This blog gives instructions and tips on doing film history research, particularly the work our course does on the Media Ecology Project’s pilot initiatives with (1) early cinema from the Library of Congress (Paper Print Collection and more) and other online sources, and (2) the University of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC), including its newsreel and newsfilm holdings, Chinese Film Collection, and others. Here’s the first in a series of posts. — Dan Streible
Looking for silent-era films? A first checkpoint is Treasures from the Film Archives, a database maintained by the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF). It contains information about more than 60,000 silent-era works held in more than 100 film archives. The database contains both filmographic data (about the works) and metadata about the physical holdings of specific copies of those works. Below, is a case study of researching the Edison/Porter film Three American Beauties (1906). (Or is it 1907? Read on. . . . )
NYU Libraries offers two on-line portals to Treasures from the Film Archives, although finding them is not as obvious as it could be. Searching “Treasures from the Film Archives” in BobCat (Bobst Catalog) first lists a book by the same title: Ronald S. Magliozzi, Treasures from the Film Archives: A Catalog of Short Silent Fiction Films Held by FIAF Archives (Scarecrow, 1988). Find that in the Bobst Reference room, call number PN1995.75 .M335 1988).
The second entry is the database you want. (Confusingly, it’s labeled as a “Journal” and given the title FIAF international filmarchive database (Online : SilverPlatter). When you click to access it, ProQuest leads you to a page called FIAF International Index to Film Periodicals Database. Despite the misleading name, searching this database yields citations for film and television periodicals but also for film holdings in archives (i.e., the Treasures metadatans-serif;”>Another ProQuest database, “Screen Studies Collection,” searches the same sources as above, but also searches the invaluable reference we mentioned in class: The AFI Catalog. In this database, the records display an icon for FIAF items and a red icon for AFI entriesns-serif;”>Here’s a search for the Edison/Porter film we watched called Three American Beauties .
Another idiosyncratic element of this database is that the entries for motion pictures (as opposed to books, journal articles, etc.) are categorized as “Artistic & Aesthetic Works” (an odd term, no?) and marked with an icon of a painter’s palette. You can filter the search to see only the records for film holdings. Helpful.
From the FIAF Treasures database, we glean this:
THREE AMERICAN BEAUTIES. 1906.
Produced and distributed by Edison Mfg. Co. (US)
Director: Porter, Edwin S.
Five archives hold film copies:
• Museum of Modern Art Department of Film (New York) [USM]
• Cinémathèque Québecoise (Montreal) [CAQ]
• BFI National Archive (London) [GBB]
• Library of Congress (Washington) [USW]
• Academy Film Archive (Los Angeles) [USF]
Holdings that can be accessed (i.e., studied on site or loaned) are: a 35mm print (Québec), a 16mm print (LOC), and one of a format not indicated (BFI). The Library of Congress has a 16mm acetate dupe negative and a 16mm acetate positive (in other words a print to watch on a flatbed viewer or put on a 16mm film projector). Acetate refers to the “safety film” stock used after the highly flammable nitrate cellulose film stock ceased being manufactured circa 1951. We also know from other sources, including the booklet for the DVD we watched of Three American Beauties, that the MoMA copy is a nitrate original 35mm print, hand-colored. That’s one preserved and digitized. Thus far I’ve found no copies of 3AB on DVD or online that are not derived from the MoMA print.
Always check the Library of Congress public catalog. It will not show you the full and deeper interior database of motion picture holdings (called MAVIS), but it might confirm that LOC holds a copy of the film. Remember that many films in the collection are not in the public catalog. However, it will often give you rich metadata about the physical items in the Library’s collection. Searching “three american beauties” at catalog.loc.gov does show a record for the Edson film. However, we learn that Three American Beauties is NOT part of the Paper Print Collection. Instead it’s a 16mm print from the George Kleine Collection, preserved in 16mm. (George Kleine was a major distributor of films in the early era of the U.S. motion picture industry.)
Always check the catalog created by our hero from The Film of Her, Howard Lamarr Walls, Motion Pictures, 1894-1912: Identified from the Records of the United States Copyright Office (Library of Congress, 1953). It lists more than 8,500 “works” corresponding to more than 6,000 titles registered in the Copyright Office as photographs — but which Walls verified were motion pictures. His list, therefore, is roughly twice as long as Niver’s.
Here we note a discrepancy: two copyrighted works using the same title, but the later (from October 1907) has four scenes instead of three.
What about the two AFI Catalog records for Three American Beauties? Entry one contains most of the information from FIAF, but brings additional details.
Produced April 1906, and Publication date (meaning when it was first sold or exhibited) June 1906.
Physical description: b&w; 60 or 65 feet. (The length of the 35mm film prints sold by the Edison company.)
Copyright Information: Thomas A. Edison, 1 May 1906, H76443-H76445 (the LOC copyright registration number, as also found in the Howard Walls catalog and Niver book, Early Motion Pictures).
Then, very helpfully, the AFI Catalog lists the primary sources in which its researchers found about Three American Beauties: LCMP (the Walls catalog), p. 61; New York Clipper (a show business trade magazine from the early twentieth century), 16 June 1906, p. 470; The George Kleine Collection, (another reference book from LOC, on PDF in our shared folder), p. 135, and Magliozzi’s book Treasures from the Film Archives, p. 250. Going first to this reference database saves you time in searching for the primary resources of 1906. Now you can go straight to the Clipper item (an Edison ad, as it turns out).
The other AFI Catalog record is for the title Three American Beauties [No. 2]. This is described as “Silent: b&w: Handcolored, 85 feet.” Published on November 23, 1907; deposited for copyright October 7 for Thomas A. Edison, with new registration numbers H100637-H100640. So it’s a remake of the first film. This film was mentioned in the New York Clipper, November 23, 1907, and in Moving Picture World (the most important trade journal for the American film industry, starting that year), November 23 and again January 18, 1908. Such documentation is especially important because No. 2 is not known to survive in any form.
Here’s the MPW ad from Edison, Nov. 23, 1907.
An important reminder about Lantern: The best method of searching and retrieving original motion picture trade press is from the powerful Lantern search platform built as part of the Media History Digital Library, which you have now read about in The Archlight Guidebook. Exploring search terms at lantern.mediahist.org allows you to read even very small items and ads. You can track how a film or a subject was covered month by months in some cases. Searching “three american beauties” and “edison” returns (as of today) 54 citations. One is the 1960 BFI catalog (see below). The other 53 are ads and release information in Moving Picture World and the New York Clipper — 53 instead of the AFI catalog’s 4. The majority are from the Clipper, which is significant because a previous generation of early cinema history relied heavily on access the Moving Picture World on microfilm.
Switching to The George Kleine Collection of Early Motion Pictures in the Library of Congress: A Catalog (1980) we get new details.
Note that the cataloguer has added the subject terms novelty and cartoon (is this a cartoon?). Then in the classification system at the end of the record we see each of the three shots labeled “Drama” (are these dramas?). We also get a specific day of production and precise location — Porter shooting March 17, 1906, in the Edison studio in New York. The summary above was written by the cataloguers (Rita Horwitz and Harriet Harrison with Wendy White) using film analysis terms (“extreme close-up”) rather than quoting from a 1906-07 description. But then that curious and surprising sentence: “A field of stars, supposedly from the flag, is animated to form the words ‘Good night.'”
Looking at the video copy we have from MoMA’s print, I see the field of stars (in a fourth shot after the three shots of “beauties”), but I see no animation of the stars to spell out “Good night.” (Do you?) Does the LOC print in the Kleine Collection contain extra footage? a longer shot of stars that transforms into text? Or is this description taken from some written source rather than any surviving film print? We’ve seen other Edison-Porter films of 1906 that use animated letters for novel effect (the How Jones series, seen in the MEP Mediathread collection).
The BFI’s National Film Archive Catalog (1960) adds another clue, but not a clear answer. A telegraphic style of description. The date assigned is 1907, but the title does not include No. 2, which is inconsistent with the other data we’ve accumulated. The physical length of the BFI’s film print — 78 feet — might suggest it is part of the longer film, No. 2, said to be 85 feet long. If the first version of Three American Beauties from 1906 was only 60 to 65 feet long, it seems more likely this British archival copy is No. 2. Presuming that the metadata is accurate. Which it might not be. The note about the animated “Good night” suggests that this part might have only been part of No. 2. We’d have to see the BFI print to know. (The BFI catalog is also in our MEP folder.)
[* Update; August 9, 2023. Confirmation from BFI National Archive that it holds a 1907 print, which indeed shows different footage. It will doubtless make this copy available in the near future.]
So even for a very short film from early cinema, we were able to discern some of its characteristics and history just by using available reference books and databases. Going to primary sources would tell us more.
And of course we can compare that with what we see when watching it.
For fun, here’s one of the YouTube copies, posted for some reason with a Russian translation of the title. Published on the “History VA” channel, July 16, 2015. Like other copies online, this file was ripped from the DVD set Edison: The Invention of the Movies (Kino International, 2005). It has a piano score (created for the DVD by Philip Carli) that differs from the piano music Martin Marks recorded for the earlier DVD Treasures from American Film Archives (National Film Preservation Foundation, 2000).
The DVD notes from both packages are given away online by the producers. Charles Musser’s notes for the Kino set add a co-director for the film, Wallace McCutcheon with Edwin Porter. “Often hand-tinted, this short film was typically used by exhibitors to conclude their programs. It elaborated on a popular practice among exhibitors of the 1890s. They ended their programs with a film of the American flag waving in the breeze,” Musser adds.
Scott Simmon’s notes for the NFPF edition of Three American Beauties add still more. The notes from these Treasures DVD series are an excellent model for doing deep research and translating them into the most relevant context for contemporary lay viewers. Film scholarship for a public readership.
Transfer Note: Copied at 16 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Museum of Modern Art. New Music: Martin Marks. Running Time: 40 seconds.
Three American Beauties is colored by stencil, a more common process in France than in America. Color was painted on release prints using a separate cut-out stencil for each color. The brief, patriotic film was shown in nickelodeon theaters at the end of a program, and proved so popular that Edison’s original negative wore out and had to be shot again, complete with in-camera dissolves. The Museum of Modern Art preservation copy reproduced here is probably from the first version, shot by Edwin S. Porter and Wallace McCutcheon in New York in March 1906. Porter remade the film in September 1907. —Scott Simmon
Note that this DVD edition says the film was transferred at 16 frames per second.
For most every case of Edwin Porter films or the Edison company, the go-to scholarly source is Charles Musser’s work, e
specially his book Before the Nickelodeon. But this interesting little film Three American Beauties is not mentioned at all in his long and scrupulously written book (based on his NYU Cinema Studies dissertation). Perhaps the film was not so accessible at the time he was researching. The scholarly tome that does feature the film is this one, edited by Andre Gaudreault, Gunning’s co-inventor of the term “cinema of attractions.” But other than identifying the film’s title on the back cover photo credit, the book does not mention Three American Beauties at all.
The film is mentioned briefly in Musser’s other key work for our study, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907, first published in 1991. He describes the Lubin company of Philadelphia and its practice of quickly remaking popular subjects made by competing companies. Lubin’s film Good Night (November 1906, 65 feet) is said to be similar to Edison’s. This is the first indication that the animated stars spelling out “Good night” were likely present in the original 1906 version as well as the 1907 Edison remake. Alas, Lubin’s Good Night is a lost film too. For now any way. It might well be sitting in an archive unidentified or awaiting rediscovery in an orphaned private collection.
But wait! Lantern shows us several ads for Good Night that Lubin placed in the New York Clipper, including this one from 1907. The film might be lost, but S. Lubin published two frames from it (lacking the color, of course).
Lubin’s Good Night is designed rather differently from Edison’s.
A final question: Who is the woman in the Edison film? (For that matter, did the same actress appear in the version Porter re-filmed a year a half later?) The Edison catalog only refers to “a bust of beautiful American girl.” It seems to be a fact one could find. But so far, none of the reference sources or archival clues tell us who she is.
Next up: a list of key reference books and other databases for researching early cinema.