Best Picture, 1889

If the idea of watching 140 silent movies ranging in duration from three seconds (“Record of a Sneeze,” 1894) to 85 minutes (“The Unbeliever,” 1918), totaling 12 1/2 hours and supplemented by two hours of scholarly chat and hundreds of documents and photographs, conveys all the allure of a sadistic high school homework assignment, you may find “Edison: The Invention of the Movies” a revelation. True, it is fraught with educational value. But once you learn to pilot the four discs in this handsomely packaged collaboration between Kino and the Museum of Modern Art, you can filter all that and bask in doting rapture as the infant art learns to mewl, dribble, crawl, rise to its feet, and take over the house.Purely as a moviegoing experience, this is exciting stuff – one of the most impressive DVD projects to date. The deceptively slim carton encompasses a cinematic museum and provides a portal into a past not yet blanketed in self-consciousness. Audiences who saw these films in Nickelodeon peep shows or at Vitascope screenings were daunted by their clarity and realism. At the 1896 debut of seashore footage, a reporter observed that people feared getting wet; at later offerings, onlookers gasped at a kiss and ducked before a raised gun. Over a century later, our awe is tempered by analysis, yet there remains an irreducible level of astonishment as the scrapbook of another age morphs into life and the occasional ancestor looks at us, bridging the chasm with near-mystical amity. The earliest image, an 1889 test, presents an unfocused, amoeba like humanoid that seems to channel a universe out of electricity; the second image is more distinct. The third, shot three years later, is of a man waving his hat in welcome.Very soon the images are configured to document sites and tell stories. They form a parade of dancers, snuggling couples, firemen, boxers, historical tableaux, scenic pans, performers in Wild West shows, and vaudevillians. Some images are famous: the May Irwin kiss, Annabelle’s hand-tinted butterfly and serpentine dances, two dancing men accompanied by a violinist. Practically all were filmed in the Black Mariah, a tarpaper-covered shack in New Jersey that served as the first film studio. It isn’t hard to imagine the enthusiasm of patrons choosing among peep shows, or of Edison’s delight in counting the nickels – a sound that briefly deafened him to the idea that movies might do better if projected on a wall.Edison was an inventor first, a businessman second, and never an artist. He did not direct the films made by his company. Nor did he appreciate their potential. His studio began to decline in part because while others dreamed of longer and better films, he devoted his energies to patenting a home-video projection system that resembled a modern plasma screen. Edison was ahead of his time, not quite of it. To gauge the contribution of his studio to cinema, these films ought to be looked at in the context of work done by the Lumiere brothers and Georges Melies in France, and the Biograph and Vitagraph studios in New York, all of them working by 1896. (Kino’s previous anthology, “The Movies Begin,” offers a comprehensive survey). Taken on its own, however, the Edison story traverses the rise of film from isolated peeks to the still-dominant menu of generic themes. The films from Edison’s peak years, 1894 to 1910, so freely engage in voyeuristic delight, violent aggression, cultural stereotypes, and comic irreverence, that far from dating, they increase their reach into our own world.In 1934, art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote that “the films produced between 1900 and 1910 pre-establish the subject matter and methods of the moving picture as we know it.” He hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. The 30-second “Burglar on the Roof” (1898) augurs the crime film as clearly as “Old Maid Having Her Portrait Taken” and “College Chums” (1901, 1907) prefigure the transgender comedy. The latter is also a benchmark in animation, as a telephone conversation is rendered in letters traveling over long-distance wires. A firing squad shooting Cuban rebels in the back combines early propaganda with wish fulfillment. A 23rd Street subway grate blows a woman’s skirts, albeit not as much as Marilyn’s; the tinted coat of the little girl in “The Great Train Robbery” prefigures the similarly tinted little girl in “Schindler’s List.” Buster Keaton adapted the plot of “How a French Nobleman Got a Wife from the New York Personal Columns” (itself a remake of a Biograph film) for his bachelor-chasing epic “Seven Chances.” “The Strenuous Life,” a burlesque of Roosevelt’s advice to multiply, portends “The Miracle of Morgan Creek,” not to mention the Dionnes; “Getting Evidence,” in which an inept detective uses various disguises to collect compromising information on the wrong woman, could serve as a Jerry Lewis script.Edwin S. Porter, who is little remembered beyond the 12-minute blockbuster “The Great Train Robbery,” directed most of these films, and this set ought to generate increased interest in his achievements. He proved innovative in blocking time (an incident is shown sequentially from different views in “Life of an American Fireman”), trick photography (his effects perfectly suggest nausea and dizziness in “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend,” and the stop-motion bears in “The Teddy Bears” lose nothing in comic esprit when compared to King Kong or Ray Harryhausen), comic timing (“A Suburbanite’s Alarm” and several others), and comic schematics (the Mutt and Jeff casting in “The Rivals”). There are virtuoso pans and social consciousness that, by today’s barometers, leans left and right. The former tends toward O. Henry-style sentimentality, savoring the plight of a good-hearted excon (“The Ex-Convict”) and the unbalanced scales of justice for rich and poor (“The Klepto-Maniac”). He leans the other way in suborning racial stereotypes, but as Michele Wallace, the most thoughtful and original of the commentators, observes, he does so with singular nuance. “Cohen’s Fire Sale” may involve a Jew as an arsonist wearing a fright wig and Fagin nose (he can’t kiss his wife without poking her eye), but the comedy is relatively good-natured. Blacks may be childish watermelon thieves, but they come off as innocent compared to the punitive whites willing to burn their home over it.Three of his most remarkable films from 1905 to 1907 are “The Train Wreckers,” “The White Caps,” and “Laughing Gas.” The first uses melodramatic conventions that would later become the stock and trade of Pearl White for a study in gratuitous violence. The gang is out to destroy a train just to watch the havoc – like that guy in California a few weeks ago. Thwarted by the heroine, they lay her unconscious body on the tracks. Spoiler alert: She is saved, and in a manner that directly anticipates one of the best-known gags in Keaton’s “The General.” “The White Caps” is a surprisingly ambivalent view of vigilante justice. The villain is a brutal wife-beater. But the actions of the hooded clan of terror-inducing enforcers – they tar and feather him, an activity I’ve never seen recreated in such detail – instantly undermines our initial outrage at their victim. “Laughing Gas,” which prefigures by 15 years the bestselling “Okeh Laughing Record,” is about a big, beautiful, charming black woman whose contagious laughter surmounts every obstacle, from getting a subway seat to a court hearing to the piety of a black church service. Vitagraph had made a similar film, but apparently without a black lead; racism here is in the eye of the beholder, not in the film.Porter was fired in 1909, and the quality of Edison films immediately declined. (The most generously reviewed Edison films of this period, “The Prince and the Pauper” and “Frankenstein,” are not included, presumably because the former does not exist and the latter is in the hands of a private collector.) Filmmaking had become more sophisticated, favoring middle-range shots that allowed actors to communicate subtly, but Edison had succumbed to a fit of family values. The sensuality and violence that spurred Porter’s imagination gave way to generic conventions – “House of Cards” is a laughably bathetic western, a screed against gambling; “The Unsullied Shield” (directed by Charles Brabin, who redeemed himself in 1932 with “The Mask of Fu Manchu”) is a temperance lecture. The fourth disc begins with a series of routine genre pieces (including a John Buchan-type spy story, “The Ambassador’s Daughter”); significantly, they credit the writers, not the directors. Yet the disc recovers with the feature-length World War I film “The Unbeliever,” one of the first films in which Erich Von Stroheim introduced his bestial hun; it’s also worth watching for splendid recreations of trench warfare.The set is imperfect. A scripted history would have been more efficient and informative than random interviews. No one addresses a basic issue: what percentage of surviving Edison films does this set represent? An index of the collection would have made more sense as a printed insert than as a feature on one disc, and the absence of chapter titles in the main menu is annoying. The way to watch is either to play the films alone or through the notes option, which provides brief written introductions by Charles Musser (they can be printed out at the Kino Web site) and includes relevant documents. An extraordinary bonus on the first disc is a presentation of about 20 films synched to Edison recordings – though you can’t access the dual soundtracks through the audio control on your remote. The music is uneven; the score to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a virtual musical, is excellent, but elsewhere buoyant ragtime is sacrificed to dull diatonic clichés. There are a few errors: The 1896 “Watermelon Eating Contest” is repeated twice (you can see the later version in the notes section); and the key scene in “Life of an American Policeman” is unaccountably missing. These are quibbles. “Edison” is an infinitely involving and illuminating collection. The 1902 “Trapeze Disrobing Act” alone will cheer you through the Ides of March.

Best Picture, 1889

Best Picture, 1889

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