This film, with nine shots lasting around six minutes, is often seen as a dry run for director Edwin S Porter's major breakthrough with The Great Train Robbery, released later the same year. Both use themes with plenty of opportunity for action and movement, and indulging audiences' taste for experiencing danger vicariously. But Life of an American Fireman is more interesting for the storytelling ideas that didn't make it into the later film or, indeed, into the developing language of mainstream narrative cinema.
The film opens rather oddly on an optical effects shot of a dozing fireman, with his daydreams of a happy woman and child, presumably his own family, in a fuzzy circular mask to his right, a device borrowed from graphic art. This reverie is rudely interrupted by a striking closeup of a street fire alarm. The firemen then spring into action, speeding through the streets of a wintry New York City and its suburbs. They rescue a woman and child from a house fire, creating a thematic link back to the beginning and reinforcing the image of the fireman as heroic protector of families and communities, as befits his emerging role as a public servant – an integrated, professional fire service for the city had only existed since 1898.
The depiction of the rescue exhibits the oddest structure to modern eyes (although there's something of the same thing going on when the fire engine leaves the station). First we see a woman in a smoke filled bedroom crying for help at the window and then collapsing on the bed. A fireman bursts through the door, lifts the woman and carries her through the window down a now-waiting ladder. Seconds later he returns through the window, lifts a previously unseen child from the bed and disappears through the window again. Porter then shows us the same sequence of events again from outside the house: the fireman enters the house, the woman appears at the window, the fireman descends carrying her. Watch the bottom of the frame as they reach safety (yes, it's another of those crowded long shots): the woman recovers and begins gesticulating distraughtly. That's why the fireman returns up the ladder for the child.
The conventions of continuity editing shortly to be defined by D W Griffith and others dictate that consecutive events with a causal link take place in a single continuous time frame when depicted from different angles or even in a different location. This governs the principles of cross cutting, which would certainly be the default if a modern film maker were to shoot this story, cutting away to an exterior shot to show the recovering victim motivating her rescuer to return to the burning room, and then back to the interior again to show him lifting the child.
In fact continuity editing is just as artificial and conventional an approach to narrative as the one demonstrated here. Continuity editing creates the illusion of continuous time by cutting together shots that were invariably filmed at different times, and sometimes in completely different places. Yet it is now so fluent and familiar it seems natural, and so hegemonic that films that deliberately break its rules are seen as marked, experimental or trying to make a specific point: for example Rashômon and films inspired by it, which repeat the same events from different perspectives with subtle differences in order to challenge the audience's acceptance of the truth of what is shown on screen.
So intolerably odd did Life of an American Fireman seem to a later distributor that it was reedited to inter-cut the shots, which led to it's being hailed, rather ironically, as an early example of cross cutting. An examination of a paper print version in the 1990s revealed Porter's original montage.
Porter's film was very likely inspired by an earlier film from Britain's Brighton school, Fire! (1901), shot in Hove by James Williamson. This depicts an essentially similar sequence of events in only six shots, and though Williamson is less adept at handling the action than Porter, with much faffing around harnessing the horses and less exciting depictions of the fire engines racing through the streets, the burning bedroom (near-identically laid out to Porter's though with a male rather than a female victim) looks much more perilous, with real flames. There's no repeated continuity during the rescue sequence but instead an excellent early example of a 'match on action', with the cut between the interior and the exterior made precisely at the moment when the fireman first emerges through the window, logically linking the two shots. Williamson stays with the exterior to show the fireman returning for the child.
The film opens rather oddly on an optical effects shot of a dozing fireman, with his daydreams of a happy woman and child, presumably his own family, in a fuzzy circular mask to his right, a device borrowed from graphic art. This reverie is rudely interrupted by a striking closeup of a street fire alarm. The firemen then spring into action, speeding through the streets of a wintry New York City and its suburbs. They rescue a woman and child from a house fire, creating a thematic link back to the beginning and reinforcing the image of the fireman as heroic protector of families and communities, as befits his emerging role as a public servant – an integrated, professional fire service for the city had only existed since 1898.
The depiction of the rescue exhibits the oddest structure to modern eyes (although there's something of the same thing going on when the fire engine leaves the station). First we see a woman in a smoke filled bedroom crying for help at the window and then collapsing on the bed. A fireman bursts through the door, lifts the woman and carries her through the window down a now-waiting ladder. Seconds later he returns through the window, lifts a previously unseen child from the bed and disappears through the window again. Porter then shows us the same sequence of events again from outside the house: the fireman enters the house, the woman appears at the window, the fireman descends carrying her. Watch the bottom of the frame as they reach safety (yes, it's another of those crowded long shots): the woman recovers and begins gesticulating distraughtly. That's why the fireman returns up the ladder for the child.
The conventions of continuity editing shortly to be defined by D W Griffith and others dictate that consecutive events with a causal link take place in a single continuous time frame when depicted from different angles or even in a different location. This governs the principles of cross cutting, which would certainly be the default if a modern film maker were to shoot this story, cutting away to an exterior shot to show the recovering victim motivating her rescuer to return to the burning room, and then back to the interior again to show him lifting the child.
In fact continuity editing is just as artificial and conventional an approach to narrative as the one demonstrated here. Continuity editing creates the illusion of continuous time by cutting together shots that were invariably filmed at different times, and sometimes in completely different places. Yet it is now so fluent and familiar it seems natural, and so hegemonic that films that deliberately break its rules are seen as marked, experimental or trying to make a specific point: for example Rashômon and films inspired by it, which repeat the same events from different perspectives with subtle differences in order to challenge the audience's acceptance of the truth of what is shown on screen.
So intolerably odd did Life of an American Fireman seem to a later distributor that it was reedited to inter-cut the shots, which led to it's being hailed, rather ironically, as an early example of cross cutting. An examination of a paper print version in the 1990s revealed Porter's original montage.
Porter's film was very likely inspired by an earlier film from Britain's Brighton school, Fire! (1901), shot in Hove by James Williamson. This depicts an essentially similar sequence of events in only six shots, and though Williamson is less adept at handling the action than Porter, with much faffing around harnessing the horses and less exciting depictions of the fire engines racing through the streets, the burning bedroom (near-identically laid out to Porter's though with a male rather than a female victim) looks much more perilous, with real flames. There's no repeated continuity during the rescue sequence but instead an excellent early example of a 'match on action', with the cut between the interior and the exterior made precisely at the moment when the fireman first emerges through the window, logically linking the two shots. Williamson stays with the exterior to show the fireman returning for the child.