What movies do come to mind when you think of Westerns? Certainly some classics like »Stagecoach« or other films by John Ford with John Wayne in the lead role. Some may think of Sergio Leone's Italian Westerns, Sam Peckinpah's films or Quentin Tarantino's excursions into the all-American genre. But today we want to go all the way back to the beginning to »The Great Train Robbery«, which premiered 120 years ago today.
The 11-minute short film marks one of the first milestones of the still young medium. The history of cinema begins in 1895 with a film screening by the Lumière brothers in front of a paying audience. Even though there had been previous film experiments, the performance of the Lumières is the date that film historiography has agreed upon.
In the beginning, the medium itself was the sensation and it didn't really matter what was shown in the films. Whether it was workers leaving the factory or a train pulling into the station didn’t matter as long as there were moving images. But there were also some first little stories early on, like in the films by Georges Méliès or Alice Guy-Blaché. Most films were no longer than a minute or two and everything was filmed in long shot and occurred in a single take. It often looked like filmed theater.
Just a few years later, Edwin S. Porter set new standards with »The Great Train Robbery«. The film was already surprisingly long at 11 minutes. In contrast to Méliès’ theatrical films, it was shot on location and seemed surprisingly naturalistic for the time. It combines a series of scenes filmed in long shots into a story, as was common at the time, but uses two panning shots as a narrative device, incorporates an invisible stopping trick, a comic relief scene and is one of the first films to show two events taking place at the same time connected to each other in cross-cutting. And then there is the famous close-up at the end of the film in which a bandit breaks the fourth wall and shoots directly at the camera/the audience. Much of what Porter did had been done before, but it was him who brought all of these elements together and created the most successful film of the year and the nucleus of the Western.
After 120 years, the film has of course long been in the public domain and you can watch it on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/y3jrB5ANUUYThe slightly grotesque death scenes may amuse us today, but »The Great Train Robbery« already introduced stylistic devices that cinema still uses today and we find it incredibly exciting to look back at the beginning of the Western genre and the development of film language.