This writer has been viewing film since the Lumiere babies, the Haverstraw Tunnel and the Empire State Express were the screen stars. . . .
— Epes W. Sargent, Moving Picture World,Oct. 16, 1920
Only now do I fully understand this statement and appreciate its 1920 utterance.
I did not see The Empire State Express (American Mutoscope Co., 1896) until perhaps 2020. And I have not seen The Haverstraw Tunnel (1897) at all. Where can we see them? The latter is absent from the web and video releases, but hasn’t disappeared altogether. [Update: This changed. The day after publishing this, the Library of Congress provided a digital copy of Haverstraw. See the March 5 blog entry.]
Nico de Klerk included The Empire State Express in his 2004 Orphan Film Symposium program, “Where to Place the Camera? 24 Biograph Films, 1896-1901.” But I apparently was outside the theater tending to other tech issues. I did, however, see the final piece on that program: Across Brooklyn Bridge (1899), which inspired audience member Bill Morrison to make Outerborough in 2005.
I definitely saw Empire State Express earlier this year when Mark Williams shared a recording of a Paul Spehr presentation at Dartmouth. Then Mike Mashon shared the digitized Library of Congress paper print copy. The visual quality of the paper-to-16mm film copy is of course shockingly distinct from the BFI and Eye’s scans of their 68mm prints. Since this was a title Paul was fond of teaching about, for my students I hastily made a diptych comparing them. Surprised I was to see that very thing on screen at Paul’s memorial at LOC on January 31, 2020.
I have not yet seen The Haverstraw Tunnel. Given its touchstone significance for film historians, it’s notable that so few have seen it since the nineteenth century. Because Biograph deposited a paper print of Haverstraw Tunnel with the U.S. Copyright Office in 1903, the Library of Congress has that 35mm paper and a 16mm film copy that Kemp Niver made at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — in 1955. This will be easy enough to get in circulation, but will underwhelm compared to the high-resolution original. Both the BFI National Archive and Eye Filmmuseum hold 68mm prints. (The BFI catalog metadata lists fragments it holds that intermix Haverstraw Tunnel with two other railway films; the record lists no less than 82 elements.)
Update: March 17, 2020. Today Bryon Dixon, Curator of silent film at BFI National Archive, emails:
to explain the database entry – there are 11 separate 68mm rolls called Haverstraw Tunnel of varying lengths (they are labelled 70mm). These have been duped so there are 11 dupes on 35mm and 11 prints on 35mm — and of course digital elements — but only 11 original pieces, many of which are repeated footage. These came from Dr. Schultze at Kodak Museum in England. I restored about 60 large format films in 2018, mainly Biograph titles including one print of Haverstraw Tunnel.
The Kodak Museum at Harrow in Greater London opened in 1927. Upon its closing in 1985, Schultze’s widow donated the collection to what is now called the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford. (See its Kodak Gallery here.) Dr. Rolf S. Schultze (1902-1967) was curator of the Kodak Museum in the 1950s and 60s. (See also Dixon’s program note for the 2019 Cinema Ritrovato,)
The Academy Film Archive also lists Haverstraw Tunnel in its holdings, dated 1903. This is no doubt a duplicate of the LOC paper print, made in the year Biograph ceased 68mm production and began making 35mm reduction prints of its 68mm holdings (nearly 2,500 titles shot over 8 years). In theory it might be the Lubin company’s Panoramic View of Haverstraw Tunnel, N.Y. (January 1903). And a Lubin title sometimes was an unauthorized dupe of someone else’s film. However, the AMB 68mm print would not have been easy to obtain at the time. Assuming Lubin shot a new Haverstraw panorama, that lost film can still be appreciated through the characteristic chutzpah of the Lubin description, which concludes “. . . you stand amazed at the ingenuity of the master mind who invented the apparatus [Siegmund Lubin!] for reproducing nature so true and lifelike. A film like this one is a whole show in itself, and anyone exhibiting it must be prepared to repeat it again and again.” (AFI Catalog.)
Apart from the media machine that was Veriscope’s The Corbett-Fitzsimmons Fight, the 68mm American Mutoscope film shot from the front of a train along the Hudson River may have been the most popular motion picture of 1897. It was the original “phantom ride,” and called such in headlines. At the Palace Theatre in London, the Biograph program listed The Phantom Ride — Haverstraw Tunnel.
However, Paul Spehr points out the name of the skilled camera operator remains unknown. W.K.L. Dickson and Billy Bitzer were elsewhere. Wallace McCutcheon Sr. was supervising productions at the time, but who shot the remarkable film? The company’s unpublished production logs (transcribed over many years by Spehr with Eileen Bowser) record the working title “Haverstraw Tunnel and Landscape,” with print lengths of 343 and 59 feet (presumably the longer 68mm celluloid print for Biograph projections and the shorter for printing Mutoscope cards, viewed on peep-show devices). When AMB began shooting in 35mm, cinematographers A. E. Weed and Frank Armitage filmed a “scenic” called From Haverstraw to Newburg (Sep. 1903), production no. 2,580.
Unlike the later films, the first Haverstraw production (no. 301), inspired enthusiastic commentary when it was projected in theaters. Those 1897-98 reports (“an unseen energy swallows up space,” etc.) inspired now-essential discourse on early cinema (thanks to Tom Gunning, who has thanked Robert C. Allen and Charles Musser; and let us thank Bebe Bergsten and Kemp Niver).*
Many newspaper reports on Biograph screenings document this was the stand-out title among the many circulating, and the most sensational since The Empire State Express a year prior. A quick search of newspapers.com hit upon dozens of such items, from cities large and small. Here are two typical ones.
The Biograph catalog failed to capture the brilliance of the recording: “A remarkably interesting view taken from the front end of a locomotive on one of the most picturesque bits of track along the Hudson. The train passes through the tunnel, and the view of the gradually increasing opening, as the train emerges from the opposite side, is particularly novel. The most delightful bit on the West Shore Railroad. First view of the Hudson on the northbound trip.” (Reprinted in the AFI Catalog.)
The Haverstraw Tunnel is one of the 68mm Mutoscope and Biograph films preserved by Eye Filmmuseum in tandem with the BFI National Archive. Restored versions were included in the 2017 Cinema Ritrovato screenings assembled by Elif Kaynakci (Eye) and Bryony Dixon (BFI). Twenty years ago, the Nederlands Filmmuseum screened it in 35mm at the Giornate del Cinema Muto, part of “The Wonders of the Biograph” programme 4, “‘Les feuilles remuaient au vent'” (‘the leaves that moved in the wind,’ the phrase Georges Méliès used in describing the background details he saw in Repas de bébé (1895) at his first Lumière cinématographe screening.) Nico de Klerk repeated the program at the University of Chicago in 2001 with Tom Gunning.
Frames from the Haverstraw film in "An Illustrated History of Early Cinema" (2017). These images and the full Biograph Picture Catalog entry are reprinted in Charles Musser's The Emergence of Cinema (1990). See below.
At the 2014 NYU Orphan Film Symposium at Eye, Paul Spehr introduced a program of M&B restorations that included a British Mutoscope picture, which W. K. L. Dickson made in response to the success of The Haverstraw Tunnel. Here is that “sequel,” shot in Wales, in a hand-colored version. From the EYE Collections YouTube channel.
An anonymous scribe writing in The Phonoscope saw the big film on the big screen at New York’s Keith’s theater in September 1897. Reading these evocative words one can imagine the sensations The Haverstraw Tunnel induced.
The train was invisible, and yet the landscape [sweeps by] remorselessly, and far away the bright day became a spot of darkness. That was the mouth of the tunnel, and toward it the spectator was hurled as if a fate was behind him. The spot of blackness closed around and the spectator being flung through that cavern with the demoniac energy behind him. The shadows, the rush of the invisible force and the uncertainty of the issues made one instinctively hold his breath as when on the edge of a crisis that might become a catastrophe. . . . The audience that stood five deep back of the orchestra chairs half reeled as it caught itself. It had been snatched up and rapt away by a phantom train. [!]
— “Life on Canvas: A Phantom Ride on an Express Train and Other Remarkable Views Made by the Biograph,” The Phonoscope, Aug.-Sep. 1897, 6.
These Biograph films of 1896-1903, when taken from the original large-format celluloid sources, still have the power to thrill. The Museum of Modern Art has restored and showcased 36 titles, and has this excellent video — “The IMAX of the 1890s | HOW TO SEE the First Movies” — with high-quality excerpts, narrated by curator Dave Kehr. Eye and BFI have preserved more than 200 others, shot in England, Wales, Germany, France, the United States, and the Netherlands (Nederlandsche Biograaf– en Mutoscope Maatschappij !). Barry Anthony says there were more than 5,000 productions, though his published filmography lists only the couple hundred from the Amsterdam and London collections. Whatever the number, the more of these that receive wider exposure, the more our conception of early cinema will be enhanced.
Nota bene:
The May 23-26, 2020, Orphan Film Symposium / Eye Academic Conference, features more and new 68mm Mutoscope & Biograph restorations (in 8K!), presented by Frank Roumen and Giovanna Fossati (Eye), Katie Trainor(Museum of Modern Art NYC), and Simon Lund (Cineric). Films related to our themes of Water, Climate, and Migration. Also a newly scanned 68mm paper print (rarest of animals) from the Library of Congress, thanks to Cineric and LOC generosity to the NYU Orphan Film Symposium. Read the rich program of films and speakers — and register to join us in Amsterdam.
* And now the endnote.
The arresting phrase “an unseen energy swallows up space” has an interesting trajectory. Coined by an unidentified writer after seeing The Haverstraw Tunnel, it moved through time steadily after the 1983 publication of Tom Gunning’s still frequently cited essay “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avante-Garde Film.” Referring to the later Hale’s Tours, which projected train-ride films to viewers seated inside a mock-up train car, he writes: “The experience to be reconstituted in these films is the thrill of motion and its transformation of space” (363). He then quotes from the New York Mail and Express description of the Haverstraw film.
The way in which the unseen energy swallows up space and flings itself into the distances is as mysterious and impressive as an allegory. A sensation is produced akin to that which Poe in his “Fall of the House of Usher” relates was communicated to him by his doomed companion when he sketched the shaft in the heart of the earth, with an unearthly radiance thrilling through it. One holds his breath instinctively as he is swept along in the rush of the phantom cars. His attention is held almost with the vise of a fate.
Gunning cites his source as Robert C. Allen, “Vaudeville and the Film, 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction” (PhD dissertation, U of Iowa, 1977), 131. I’m not sure if Allen found the report in the New York Mail and Express itself or elsewhere. But the piece was reprinted in full earlier in a reference book they knew and acknowledged: Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908, “compiled, with introduction and notes by Kemp R. Niver,” edited by Bebe Bergsten (Locare Research Group, 1971). The book contains facsimiles of the original promotional material from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company.
Bulletin no. 2 compiled press clippings about Biograph exhibitions throughout 1897, with a special section entitled “English Press Comments on the View of the Haverstraw Tunnel on the West Shore Railroad.” Some 35 items in American and British papers mention The Haverstraw Tunnel. The one referring to an unseen energy swallowing up space is the longest, a complete article. “Where the Past Speaks: What the Biograph Is Doing for the Future Historian – Life Reproduced on Canvas,” New York Mail and Express (Sep. 25, 1897).
Reading the Phonoscope piece in full for the first time, I was struck by how much its phrasing and tone resemble the passage Gunning and Allen quote from the Mail and Express. In 2015, Gunning speculated about this in an endnote. “The similarities between the two descriptions are striking and either indicate a broadly common mode of experiencing this film, or less excitingly, a single author. I suspect the former, but cannot rule out the latter.” (“The Attraction of Motion,” 173.) Looking now at dozens of 1897-98 descriptions of the Haverstraw film, we can see both things may be true. Idiosyncratic words and phrases recur, including in British sources. Appropriating previously published material was common trade practice. And the American Mutoscope Company itself supplied copy from which some writers cribbed, as in the Biograph Bulletin no. 2 clippings.
Reports in the British periodicals The Pelican (October 30) and The Sketch (November 10) use paragraphs almost verbatim from The Phonoscope. Elsewhere, the conspicuous term “swallow up” re-appears in other 1897 reports about Haverstraw Tunnel. On October 30, Travel Life (UK) wrote that “the black mouth of a tunnel appears to meet you, and gets bigger and blacker as you hurtle until it swallows you up in dark embrace.” In the November Boston Truth: “two black holes in the mountain side seem to swallow up the tracks in their inky depths.” Even the titles of the two longest pieces are similar. “Life Reproduced on Canvas,” New York Mail and Express; “Life on Canvas,” The Phonoscope.
Sources
Tom Gunning has published three essays block-quoting what filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky calls the “well known and often cited” words.
• “An Unseen Energy Swallows Space: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avante-Garde Film,” in Film before Griffith, ed. John L. Fell (U of Cal Press, 1983), 355-66.
• “The Whole Town’s Gawking: Early Cinema and the Visual Experience of Modernity,” Yale Journal of Criticism 7.2 (1994): 189–201.
• “The Attraction of Motion: Modern Representation and the Image of Movement,” in Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture, ed. Annemone Ligensa and Klaus Kreimeier (Indiana U Press / John Libbey, 2015), 164-73; here citing Niver as the source for the Mail and Express passage.
Robert C. Allen, “Vaudeville and the Film, 1895-1915: A Study in Media Interaction” (PhD dissertation, U of Iowa, 1977). Arno Press published a book version in 1980. Wider circulation of Allen’s research appeared in 1976 as the lengthy essay “The Movies in Vaudeville: Historical Context of the Movies as Popular Entertainment,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio (U of Wisconsin Press), 57-102; rev. ed. 1985.
Kemp R. Niver, Biograph Bulletins, 1896-1908, ed. Bebe Bergsten (Locare Research Group, 1971).
Paul Spehr, The Man Who Made Movies: W. K. L. Dickson (John Libbey, 2008).
Paul C. Spehr and Jean-Jacques Meusy, “L’esordio in Francia dell’American Mutoscope and Biograph Company / The Beginnings of the American Mutoscope and Biograph Co. in France,” Griffithiana 62-63 (1998): 128-69. Discussing how the company judged which American films would play well in Europe: “Some views, such as The Haverstraw Tunnel, aroused a strong impression on every spectator and prefigured, fifty years in advance, the sensational scenes of This Is Cinerama!”
Barry Anthony, “Le Collezioni Biograph di Amsterdam e Londra / The Biograph Collections in Amsterdam and London,” Griffithiana 66-70 (1999/2000): 259-75.
Luke McKernan, “L’American Biograph al Palace/The American Biograph at The Palace,” Griffithiana 66-70 (1999/2000): 248-58.
Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Scribner’s Sons, 1990). Below, the Biograph Picture Catalogue entry no. 301, as published on page 229.
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Dan Streible (New York University) @Orphan_Films
Blog of the NYU Orphan Film Symposium (c) 2020
NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Department of Cinema Studies