Tommaso wrote:While I agree that we cannot really determine the exact meaning of the opening shot, it nicely gives the whole story some sort of introduction or 'frame', which basically works to build up suspense, a suspense that is prolonged by those extended moments of the firemen waking up and preparing to do their job. We want to see the burning house, but it takes us a while to get there and suspense is created. The importance of the event is underlined, too, by the fact that there are nine carts, not just two or three. So all this works together to create audience excitement in a way that I find quite modern or at least 'hollywoodesque'. I also find the fact that Porter tells the ending twice - or at least the way he tells it, with continuity errors et al - not quite convincing from a modern point of view, but this might serve as a reminder that cinema at the time was very much still seen as 'spectacle' in the sense of what Gunning calls the 'cinema of attractions', and Porter gives the audience precisely what it wants: the most spectacular moments are shown twice. The camera trickery in the dream scene at the beginning belongs here, too.
By contrast, I can't help finding the Williamson film rather plain or at least 'matter-of-fact', even though there are no 'mistakes' in spatial arrangement and continuity. But the fact that it obeys the 180° rule not necessarily makes it more modern, and I have doubts that that rule had been formulated at the time, anyway (correct me if I'm wrong). Perhaps this indeed all comes down to whether you prefer your cinema to be 'realistic' or 'cinematic', for want of a better word. Domino's point about film musicals is the best example for this.
Having seen Williamson’s
Fire! again, in some ways I do prefer it to the Porter film: the opening shot, with the burning house and the policeman rushing into the frame, shows a more artful control of mise-en-scène than you see in
Life of an American Fireman. So does the brilliant scene where the man wakes up in the burning room, and the curtain burns away from the window to reveal the fireman about to break in (much more effective, pictorially speaking, than the equivalent moment in Porter’s film where the fireman breaks the door down); and so does the ending, where the man is led away from the building, towards the camera. Williamson’s choice of building pays off too: the fire hoses soaking and darkening the white walls is a nice effect. Plus there’s a decent stunt when the man jumps from the window. In purely technical terms, it’s a better, more thrilling, piece of film-making.
But I think it’s deeply unfair to say that
American Fireman ‘plagiarises’ Williamson. Perhaps Porter did get the idea of cutting between the interior and exterior of the building from
Fire!, but after all there’s nothing wrong with that (as the word 'plagiarise' would seem to suggest) – and it isn’t the main reason why his film is effective. In most important respects, we’re dealing with two very different films here, and the character of these differences is summed up in their titles.
Fire! is a thrilling and effective, but rather impersonal, demonstration of film technique;
Life of An American Fireman is a great, sentimental, populist show.
The opening shot is masterful, and watching it again on a DVD (rather than on, ahem, the internet) I don’t think it’s at all confusing. The fireman dreams of his wife putting their child to bed, she reaches to turn off the bedside lamp, and at that moment the dream fades away into the dark wall – what a brilliant idea. The fake desk-lamp painted on the wall next to the sleeping fireman contributes to the scene as well. He sleeps while they’re awake, and dreams of them; while they sleep, he wakes, and is called to save another mother and her child, from a bedroom reminiscent of the one he has just been dreaming about. Even if this were the only distinguishing characteristic of Porter’s film, it would go some way to explaining why it is better remembered than Williamson’s: because it engages our sympathy for the fireman, and pays tribute to the sacrifices of this unglamorous working man, rather than simply offering an effective staging of a Fire (!).
One could go on: the close-up of the fire handle being turned helps to make us, as spectators, feel personally involved in the drama, as does the crowd of spectators (absent in
Fire!) who watch the fire trucks going by. The shot of the firemen jumping out of bed and descending the pole, followed by the trucks pulling out (yapped at by that little dog – planned or not, a very nice touch) fulfils the movie’s remit of showing us the ‘life of a fireman’; to us it might seem to drag a little, but actually it just shows how superior Porter’s film is as a documentary ‘slice of life’.
The difference between these two films is not wholly unlike that between the British
Daring Daylight Burglary and
The Great Train Robbery (both 1903, and I think Porter had definitely seen the British film before making his). Some of the shots in
Burglary – the break-in seen from a high angle, the criminal beating a policeman to death on the roof (the body turns into a dummy and gets thrown off, as in
Robbery), the chase down a rocky hill and over a stream – are well composed and aesthetically pleasing in a way that no single shot is in Porter’s film. The ending, with the other (evidently real-life) passengers looking on in bemusement as the burglar is ambushed and wrestled to the ground upon arriving at the station, is also, I think, more resonant and memorable than anything in
Robbery.
Yet every single shot of
The Great Train Robbery displays not only the greater resources at Porter’s disposal, but also the greater sense of showmanship associated with the name Edison. Just as in the fireman films, Porter is a master at getting the audience to feel involved (look at the right-hand corner of the first shot, with the passengers watching nervously from the train windows, oblivious to the robbers’ activities in the foreground). So while I sort of prefer the British films, it isn’t in the least surprising – or unfair – that the American ones have proven the more popular and influential. Tommaso is right to call them ‘hollywoodesque’, because they’re pioneering exactly the sort of film techniques which would turn film into an art form
with mass appeal. Domino’s earlier comments on the Edison trademark in the bedroom in
American Fireman are fascinating, but I read the importance of this in a more prosaic sense: it’s indicative of how professionalised film-making was becoming under Edison’s direction, foreshadowing the imminent development of the film
industry. And needless to say, that’s a really important part of the development of film as an
art.
Interesting discussion in the last few posts – I also am not sure how many of these very early films I could put on a ‘favourites’ list. Coming to terms with something ‘alien’ – whether we’re alienated from it in terms of time, culture or whatever – involves becoming more familiar and comfortable with the context, which with cinema usually just means watching more films from the period/culture. Here, though, the context is an audience who were seeing these sort of films for the first time, acculturating themselves to a completely new medium, and it’s perhaps impossible to re-create that context now. Lubitsch - as well as saying that it would be unjust to Bauer et al to put them lower down on a list than these early pioneers, you might equally say it’s unjust not to acknowledge the work which made those later masterpieces possible. You compared this era to a transitional period in painting, but we’re really looking at the birth of a whole art form – I can’t think of another art form whose birth and initial growth stages we can still spectate today, and in some respects there are no films greater, more important, or more beautiful than those of Méliès, Paul, Porter and so on, which forged the whole concept of cinema as an art form. I'm still coming to terms with it myself, though.
Hopefully there will be a change of government later this year, and things might change. Here is a link to the silent films they have restored (some are only fragments). Only 6 have been released on DVD in Sweden I believe, and a few on VHS. Otherwise they can only be seen at screenings at the Cinematek. 
