Edwin S. Porter
Encyclopedia
Edwin Stanton Porter was an American early film pioneer, most famous as a director with Thomas Edison
's company. His most important films are Life of an American Fireman
(1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903).
to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane (Clark) Porter; he had three brothers and one sister. After attending public schools in Connellsville and Pittsburgh
, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 21 for a lamp regulator.
as an electrician. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.
Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. 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, he worked as a projectionist and attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a manufacturing concern for motion picture cameras and projectors.
-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 (1902) and Life of an American Fireman
(1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès
and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson
. 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.
story, already familiar to audiences from dime novel
s and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience. 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 "cross-cutting
" in editing
to show simultaneous action in different places. 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 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon
. 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 (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. He also directed trick films such as Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
(1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay
. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. 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 shot rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D.W. 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.
In 1909 Porter, in an attempt to resist the new industrial system born out of the popularity of nickelodeons, left Edison and joined with others in organizing Rex, an independent motion picture company. He also took part in launching a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. After three years he sold Rex and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor
to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company
, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. Porter directed the stage actor James K. Hackett
in the first five-reel American film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and also directed Mary Pickford
, Pauline Frederick
, and John Barrymore
in feature films. But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art. His last film was released in 1915 and he left Famous Players during a reorganization the following year.
and was buried in Husband Cemetery, Somerset, Pennsylvania
. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1893; they had no children.
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and a long-lasting, practical electric light bulb. In addition, he created the world’s first industrial...
's company. His most important films are Life of an American Fireman
Life of an American Fireman
Life of an American Fireman is a short, silent film Edwin S. Porter made for the Edison Manufacturing Company. It was shot late in 1902 and distributed early in 1903...
(1903) and The Great Train Robbery (1903).
Birth and education
Porter was born and raised in Connellsville, PennsylvaniaConnellsville, Pennsylvania
Connellsville is a city in Fayette County, Pennsylvania, USA, 57 miles southeast of Pittsburgh on the Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela River. It is part of the Pittsburgh Metro Area. In 1890, 5,629 people lived in Connellsville, which was a borough at that time...
to Thomas Richard Porter, a merchant, and Mary Jane (Clark) Porter; he had three brothers and one sister. After attending public schools in Connellsville and Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Pittsburgh is the second-largest city in the US Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and the county seat of Allegheny County. Regionally, it anchors the largest urban area of Appalachia and the Ohio River Valley, and nationally, it is the 22nd-largest urban area in the United States...
, Porter worked, among other odd jobs, as an exhibition skater, a sign painter, and a telegraph operator. He developed an interest in electricity at a young age, and shared a patent at age 21 for a lamp regulator.
Early career
He was employed for a time in the electrical department of William Cramp & Sons, a Philadelphia ship and engine building company, and in 1893 enlisted in the United States NavyUnited States Navy
The United States Navy is the naval warfare service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the seven uniformed services of the United States. The U.S. Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S...
as an electrician. During his three years' service he showed aptitude as an inventor of electrical devices to improve communications.
Porter entered motion picture work in 1896, the first year movies were commercially projected on large screens in the United States. 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
South America
South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...
, showing films at fairgrounds and in open fields, and later made a second tour through Canada and the United States. Returning to New York, he worked as a projectionist and attempted, unsuccessfully, to set up a manufacturing concern for motion picture cameras and projectors.
Edison
In 1899 Porter joined the Edison Manufacturing Company. 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. During the next decade he 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 1901 about the then Vice PresidentVice President of the United States
The Vice President of the United States is the holder of a public office created by the United States Constitution. The Vice President, together with the President of the United States, is indirectly elected by the people, through the Electoral College, to a four-year term...
-elect, Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
. 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 (1902) and Life of an American Fireman
Life of an American Fireman
Life of an American Fireman is a short, silent film Edwin S. Porter made for the Edison Manufacturing Company. It was shot late in 1902 and distributed early in 1903...
(1903) he followed earlier films by France's Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès
Georges Méliès , full name Marie-Georges-Jean Méliès, was a French filmmaker famous for leading many technical and narrative developments in the earliest cinema. He was very innovative in the use of special effects...
and members of England's Brighton School, such as James Williamson
James Williamson (film pioneer)
James Williamson was an early film developer and film director.-Biography:...
. Instead of using abrupt splices or cuts between shots, however, Porter created dissolves
Dissolve (film)
In the post-production process of film editing and video editing, a dissolve is a gradual transition from one image to another. The terms fade-out and fade-in and are used to describe a transition to and from a blank image. This is in contrast to a cut where there is no such transition. A dissolve...
, 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
In his next and most important film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), Porter took the archetypal American WesternWestern (genre)
The Western is a genre of various visual arts, such as film, television, radio, literature, painting and others. Westerns are devoted to telling stories set primarily in the latter half of the 19th century in the American Old West, hence the name. Some Westerns are set as early as the Battle of...
story, already familiar to audiences from dime novel
Dime novel
Dime novel, though it has a specific meaning, has also become a catch-all term for several different forms of late 19th-century and early 20th-century U.S...
s and stage melodrama, and made it an entirely new visual experience. 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 "cross-cutting
Cross-cutting
Cross-cutting is an editing technique most often used in films to establish action occurring at the same time in two different locations. In a cross-cut, the camera will cut away from one action to another action, which can suggest the simultaneity of these two actions but this is not always the...
" in editing
Film editing
Film editing is part of the creative post-production process of filmmaking. It involves the selection and combining of shots into sequences, and ultimately creating a finished motion picture. It is an art of storytelling...
to show simultaneous action in different places. 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 1905 it was the premier attraction at the first nickelodeon
Nickelodeon movie theater
The Nickelodeon was a multi-purpose theater that was popular from about 1900 to 1914. Usually situated in converted storefronts, the Nickelodeon featured motion pictures, illustrated songs, slide shows and lectures...
. 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 (1905), a film of social commentary like his technically more conventional film of 1904, The Ex-Convict. In The Seven Ages (1905) he used side lighting, close-ups, and changed shots within a scene, one of the earliest examples of a filmmaker departing from the theatrical analogy of a single shot for each scene. He also directed trick films such as Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
Dream of the Rarebit Fiend was a newspaper comic strip written and drawn by Winsor McCay beginning September 10, 1904. It was McCay's second successful newspaper strip, after Little Sammy Sneeze secured him a position on the cartoon staff of the New York Herald newspaper...
(1906), based on the comic strip by Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay
Winsor McCay was an American cartoonist and animator.A prolific artist, McCay's pioneering early animated films far outshone the work of his contemporaries, and set a standard followed by Walt Disney and others in later decades...
. Between 1903 and 1905 he successfully demonstrated most of the techniques that were to become the basic modes of visual communication through film. For instance he helped to develop the modern concept of continuity editing
Continuity editing
Continuity editing is the predominant style of film editing and video editing in the post-production process of filmmaking of narrative films and television programs...
, and is often credited with discovering that the basic unit of structure in film was the shot rather than the scene (the basic unit on the stage), paving the way for D.W. 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.
In 1909 Porter, in an attempt to resist the new industrial system born out of the popularity of nickelodeons, left Edison and joined with others in organizing Rex, an independent motion picture company. He also took part in launching a company to manufacture Simplex motion picture projectors. After three years he sold Rex and accepted an offer from Adolph Zukor
Adolph Zukor
Adolph Zukor , born Adolph Cukor, was a film mogul and founder of Paramount Pictures.-Early life:...
to become chief director of the new Famous Players Film Company
Famous Players Film Company
The Famous Players Film Company was founded in 1912 by Adolph Zukor in partnership with the Frohman brothers, the powerful New York City theatre impresarios. The company advertised "Famous Players in Famous Plays" and its first release was the French film Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth starring...
, the first American company that regularly produced feature-length films. Porter directed the stage actor James K. Hackett
James Keteltas Hackett
James Keteltas Hackett was an American actor and manager.-Life:He was the son of James Henry Hackett, a comedian and celebrated Falstaff. His elderly father died age 71 when Hackett was just two years old thus never living to see Hackett grow to an adult...
in the first five-reel American film, The Prisoner of Zenda (1913), and also directed Mary Pickford
Mary Pickford
Mary Pickford was a Canadian-born motion picture actress, co-founder of the film studio United Artists and one of the original 36 founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences...
, Pauline Frederick
Pauline Frederick
Pauline Frederick was a leading Broadway actress who later became known for her motion picture work.-Early years:...
, and John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...
in feature films. But his directorial skills had not kept pace with rapid changes in motion picture art. His last film was released in 1915 and he left Famous Players during a reorganization the following year.
Precision Machine Company
From 1917 to 1925 Porter served as president of the Precision Machine Company, manufacturers of the Simplex projectors. After his retirement in 1925 he continued to work on his own as an inventor and designer, securing several patents for still cameras and projector devices. During the 1930s he was employed by an appliance corporation.Death
Aged 71, he died in 1941 at the Hotel Taft in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
and was buried in Husband Cemetery, Somerset, Pennsylvania
Somerset, Pennsylvania
-Demographics:As of the census of 2000, there were 6,762 people, 3,035 households, and 1,717 families residing in the borough. The population density was 2,466.0 people per square mile . There were 3,313 housing units at an average density of 1,208.2 per square mile...
. He was survived by his wife, Caroline Ridinger, whom he had married on June 5, 1893; they had no children.
Legacy
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 1912. 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.Further reading
- "Edwin Stanton Porter. Dictionary of American Biography, Supplement 3: 1941–1945. American Council of Learned Societies, 1973.