Somme documentaries, and others.

The actuality films we saw today did not include one called The Haverstraw Tunnel, made by the American Mutoscope Co. in 1897. Gunning mentions it as the phantom ride film that inspired a newspaper reviewer to grasp for words to describe this new experience, in which "an unseen energy swallows space." Charles Musser's The Emergence of Cinema says it was by far the company's most popular film. I've never seen the film and don't know that it's available on any DVD collection. (One copy, at least, is held by the British Film Institute's National Film and Television Archive, an institution that built a grand film preservation infrastructure, then rather abruptly stopped doing active preservation work. BFI and its masters prioritized working with films that could turn a profit when released on video. So don't look for the BFI Haverstraw Tunnel any time soon.)

I wanted to share the picture here, a photo taken of cinematographer (mutographer?) Billy Bitzer, a key figure in early cinema, though best known as D. W. Griffith's cameraman. This image has been reprinted many times, including as the colorized cover of Musser and Leyda's book Before Hollywood (1987). It would seem to be a still photo documenting the making of Haverstraw Tunnel, which was shot entirely from a camera mounted on the cowcatcher of a train. The photo credit in the book (Museum of Modern Art) says only Bitzer, ca. 1898. So it could have been taken on any number of shoots that Bitzer did while taking locomotives literally from coast to coast in the late 1890s.

Apparently the spectatorial sensation of watching The Haverstraw Tunnel was caused by a combination of the view from the front of the train (i.e., no train visible on screen, unlike what we watched today) and the effect of seeing the train enter and exit a darkened tunnel. The village of Haverstraw, NY, was a stop on the New York Central Railroad West Shore Line -- and the NYCR and other train companies allowed Bitzer and crew to use their trains, even providing cameras and cameramen their own train cars, gratis.

-- dan.streible@nyu.edu