Porter - Wikipedia. Edwin Stanton Porter (April 2. Named Edward at birth, he later changed his name to Edwin Stanton, after the Democratic politician from Ohio who had served as Abraham Lincoln's Secretary of War. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 2. He filed for bankruptcy on June 1. United States Navy four days later on June 1. 0 Comments on Life of an American Fireman. Action - 1903 Add to Watchlist. Add to or remove from a custom list. In Film History The Year 1903.
During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications. He was briefly employed in New York City by Raff & Gammon, agents for the films and viewing equipment made by Thomas Edison, and then left to become a touring projectionist with a competing machine, Kuhn & Webster's Projectorscope. He traveled through the West Indies and South America, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields, and later made a second tour through Canada and the United States. Returning to New York in early 1. Porter found work at the Eden Mus. As an exhibitor, Porter had tremendous creative control over these programs, presenting a slate of films accompanied by a selection of music and live narration. Soon afterward he took charge of motion picture production at Edison's New York studios, operating the camera, directing the actors, and assembling the final print. He collaborated with several other filmmakers, including George S. During the next decade Porter became the most influential filmmaker in the United States. From his experience as a touring projectionist Porter knew what pleased crowds, and he began by making trick films and comedies for Edison. One of his early films was Terrible Teddy, the Grizzly King, a satire made in February 1. Vice President- elect, Theodore Roosevelt. Like all early filmmakers, he took ideas from others, but rather than simply copying films he tried to improve on what he borrowed. In his Jack and the Beanstalk (1. Life of an American Fireman (1. France's Georges M. Instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, however, Porter created dissolves, gradual transitions from one image to another. In Life of an American Fireman particularly, the technique helped audiences follow complex outdoor movement. The Great Train Robbery and after. 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 . 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 1. 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 (1. The Ex- Convict. In The Seven Ages (1. He also directed trick films such as Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1. Winsor Mc. Cay. Between 1. 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 . 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. Porter directed future filmmaker Griffith in . In 1. 91. 0 he founded Defender Film Company. In 1. 91. 1 he joined with others in organizing the Rex Motion Picture Company. Hackett in their first feature film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1. Mary Pickford in her first feature film, A Good Little Devil (1. Pauline Frederick and John Barrymore. D movie pioneer. Porter's last film premiered on June 1. Niagara Falls. In 1. Famous Players during a reorganization. Precision Machine Company. During the 1. 93. Death and legacy. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1. Porter remains an enigmatic figure in motion picture history. Though his significance as director of The Great Train Robbery and other innovative early films is undeniable, he rarely repeated an innovation after he had used it successfully, never developed a consistent directorial style, and in later years never protested when others rediscovered his techniques and claimed them as their own. He was a modest, quiet, cautious man who felt uncomfortable working with the famous stars he directed starting in 1. Zukor said of Porter that he was more an artistic mechanic than a dramatic artist, a man who liked to deal with machines better than with people. Collaborator With Edison on Invention of Motion- Picture Camera Dies in Hotel. Once Partner of Zukor. Ex- Head of Simplex Projector Company Was Producer of 'Great Train Robbery'. Porter, or the History of the Motion Picture. Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. University of California Press. America's Film Legacy. Continuum International Publishing Group. Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. University of California Press. Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 3: 1. American Council of Learned Societies, 1. New York Public Library. Retrieved 1. 1 March 2. Movie- Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. The Life of an American Fireman . Years later Porter claimed that the M. This film, which was also influenced by James Williamson’s..
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