In “68mm 8k Phantoms,” I wrote about how the 1897 American Mutoscope and Biograph film The Haverstraw Tunnel was highly praised upon its release but is now difficult to see. And it’s not on any website. The next day the Library of Congress Moving Image Section responded by sending a ProRes MOV file. So here, online for the first time, is a version of the 1897 motion picture copyrighted in 1903 as Haverstraw Tunnel. The Library scanned its silent, black-and-white, 16mm film at 24 frames per second.. (Downloadable at archive.org/details/haverstrawtunnel).
The speed looks about right, although the original 68mm films were shot and projected at about 30 frames per second. Of course being so far removed from the original large-format film, this copy must pale next to the high-resolution scans of the 68mm prints made at the BFI National Archive and Eye Filmmuseum. To be specific about the provenance of this file: it’s from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection, aka the Paper Print Film Collection. Some 3,000 titles appear in that collection, with another 3,000 or so in the Paper Print Fragments Collection. The public catalog.loc.gov currently contains 729 titles cross-referenced with the PPC. (Haverstraw Tunnel is not among them yet.)
LOC’s MOV (1440 x 1080) derived from a 2k scan (2020) of its 16mm print (produced in 1955), which was made from one of the two 35mm paper rolls the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company deposited for copyright in 1903 using the 35mm film copy (1903) made from the original 68mm film print of The Haverstraw Tunnel made from a 68mm negative exposed in September 1897.
Kemp R. Niver, who oversaw the conversion from paper to 16mm film from 1953 through the 1960s, is the author of the essential reference book Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress, edited by Bebe Bergsten (1985). (Downloadable from Hathi Trust.) The book’s entry for Haverstraw Tunnel gives the copyright registration number and date of deposit, but remains uncertain about the year of creation (later well verified by Niver and others).
AM&B © H30724, Apr. 24, 1903, Location: Haverstraw, N.Y. Date: 1897[?] 27 ft. FLA3394 (print) FRA0692 (neg.)
Anyone who might have studied the film in the past would have gone to the LOC (or the Academy Film Archive) and watched the 16mm print on a flatbed viewer. Its 27 feet of celluloid (a little more than 1,000 frames, including the two title cards) runs less than a minute. Niver and Bergsten’s description of course cannot capture the spirit of what the original spectators said they saw in 1897.
Judging by the perforations visible in the edge-to-edge scan, the curved area includes some photographic image falling outside of the frame line. Since it is from the images printed on paper, the 35mm negative (from which the paper copies were made) might have had this imperfection. Perhaps it’s a lab artifact of making a 35mm motion-picture film copy of the 68mm original in 1903. Or perhaps the curve was introduced when printing onto the contact paper? Little is known about how the films got to paper, although there must have been a somewhat standard operating procedure, since this was done thousands of times between 1896 and 1915.
— Dan Streible
p.s. March 16: The BFI confirmed it can sell a digital access copy (MP4) of its restored Haverstraw film for £50. I’ve arranged for this purchase, but the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may interrupt this for a long time to come. [5 months as it turned out.]
p.p.s. July 27, 2020 The Haverstraw postings in March were my last before turning fully to the Orphan Film Symposium on Water, Climate, and Migration. But today’s harvest of research included a notable mention of the 1897 Mutoscope film’s afterlife. ProQuest recently unveiled a new database, the “Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive,” available via subscription (which my library fortunately has). The site describes three separate collections:
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- Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 1: Music, Radio and The Stage contains 14 titles and approximately 1.1M pages of content from such publications as Billboard (1894-2000), Spin (1985-2000) and The Stage (1880-2000)
- Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 2: Film and Television includes 10 titles and around 1.1M pages of material from key publications like Variety (1905-2000), Boxoffice (1920-2000) and Broadcast (1960-2000)
- Entertainment Industry Magazine Archive 3: Film and Television (Part 2) includes 12 titles and approximately 1 M pages of material from key publications like The Hollywood Reporter (1930-2015), American Cinematographer (1920-2015) and Kine Weekly (1907-1971)
Much of this overlaps with the content found in the nonprofit Media History Digital Library and its free Lantern search engine. But there’s certainly new territory to search through as well. Even where the two databases overlap searches return different results. A search for “Haverstraw” yielded a document that adds some significant facts not only about the 1897 Mutoscope film but about the under-researched but often mentioned commercial operation called Hale’s Tours.
The franchise featured scenic films projected to audiences seated inside a train car replica. But what 35mm films did Mr. George C. Hale and his franchisees use circa 1904 – 1911? André Habib has shown that the Miles Bros. now-famous film A Trip Down Market Street (April 1906) was made specifically for sales to Hale’s Tour exhibitors — until the San Francisco earthquake made it exploitable as a topical film a few days after it was recorded.
This full-page advertisement appeared in The Billboard magazine, March 17, 1906. Kleine Optical Company offers extraordinary detail about how “Hale Tour” units operated and what specific films they offered. Kleine identifies Edison and the American Mutoscope and Biograph as two suppliers, alongside Pathé and other European production companies. Kleine’s ad is surprisingly frank about the condition of the films. It includes Haverstraw Tunnel, the 68mm Mutoscope production of 1897, which in 1906 would have been a 35mm reduction.
Perhaps the condition described is related to the great popularity of the film in 1897-98.
HAVERSTRAW TUNNEL — Length 200 feet. Price $24.
The negative from which this film is made is old and defective.
The negative is “old and defective!” Honest ad copy. The 200 feet of 35mm film would give it approximately three times as many frames as the LOC Paper Print’s 16mm copy (27 feet), another confirmation that the version seen above is a pale version of the original.
