Much of the Media Ecology Project’s pilot study of early cinema from the Library of Congress has been aided by consultation with Paul Spehr, film historian, archivist, and former assistant chief of the LOC Division of Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division. He worked at the Library from 1958 to 1993. Some of his invaluable experience he documented for us in “The Education of an Archivist: Keeping Movies at the Library of Congress,” The Moving Image 13.1 (Spring 2013): 151-178. His generosity and contributions are described throughout the scholarship we have been reading this semester, especially in Derek Long’s “Excavating Film History with Metadata Analysis: Building and Searching the ECHO Early Cinema Credits Database,” in The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (Reframe, 2016), a free e-book edited by Charles Acland and Eric Hoyt. “Spehr has always been generous in sharing and reformulating [his] data for researchers, Long writes.
For NYU students in Film History / Historiography, Paul Spehr has granted access to other research in progress, particularly his work with American Mutoscope and Biograph production logs of 1895-1908. He and former Museum of Modern Art curator Eileen Bowser have poured years of research into this. I could testify about other knowledge he has shared dating back to this LOC days. More recently, he sent me invaluable primary resources (pages from W. K. L. Dickson’s personal scrapbook, for example, and his typed transcriptions of Edison business correspondence) — and hard-to-find images. When I e-mailed Paul to ask if American Mutoscope and Biograph ever deposited paper prints made from its large-format 68mm films or mutoscope flip-cards, he sent me this:
“From 1896 until 1902 American Mutoscope Co. [and, after 1899, AM&B] didn’t copyright many films. In 1896 and 1897 they copyrighted scenes from several early productions in the large format, mounted on cards, as these pictures of Annabelle. The 68mm films that were projected weren’t copyrighted because they weren’t for sale.” Paul C. Spehr e-mail to Dan Streible and Mark Williams, Feb. 12, 2017.
When I asked for clues as to who the model in Three American Beauties was, he sent some interesting related material, pointing to this entry, The Rose, in the AM&B catalog.
Vaudeville comedienne Kathryn Osterman appeared in more than a dozen AM&B productions in 1903 (and one in 1900, The Art of “Making Up”). The Rose (aka Toying with Roses, 1903) is a single-take film that might be a precursor to Three American Beauties. A young woman (Osterman was 20) in medium close-up is associated with the American Beauty rose, and the catalog suggests it could be hand-colored.
“Another beautiful picture of the same young woman as in 2453 [LUCKY KITTEN!], admiring and enjoying the odor of a bunch of American Beauty Roses. Her head and bust occupy the whole field of the picture, which is admirable in every respect. Is exceedingly effective when colored.”
Because AM&B copyrighted The Rose, a paper print survives. Or perhaps two. Another asset the MEP-LOC project provides is access to the XML file for each of the 130 digital videos delivered. For example, the XML file for another Osterman title, The Unfaithful Wife: Murder and Suicide includes this metadatum: “Originally, two copies of Paper Print paper rolls were housed in one box (LC 1084). When rehoused by Conservation Division, copy 1 was housed in Box 0047, copy 2 was housed in a separate box, Box 5123.” Documented by PPC archivist Alexis Ainsworth on January 20, 2012.
The Niver summary, first published in 1967, enriches the 1903 sales bulletin description.
The Rose
AM&B ©H34518 Aug. 13, 1903.
Cameraman: G. W. Bitzer. Cast: Kathryn Osterman. Location: Studio, N.Y.C. Photographed: Aug. 3, 1903.
20 ft. [the 16mm copy]. FLA3570 (print) FRA0844 (neg.)
The film begins with a waist camera position or close-up of a young woman wearing an off-the-shoulder dress. Nothing else is visible except for the young woman from her waist to above the top of her head. The film was artificially lighted. She admires some long-stemmed roses she is holding. She smiles and talks during the film as if she were discussing the loveliness of the flowers with another person.
Another meaningful detail: the 1985 edition of Niver’s catalog does not include some of the classifications and subject headings assigned to titles in 1967. The first edition tags The Rose with “Comedy, Costumes, Series.” In “How to Use This Index” Niver wrote “Our selection of categories is of course somewhat arbitrary” — something the list of Library of Congress Subject Headings & Genre/Form Terms is designed to offset. The 1985 catalog includes The Rose in its index of comedies but removes the terms Costumes and Series from its description. To understand why The Rose was classified as part of a series we have to consult Niver’s “somewhat arbitrary” text of 1967, in which he reports “We used the word ‘series’ to describe those films where a repertory group made one complete film after another with a different plot” (p. xx). Even this is curious. Osterman is not named in the synopses of her 1903 AM&B films, making it impossible to realize that indeed Billy Bitzer shot several very short movies with Osterman in his studio. (She also appeared in a few productions later, including the well known 1904 narrative chase comedy The Lost Child.) But thanks to Spehr & Bowser’s work on the AM&B production logs, we can see that Osterman appeared in 13 productions at the AM&B studio on 14th Street in New York, shot with a six-week period in the summer of 1903. All were 35mm films, most slightly more than 50 feet in length (less than a minute duration). To distinguish them from their flip-card mutoscope offerings, they were advertised as New Subjects for Sprocket Films.
In fact Kathryn Osterman posed for 4 films on August 3rd alone, two recorded by cinematographer Bitzer, two by Wallace McCutcheon.
Chicks to Order (aka Strictly Fresh Eggs; aka Why She Didn’t Make the Cake ) and A Welsh Rabbit (aka Making a Welch Rabbit, made in June, are logged as comedy/trick films.
The Unfaithful Wife: The Lover
The Unfaithful Wife: The Fight [MEP metadata by Michael Nemchick]
The Unfaithful Wife: Murder and Suicide
differ from the others, being a narrative series — and quite un-comic. Thanks to MEP and LOC, we have unique digital access to these. A frame grabbed from each:
Thanks to the reprinted Biograph Bulletins, we can read the gruesome plot details. Not the stuff of peep shows!
In the studio later that July, Bitzer filmed Osterman in a second narrative drama, one with an exceptional 18-shot construction. A Search for Evidence uses keyhole mattes in point-of-view shots, described in Biograph Bulletin no. 14 (Sept. 21, 1903).
The film is not widely seen, despite its seemingly exceptional construction. The available video copies are of poor quality. Some YouTube versions are no doubt ripped from the 2007 DVD-R Biograph Productions (without D. W. Griffith), Volume One (1898-1905), released by Grapevine Video (known for low-fi editions of public domain silent films, starting in the VHS era). One appears to have the original Kemp Niver – LOC head title, although Niver has the title as A Search for the Evidence, rather than its copyright and release title, A Search for Evidence. This version races by at 2:32, while another adds contemporary music and runs 2:54. A third runs 3:10 with some anachronistic [jackass?] theater organ music and a fabricated head title using a later “Biograph Company” eagle logo.
As to the mise-en-scene in A Search for Evidence, its finale uses the same parlor set as The Unfaithful Wife parts 1 and 3, albeit with gender roles reversed. Here the faithful wife catches her unfaithful husband. Bitzer’s multi-shot editing and narrative pace made such an impression on Niver that he added a distinctive assessment to the synopsis: “Author’s note: The film made by a competitive company predates The Great Train Robbery.”
The other Osterman titles of 1903 give a better idea of how The Rose was situated as a mutoscopic tease, a moving picture designed for voyeuristic pleasures. So much so that the AM&B log does not currently list them as comedies but as “titillating?” The title Lucky Kitten takes on its suggestive connotation when revealed to be a “large figure study of a handsome young woman in décolleté evening gown.” The ad copy continued “She is fondling a tiny kitten and is snuggling it to her breast and cheek.” Niver’s Paper Print summary is cheeky: “The title is given as it appears on film and in the copyright application.” He sees the unnamed Osterman as “holding a small kitten against the skin above her low-cut dress.”
In “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not” Osterman appears with another flower associated with romance, this time plucking petals from a daisy. In Sweets for the Sweet: “Again the stunning girl who posed for 2453 [LUCKY KITTEN] and 2454 [THE ROSE]. Here she is seen enjoying to the utmost the contents of a box of candy. Very winsome and very attractive.” The Widow is a “very piquant” turn, in which the title character weeps before a photograph of her husband, only to brighten and put on makeup when a young man calls on her. The Girl at the Window shows Osterman as “a pretty girl (figure large)” “looking for the approach of her lover with a pair of field glasses.” The references to the figure on screen as large or very large refer not to the human body but to the fact that these films show her in close-up and medium close-up compositions. The terminology of 1903 had not yet found a consistent way to describe cinematic elements that soon enough became standardized. In this era of “attractions” close-ups were not rare, but were striking enough to merit attention.
The emphasis on face instead of body also complicates the power dynamics of objectification. Osterman’s looking back and direct address illustrate that aspect of early cinema Tom Gunning found “emblematic” of the “relationship the cinema of attractions constructs with is spectator.” As his influential essay put it, such actions, when “undertaken with brio,” “rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.” And seldom did a performer express greater brio than Kathryn Osterman does in some of these 50-footers.
The two remaining titles — The Art of “Making Up” (1900) and In My Lady’s Boudoir (1903) — reveal this. The only place I could locate them online was on a stock footage company’s YouTube channel.
Also known as In Her Boudoir, the film at right is particularly striking, both to an old-guard preservationist like Kemp Niver (“The camera work is quite imaginative”) or an avant gardist such as Hollis Frampton, who purchased a 16mm print of what he called in 1980 the “soft-core Edwardian porn” in the Paper Print Collection. (Recall that we began the semester with Frampton’s Public Domain, his 1972 compilation of films from the LOC PPC.) The Boudoir film was shot by Wallace McCutcheon at Biograph — the same Wallace McCutcheon who “left AM&B in 1905 and went to Edison,” Paul Spehr’s Feb. 18 e-mail points out. That McCutcheon, who joined Edwin Porter in making Three American Beauties, made these Osterman films draws a straight line between The Rose and the other beauties. “It was Billy Bitzer on camera and no credit for director, but the principal director for such films was Wallace McCutcheon,” Spehr offers. “He returned to AM&B in the fall of 1907, so he might not have directed the remake of Three American Beauties. [but] The similarity is rather striking, no?” Yes!
The re-circulation of Three American Beauties began well before its DVD and Web appearances. This color reproduction appears in the beautiful book Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the Century Film from American Archives (American Federation of the Arts, 1986), edited by NYU faculty member Jay Leyda and his former student Charles Musser.
They also assembled a traveling program of 35mm films. Consisting of six screenings, Three American Beauties closed the second, functioning as it was originally intended as a “Good Night” coda.
Program 2: Pleasures and Pitfalls
Interior N.Y. Subway 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905) AM&B
Coney Island at Night (1905) Edison
The Hold-Up of the Rocky Mountain Express (1906) AM&B
The Miller’s Daughter (1905) Edison
Getting Evidence (1906) Edison
Photographing a Female Crook (1904) AM&B
The Black Hand (1906) AM&B
Terrible Ted (1907) AM&B
Foul Play; or, A False Friend (1906) Vitagraph
The Thieving Hand (1908) Vitagraph
The Unwritten Law: A Thrilling Drama Based on the Thaw-White Case (1907) Lubin
Three American Beauties (1906) Edison
The historiography of film should incorporate the documentation of the continuing circulation of films after their initial release. When the first posting about Three American Beauties appeared on this blog, historian Kathy Fuller-Seeley noted on my Facebook page that the Edison film “was Bert and Fannie Cook’s favorite. . . they showed their print for many years of their touring days as the Cook and Harris High Class Moving Picture Company.” She writes about specific screenings by these itinerant showpeople from Cooperstown, New York, including one in 1908 for which the Cooks advertised it as Three American Beauties in Color.
So add another alternative title to the database!
Works Cited
Kemp R. Niver authored these three reference books, edited by Bebe Bergsten.
Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, 1894-1912 (University of California Press, 1967), revised and updated as Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress (Library of Congress, 1985); and Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908 (Locare Research Group, 1971).
Hollis Frampton is quoted in Bill Simon’s “Talking about Magellan: An Interview with Hollis Frampton,” Millennium Film Journal 7/8/9 (Fall-Winter 1980-81), 5-26.
Fuller, Kathryn H. At the Picture Show: Small-town Audiences and the Creation of Movie Fan Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996; University of Virginia Press, 2000), 22.
Fuller-Seeley, Kathryn. “Modernity for Small Town Tastes: Movies at the 1907 Cooperstown, New York, Centennial,” in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. Richard Maltby, Daniel Biltereyst, and Philippe Meers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 280-294. doi10.1002/9781444396416.ch16
Gunning, Tom. “The Cinema of Attraction[s]: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded, ed. Wanda Strauven (Amsterdam University Press, 2006): 381-88. First published in Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986).