildings. We sent a portrayal of the postoffice department and that vied in popularity with the Westing-house factories (Pittsburgh Post, 11 November 1906, p. 66).

Biograph also made a small number of advertising films for Shredded Wheat Biscuits, Mellin's Baby Food, and the Gold Dust Twins. More than a dozen films taken in October and November 1903 were for "thumb books"—"riffle" or "flip" books of still photographs that are transformed into a moving image when the viewer bends back and then releases the pages in rapid succession. Made for the New York Journal, these featured its leading comic-strip characters: Foxy Grandpa, Alphonse and Gaston, Toodles, Happy Hooligan, and the Katzenjammer Kids.

Biograph's diverse output thus included many sponsored films, mutoscope subjects, and pictures for Biograph's own exhibitions or outright sale to independent showmen. But with this impressive array of films, it is worth considering why the Edison Manufacturing Company and Porter retained a higher profile both at the time and in subsequent histories. The most important reason would seem to be that Edison sold its films as soon as they were completed. By Christmas week of 1903, all the major exhibition services in New York City owned copies of The Great Train Robbery and were showing them in eleven Manhattan and Brooklyn theaters. Throughout the country exhibitors quickly acquired the film.¹⁷ In contrast, Biograph retained its most attractive productions for its own exhibition circuit, and even at these limited outlets, the films were not displayed immediately. Rather, the company waited until the winter months, when weather conditions created a shortage of new products, before unveiling its exclusive story films. Kit Carson, for example, was not shown at Keiths Boston theater until late January, four months after it was produced and well after The Great Train Robbery was seen in Boston. And although the hand-tinted print was hailed as the star feature on the bill—"It is splendidly worked out, much of the photography is almost stereoscopic and the coloring is the work of the artist"—Keith's patrons were warned, "It will not be seen elsewhere in New England."¹⁸ Likewise, The Escaped Lunatic was shown at Keith's in late March. Since neither film was sold to exhibitors, their distribution was primarily limited to vaudeville. Both Edison and Biograph found effective ways of achieving profits, but the Edison policy assured more immediate impact and greater diffusion.

Other American Producers Revive Production

The affirmation of viable copyright practices in April 1903 encouraged other American producers to embark on more ambitious projects, particularly the making of longer story films. While few of these productions, unfortunately, have survived, they reflect the industry's general revival. Lubin found still more ways to challenge Edison's commercial base. A week after Edison marketed Uncle Tom's Cabin at a cost of $165, Lubin announced the imminent release of his own 700-foot version for $77.¹⁹ It was shot at fewer frames per second and eliminated a cakewalk dance but was remarkably similar in other respects. This film was followed by Ten Nights in a Barroom, also 700 feet, in mid October. Lubin's advertisements suggest that this, too, was an example of filmed theater.

In mid December, the producer offered three new "song films": Dear Old Stars and Stripes Good-bye (340 feet), Only a Soldier Boy (215 and Every Day Is Sunshine When the Heart Beats True (255 feet).²⁰ Illustrating sentimental and patriotic ballads, these elaborate productions contained at least four shots each and ran three and a half to five minutes. Every Day Is Sunshine When the

Two scenes from Lubin's Uncle Tom's Cabincatalog. In "The Auction of St. Clair's Slaves" Sigmund Lubin (third from left in the front row) plays the auctioneer.

Heart Beats True was written from the perspective of a man who has lost his beloved wife and recalls their happiness together. The chorus of Only a Soldier Boy, which was intended to be sung as pertinent sections of the film were projected, went:

You are a soldier boy, that's all you know,
When duty calls you're always first to go
You're not supposed to have a heart,
Let others play the lover's part,
So brush off your sweetheart's tears and say "good-bye."
Don't let her hear your parting sigh.
When the band begins to play, fall in line
And march away, for you're only a Soldier Boy.

Lubin also sold sets of lantern slides for a long list of illustrated songs (including Only a Soldier Boy and Every Day Is Sunshine When the Heart Beats True).²¹

Lubin also continued to make short comedies, such as Street Car Chivalry, where men willingly offer their seats to a pretty woman but not to an ugly one. Although news films, such as one of the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, and fight reenactments remained commercially viable, longer acted films became increasingly important for the Philadelphia producer. Perhaps these signs of prosperity encouraged Lubin's chief sales manager, Lewis M. Swaab, to leave the producer's employ and open his own business—as agent for many of Lubin's competitors in the Philadelphia market—in April 1904.²²

Since Selig advertised only irregularly and without listing most of his films, his productions are harder to trace. By the time he printed his complete catalog sometime late in 1903, he was selling two original productions based on well-known fairy tales: Pied Piper of Hamelin and Scenes from Humpty Dumpty. Pied Piper of Hamelin (350 feet) was indebted to Robert Browning's poem of that name, and according to the Selig catalog, "Even those who fancy the great poet to be as intelligible read backwards as forward, are constrained to make an exception in favor of the charming ballad which sets forth, in fantastic fashion, the danger of leaving one's debt unpaid." The film thus acted as a moral tale for children and adults. Scenes from Humpty Dumpty, meanwhile, "were made from the great pantomime Humpty Dumpty and were posed for by one of the greatest European Pantomimists." This 675-foot film had eight scenes, each of which was sold separately at thirteen cents a foot, and the catalog assured potential exhibitors that "these films are without doubt the finest ever made and will create no end of amusement to the little folks as well as the old folks, who in these films will recognize the familiar scenes of their childhood when they witnessed Humpty Dumpty."²³ Such fairy tale films were designed for adult nostalgia as much as for children, linking them in significant ways to the bad-boy comedy genre.

Selig continued to produce numerous actualities. In the spring of 1903, one of his cameramen toured with President Roosevelt and took scenes at the dedication ceremonies for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis on 30 April. The cinematographer then journeyed to Oregon and Washington for the president's May tour (President Roosevelt at Walla Walla) and also took a series of films along the Columbia River (Panoramic View of Multnomah Falls). A 600-foot scene of a Mexican bullfight was shot sometime in 1903, though the locale may have actually been a Chicago stockyard.²⁴

Vitagraph's production activities were modest, and its original subjects were principally for use on the company's exhibition circuit. Acted films played a modest role. Like its competitors, Vitagraph produced an example of filmed theater, East Lynne. Condensing the well-known melodrama into fifteen minutes of screen time, Vitagraph claimed to offer "the entire play acted by well-known members of the theatrical profession."²⁵ A news film of a devasting fire in Rochester was prominently advertised in that city and attracted patrons to the Baker Theater, where Vitagraph was giving a Sunday program. As with Biograph, Blackton, Smith, and Rock used these exclusive subjects to win and retain venues. Perhaps more importantly, Vitagraph rushed its European purchases to the United States and projected them ahead of their rivals.

By the end of 1903, Vitagraph, Lubin, and Selig all made longer narrative films with clear theatrical antecedents, coinciding with the fairy-tale or filmed-theater orientation previously explored by Méliès, Porter, and G. A. Smith. However, they failed to move quickly into the production of chase and crime films as did Edison and Biograph. This failure meant that, in the realm of commercially successful filmmaking at least, they could not challenge their larger, better-established rivals. They made up the second tier of American production companies.

The Impact of the European Industry on the United States

The European industry continued to play a major role in shaping American cinema even though French and English producers had had little direct access to American markets since 1896–1897. While they sold a certain number of prints to American exhibitors with overseas connections, their films generally reached American screens as dupes marketed by U.S. companies. Undoubtedly the world's leading filmmaker during the first years of the new century was the Parisian Georges Méliès, whose pictures had been duped by every major American producer. Dissatisfied with this state of affairs, he sent his brother, Gaston Méliès, to the United States to represent his interests. Gaston arrived in March 1903—while the copyright case was still unresolved—and discovered, for example, that Biograph had been paying Charles Urban one-cent-per-foot royalties for prints of Méliès subjects. The money, of course, had never reached the original artist.²⁶

To secure the economic benefits of these films for their creator, Gaston opened a New York office and factory in June. Georges Méliès began to make two negatives of each subject and ship one to New York, so that his brother could not only distribute but also print his Star-brand films. (Gaston, as agent, received a salary plus 25 to 40 percent of the profits, the percentage growing as the size of the profits increased.) In his first catalog, Gaston chided American manufacturers, who "are searching for novelties but lack the ingenuity necessary to produce them" and "found it easier and more economical fraudulently to copy the Star Films and to advertise their poor copies as their own original conceptions." In opening the New York branch, he announced, "we are prepared and determined energetically to pursue all counterfeiters and pirates. We will not speak twice, we will act." To make the threat real, Gaston took the precaution of registering his films with the Library of Congress, commencing with The Enchanted Well (© 25 June 1903). This forestalled the duping of most subsequent Star films.²⁷

Notwithstanding Méliès's actions, American companies still had a wide choice of European films to dupe. Among their favorites were those of Pathé Frères, such as Sleeping Beauty (January 1903), Don Quixote (August 1903), and Christopher Columbus (March 1904). Several English story films that reached the United States during the summer of 1903 were also duped, including the Sheffield Photo Company's A Daring Daylight Burglary, Robert Paul's Trailed by Bloodhounds, and Walter Haggar's A Desperate Poaching Affray. While Edison sold only dupes it had acquired surreptitiously through James White, Biograph usually made arrangements with the original producers. In some cases the latter offered to sell either prints made from the original negative (for fifteen cents a foot) or duplicates made from prints (twelve cents a foot).²⁸

The three British films mentioned above offered two important innovations. First, and in sharp contrast to the earlier fairy-tale films, they were films of violent crime. In A Daring Daylight Burglary, for example, a burglar looting a house is discovered by police, makes his escape, and is finally captured after a prolonged chase, while in Desperate Poaching Affray, two poachers are chased by game wardens, with resulting shootings and hand-to-hand fights. Second, these films used the chase as a central narrative element. As a result, the British conveyed a sensationalistic energy that American and French producers soon emulated.

Despite their innovative subject matter, however, British firms did not establish a solid base in the United States. Most producers were small and sold their films through larger distributors, particularly the Charles Urban Trading Company or British Gaumont. Similarly, during the period covered by this volume, not a single British film company opened an American agency, but rather sold films through American sales agents. While Gaumont sold Biograph films in England, Biograph served as the American agent for Gaumont and several other British companies, including Hepworth and Robert Paul.²⁹ The American company was soon protecting these rights by copyrighting such pictures as British Gaumont's An Elopement a la Mode (© 1 December 1903 as Runaway Match) and The Child Stealers (© 9 June 1904).

Exhibition and Distribution

The rise of the story film coincided with other important changes in the film industry, including increased production and improved projection: all contributed to cinema's revived and increasing popularity. The number of theaters showing films as a permanent feature as well as the number of traveling exhibitors rose rapidly. During October and early November 1903, approximately eleven prominent New York theaters were showing films, a figure that had changed little in three years. By April 1904, the number had increased to seventeen. Keith's had been the only Boston theater to show films on a regular basis during the 1902–1903 season, but by fall 1903, films were appearing at four theaters. Two of these also gave Sunday concerts that included films. Although still shown at the end of the bill, these films, wrote theBoston Herald, "caused many persons to forget that there were such things as railway schedules."³⁰ The "chaser period" was coming to an end.

In Rochester, moving-picture exhibitions reappeared on a sporadic basis at commercial theaters in March 1903. Their increasing frequency in the fall coincided with the programming of story films. The Kinetograph Company's screening of The Great Train Robbery created tumultuous excitement in January 1904 and reportedly "scored the biggest moving picture hit ever made in Rochester."³¹ The following Sunday it was shown at another theater, where crowds packed the house from gallery to orchestra and a great many people were turned away. Two weeks later, in response to many requests, a return engagement was arranged. Soon the Kinetograph Company was exhibiting at Cook's Opera House on a permanent basis, while Sunday film shows were given at a rival theater.

A similar boom began among traveling exhibitors in the nation's opera houses. A survey of records documenting these showmen's activities suggests that the number of exhibitions given in the spring of 1903 was almost double that of the previous two years. These numbers increased another 50 percent in the fall, and more than 50 percent again in the spring of 1904. Lyman Howe started a second exhibition company to travel through the Midwest in early 1903. That summer, an employee, Edwin Hadley, left and started his own company. Archie Shepard, who had shown films between play acts for the Maude Hillman Stock Company, started his own traveling motion-picture show in the fall of 1903; he added a second unit in January and a third in February 1904. Other exhibitors were either getting started or moving into commercial venues at about the same time. Morgan & Hoyt's Moving Picture Company may have been operating during the first years of the new century, but in the fall of 1903, they added a ladies' orchestra, a whistling soloist, and two singers to present illustrated songs. They were thus assured of successful exhibitions in commercial theaters.³²

Perhaps the only form of exhibition that did not prosper during this period was, ironically, the storefront theater, which, for reasons discussed in the previous chapter, suffered as existing vaudeville theaters added motion pictures to their bill. Moreover, new vaudeville houses opened in many middle-size cities, such as Hart-ford, Connecticut, where S. Z. Poli added a theater in September 1903; here as elsewhere on the Poli circuit, the electrograph had become a permanent attraction. The proliferation of inexpensive vaudeville was particularly characteristic of the Far West (Portland, Los Angeles, etc.). Known as small-time vaudeville, these places had between six and eight acts on their bill—much fewer than at Keith's—and the admission charge was correspondingly less, usually a dime. Motion pictures had a prominent role in these houses, but potential patrons received more for their money in these situations than at specialized storefront picture shows.

During 1903–1904, fundamental changes in the method of distribution became widespread. Until this period, distribution had been only one of several functions performed by exhibitors. Now, some established companies began to rent a reel of film to the theater for less money (about twenty-five dollars a week) and let its management be responsible for the actual projection. The theater thus became the exhibitor, while the old exhibition service retained the more limited role of distributor. This development was not some belated "discovery" but a practical response to recent changes in the industry. The exhibitor's role had become simpler and easier. With titles usually incorporated into the films rather than on separate slides, the mechanics of the editorial process were no longer performed in the projection booth, at least in vaudeville houses where a single reel of film was being shown. With projectors easier and safer to operate, astute exhibition services shifted projection responsibilities onto the theater's electrician (often selling a projector to the theater in the process).

While films had been rented occasionally in the past, the practice now became much more common. In August 1903 Lubin announced that "A Million Feet of Film of all the latest and Up-to-date Subjects will be rented."³³ Yet this offer did not have the commercial impact of similar moves made by others, particularly the Miles Brothers and Percival Waters' Kinetograph Company. In December, several months after making the shift to story films, Biograph sought to dispose of many of its old actuality subjects by offering them for sale at eight cents a foot. The Miles Brothers, who had located their New York office first in Biograph's new building on Fourteenth Street and then across the street, saw a commercial opportunity in the sale. According to Albert Smith, "They bought a number of these old copies of films, and went across the country to San Francisco, stopping at the small towns en route, and making arrangements with the managers of theaters in these small towns to supply them with programs from week to week on a circuit basis."³⁴ Because they had purchased the film at a low price, the Miles Brothers could offer theater managers an attractive bargain. Many of their customers were in the Far West, where small-time vaudeville managers found films an effective way to keep within their budgets.

Even though it was inaugurated with actuality footage, the Miles Brothers' venture was made possible by the shift toward story films. As this contradiction suggests, advances within the film industry were rarely instituted uniformly. A company making advances in one area, in fact, usually did not make comparable advances in others. The Miles Brothers' picture circuit indirectly challenged the business practices of exhibition services by simply renting a reel of films rather than a service that also included projector and operator. Perhaps because the theaters supplied by the Miles Brothers were small and removed from New York City, and the films were secondhand and nonfiction, the implications of this commercial strategy were not immediately apparent. The separation of distribution from exhibition and the treatment of a reel of film as a standardized interchangeable commodity had commercially revolutionary implications for the film industry.

Percival Waters' Kinetograph Company made the move to renting a reel of film at about the same time as the Miles Brothers. The precise date is uncertain, but the results were obvious. Four Boston theaters were showing films at the beginning of December 1903: Keith's with the biograph, the Boston and Majestic with the vitagraph, and Howard's with the cineograph. A month later, five theaters were showing films: Waters' kinetograph or kinetoscope service was at the Howard, Majestic, and Music Hall, while the biograph remained at Keith's and the vitagraph at the Majestic. In Rochester, where the biograph, vitagraph, and kinetograph were all contending for a place on the local vaudeville bill, the Kinetograph Company probably won the competition because of its lower cost. Nor is it surprising that the Kinetograph Company was the first to make such a move toward rentals. Unlike Biograph or even Vitagraph, Waters could rarely offer exclusive programs. He was thus forced to experiment with innovations in other areas to challenge his leading competitors.

The policy of renting films was quickly adopted by others. In Chicago, Eugene Cline and Company was advertising "Film for Rent" by the beginning of January 1904. In New York City, Alfred Harstn & Company followed in March, and William Paley by April. By that month George Spoor, whose kinodrome was the leading exhibition service in the Midwest, was also renting films through his National Film Renting Bureau.³⁵

High-Class Moving Pictures

The rise of the story film and the decline of film as a visual newspaper meant that moving pictures were assuming more and more clearly the role of commercial amusement. Not surprisingly, more genteel motion-picture exhibitions did not experience the same dramatic expansion. Burton Holmes and Dwight Elmendorf remained among the few to show films in their travel lectures. Holmes had switched from 60-mm to regular 35-mm film stock in 1902. Although his original productions (still taken by Oscar Depue) remained central, the lecturer would now include films taken by other producers in his programs. For the 1903–1904 season, Holmes delivered a series of lectures on America, "having chosen them with the patriotic intention of extolling the beauties of our own country."³⁶ These included "The Yellowstone National Park: The Wonderland of America," in which, according to one critic:

By means of motion pictures and stationary projections, accompanied by almost sublime word painting, the speaker carried the audience from Livingston, Mont., through the Gate of the Wonderland, indicating as he proceeded the changes wrought in the last seven years, taking the observer to the very crater of the famous geysers, skirting the various falls and rushing down through the canyons and gorges. Not for a minute did interest lag. Among the most interesting and thrilling of the many motion pictures were those showing the mammoth buffalo herd, the minute man in action, the great fountain, the Black Warrior geyser, brink of the upper fall, the great fall of the Yellowstone and the upper falls from the right bank (Pittsburgh Post, 28 November 1903, p. 4).

By late February 1904, Holmes had added "St. Petersburg and the Russian Army," which, reported the New York World, was based on a trip he had taken to Russia three years earlier, during which "he made a close study of the Czar's military system."³⁷ Thus a simple travelogue became a timely documentary program on a country engaged in war.

During the 1903–1904 season, Elmendorf gave his own illustrated lecture "The Yellowstone Park: The Wonderland of the World." One critic wrote:

Moving pictures constituted more than half the views shown on Saturday and included the majority of the geysers in the park first pictured in the gorgeous coloring of their surroundings and then shown in action. There were also many comical pictures of bears, one of an old bear and her cub, being immediately suggestive of "Mrs. Grumpy" and "Little Johnny" of Mr. [Ernest Thompson] Seton's tales of the animals of the Yellowstone (Brooklyn Eagle, 16 November 1903, p. 5).

Elmendorf and Holmes thus offered their overlapping audiences different views of the same subject. The following year, Elmendorf became a cause célèbre with "Old and New Castile." As originally announced, the illustrated lecture at the Brooklyn Institute was to include "the only moving pictures of a complete bull fight from start to finish," and announcements of the event jammed Association Hall with 1,500 eager patrons, two-thirds of whom were women. Elmendorf's intentions were thwarted by Professor Franklin W. Hooper and officers of the institute, who forbade the film. Elmendorf protested but reluctantly accepted the censorship. At the exhibition, however, there were vehement calls for the banned subject. "The audience was made up of the very best people in Brooklyn, and there was nothing rowdyish or threatening in the demonstration, but it was certainly carried to the extreme limit of expression which well-bred people permit their emphatic and earnest disapproval to take."³⁸ Despite these protests, the film was not shown.

Illustrated lectures had a strong following by 1903–1904, yet few joined Holmes and Elmendorf in appealing to patrons of refined culture with motion pictures. Likewise, American producers made little effort to cultivate religious groups with films on sacred subjects. Although exhibitions in noncommercial venues are particularly difficult to document, church-sponsored exhibitions do not appear to have grown with the same rapidity as those located in theatrical amusement centers. But even the exhibitors who appealed to religious groups were sometimes attracted to films of violence and crime. Lyman H. Howe, who retained important ties to Protestant groups, included A Desperate Poaching Affray in his repertoire—and this must have dismayed conservative churchgoers. Film practice thrived when it catered to one particular cultural group, lovers of commercial amusement, and it was here that virtually all the innovations in production, representation, and industrial organization were made in the early 1900s.