Train Robbery Research Articles

Team Films in Adaptation: Remembered Stories and Forgotten Books

This article identifies common features of a neglected formula, the team film, in which the films invariably overtake the sourcetexts as the dominant form. Surveying adaptations, such as The Great Escape, The Italian Job, The Professionals and The First Great Train Robbery, the article demonstrates how in the team film, particular textual elements are consistently used, re-used and modified in a fashion akin to genre.

The Frozen Screen: Levinas and the Action Film

The cinema has long reigned as the kinetic medium of the twentieth century. Early in its development it secured its privilege over the more traditional arts through its unprecedented control and manipulation of time. In The Great Train Robbery (Edwin S Porter, 1903) and Life of an American Fireman (Edwin S Porter, 1903) crowds had their first experiences of film crosscutting between two different spaces and moments in time. They saw a shot of a raging house fire, and then suddenly a shot of a sleeping fireman in the station. Between these two spaces is a simple cut, and yet here is the precise location of a vast frontier: the pleasure of waiting for something forever on the verge of arrival. This expectation of the event, the catastrophe, and the culmination, is the fuel for modern cinema. The Hollywood tradition has been a developing story of technology’s attempts to exploit this passion, pushing the barriers of how much suspense can be introduced and resolved within the space of a screen and a segment of time, and in the

Colorization - The Saga of Legend Films

COLORIZATION - WHY NOT? THE SAGA OF LEGEND FILMS Colorization is as old as the movies. In fact, it's even older. Although some historians are want to trace the theory of colour photography as far back as 1785, the first patent for colour film was registered sometime in the late 1800s. This was during the era of Georges Méliès, whose famed hand-tinted trick films delighted audiences as early as 1894. Edwin S. Porter borrowed the tinted technique to enhance the gunshot blast at the end of The Great Train Robbery (1904). Later, D. W. Griffith had gun explosions tinted in battle scenes of The Birth of a Nation (1915). And Sergei Eisenstein made sure that in the first prints of Battleship Potemkin (1925) a tinted red flag was raised to glorify the revolution. The first commercially successful colour system to hit the market was Kinemacolor, patented in 1906 by...

The Adventures of Vin Fiz (review)

Reviewed by: The Adventures of Vin Fiz Elizabeth Bush Cussler, Clive The Adventures of Vin Fiz. Philomel, 2006 [176p] ISBN 0-399-24474-3$15.99 Reviewed from galleys M Gr. 3-5 The itinerant farmhand who helps Casey and Lacey's father bring in his herb crop leaves the twins a parting gift—a magical machine that enlarges toys to life size, with the predictable fantasy advice to "love and cherish the secret and it will last until you're both grown up. . . . Then your dreams will take new directions, and the secret will fade in mind and heart." Casey tests the effect on his model Wright Brothers flyer, and he and his sister and dog Floopy are off on a California to New York flight (the reverse of the actual 1911 Vin Fiz route). With Vin Fiz in control, they foil the nefarious Boss and his henchman who have enslaved a Nevada town in their gold mine; avert a steamboat and barge collision; foil a train robbery and save a runaway train; and rescue teenagers heading over Niagara Falls in a boat. After a quick glance at New York City and a night under the stars on an Atlantic beach, they awake to find themselves in their own beds, but of course with evidence of the adventure still attached to the miniaturized model plane. Cussler tries for lighthearted fantasy but succumbs to a severe case of the cutes, with a host of silly character names—the Nicefolks, Sucoh Sucop (yep, Hocus Pocus), Craven Cranberry, Captain Crowsfeet—bumbling criminals, a de rigueur doggie, and an ending straight out of The Polar Express. Brave brother Casey runs the show, while sister Lacey pretty much goes along for the ride. Most annoying perhaps, is the squandered opportunity for spotlighting the historic Vin Fiz itself, for although Cussler gives a brief history of the flyer in a closing note, any old plane could have moved the action here just as well. For a more satisfying fictionalized adventure, try riding Hyatt's Coast to Coast with Alice (BCCB 9/95). Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The encyclopedia of Westerns

This work is a reference on the history of the Western movie, from The Great Train Robbery in 1902 to the most recent Hollywood hits. Each of the 3500 entries include the film's vital statistics - title, year released, director, writers and screenwriters, cast, and running time. A summary of the film is included and a critical analysis of the more significant stars and films.

Out With a Moving Picture Machine

Although Vitagraph had already acquired land in Brooklyn for a large new studio, they would not move into that facility until the following year. The interiors of this film (given here as Escaped from Sing Sing) were shot on the roof of the Morton Building, 110-116 Nassau Street, in lower Manhattan. Exteriors were filmed in Bronx Park, the location of the Bronx Zoo and Botanical Garden. This was one of the first films made by Vitagraph after they resumed production in 1905, and there is an interesting tension between a new desire for corporate publicity and an existing tradition of filmmaker anonymity. The numerous frame enlargements accompanying the original piece were each carefully labelled as copyright by the Vitagraph Corporation of America. Within the body of the text, however, the word vitagraph appears only in lower case, referring to the camera, and no studio personnel are identified by name. Even the featured actor, Paul Panzer, is only identified by his surname (Panzer, who had already appeared in films for Edison, would be a Vitagraph stock company regular for the next six years). Inset illustrations do show two different cameramen at work; one looks very much like J. Stuart Blackton, the other may or may not be Albert E. Smith. Author Theodore Waters implies that the stage manager on this film was distinct from the camera operator, but fails to identify him. According to Charles Musser, G.M. Broncho Billy Anderson was directing for Vitagraph at this time. Would his presence account for the narrative's remarkable similarity to The Great Train Robbery, a film Anderson had appeared in for Edison two years earlier? Indeed, he chase plot of that film seems merely to have been grafted onto the beginning of Escape from Sing Sing, a 1903 Biograph film taken from a current theatrical melodrama.

So Many Fragments, So Many Beginnings, So Many Pleasures: The Neglected Detail(s) in Film Theory

"WE USED TO WALK the cold, deserted streets," recalled Phillipe Soupault, "in search of an accident, an encounter, life." 1 And then they discovered American cinema through a movie poster—perhaps of Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery—showing "a man, his face covered with a red handkerchief, . . . pointing a revolver at the unconcerned passersby." 2 Like that of all Surrealists captivated by the camera's automatism, Soupault's writing reveals his fascination with the ordinary details that the camera brings to life. In fact, for Surrealists, a film's narrative was never as significant as the poetic power that lay in what René Crevel called "a single minute's lyricism, the detail of a face, the surprise of a gesture." 3 But what happened to this Surrealist faith in cinema's lyricism, in photogénie, after the paradigm shift in film studies in the direction of semiotics? Is it possible to recuperate the Surrealist respect for cinema's "rhythmic impression," 4 considering "'impressionistic' became one of the new paradigm's most frequently evoked pejoratives, designating a theoretical position that was either 'untheorized' or too interested in the wrong questions" 5?

Introduction: A Century on the Trail

The Edison Company made numerous one-minute documentary films about the American West during the last five years of the nineteenth century. A few, such as Cripple Creek Barroom in 1898, had rudimentary story elements (Jones). Almost everyone agrees, however, that die true beginning of Western movies occurred with William S. Porter's popular one reeler The Great Train Robbery, copyrighted in December 1903 (Buscombe 23). So, Pilgrim, light the candles on the cake. Put on your Sunday-go-to-meetin's. Make your spurs go jingle, jangle, jingle. And shoot them six-guns at the moon. It's the hundredth birthday of Western movies!

The great Canadian training robbery: evidence on the returns to educational mismatch

In this paper, I use data from the National Survey of Class Structure and Labour Process in Canada (NSCS) to estimate the returns to over and undereducation. I find that there are positive returns to overeducation for males in jobs that require a university bachelor's degree; but for other levels of required education, the returns are insignificant. I also find evidence of lower pay for undereducated males in jobs with low education requirements. For females, the returns to over and undereducation are insignificant for all levels of required education.

An Australian Court on Confidentiality: Getting the Bank to Tell

One of the great attractions of dealing in offshore financial centres is the matter of confidentiality. Many people, especially if they are high-wealth individuals, do not want others peering into their financial affairs and structures. They require privacy. This is particularly so if the would-be inquirer is the individual's Commissioner of Taxation. Fast communications and jet travel have made the world smaller, resulting in business being transacted worldwide by people who are constantly on the move in the conduct of their business. To achieve the best bottom-line results for their business and for themselves personally, it is commonplace for international structures to be put in place to minimize the tax burden. This is the province of international tax experts. They look to find where their clients will have a safe haven, where the taxpayers will enjoy low taxation and privacy about their finances. All this is perfectly reasonable and the inevitable result of high-tax countries. However, there is a dark side. Around the world crime is flourishing. This may involve theft in the simple form of robbing a bank or other financial institution (like the Great Train Robbery in England) or in the form of expropriation by a tyrannical leader of a country, who, through his position as head of state, milks that country's economy and spirits away the funds into secret bank accounts. There are many types of theft between these two extremes. But in all cases the perpetrator has to be able to launder his ill-gotten gains so that what has happened is hidden from the outside world and from those trying to follow the money trail. Banking confidentiality is a blessing to these thieves; it throws a cloak over what they have done. This is still true today, even when so many institutions are practising due diligence.

The knowledge-enabled organization: moving from "training" to "learning" to meet business goals

The great train robbery knowledge and skills the knowledge-enabled organization the learning contract - tying learning to business goals learning to get the job done the knowledge network - building support for employee and oganizational learning fostering a positive learning environment throw out the training catalogue, not the training group the learning organization, the corporate university and the knowledge-enabled organization moving learning beyond company boundaries.

Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company by Charles Musser

166 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. By Charles Musser. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 591; illustrations, notes, appen­ dixes, indexes. $60.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). The history of early film, stretching from Edison’s introduction of the kinetoscope to the rise of the Nickelodeon theaters, has often been depicted as a series of firsts: the first film camera, the first story film, and so on. Edwin Porter was the most important filmmaker of this period, and his work for the Edison Manufacturing Company produced many of these significant advances; he is most often credited with establishing the narrative form of film. The unprece­ dented popularity of his best-known film, The Great Train Robbery (1903), marked a new level of public acceptance of visual entertain­ ment. Yet as Charles Musser points out in this exhaustive study of Porter’s career, the construction of film history as a series of milestones hinders our understanding of the road they marked. Musser’s goal is to show the development of film within the context of popular culture and business relationships. He has not only examined numerous motion pictures but also delved into the business of the film industry and the psyche of its audience. The result is a comprehensive account of the origins of American film that presents some important new information. His detailed examination of Porter’s Life of an American Fireman (1903) is a case in point. This film is celebrated as the great leap forward into narrative filmmaking which told stories with new devices such as crosscutting. Many scholars had come to this conclusion after examining a version of the film that was altered significantly— “modernized,” as Musser calls it—in the years after Porter made it. Musser’s shot-by-shot analysis of the original film refutes the claim that it established the vocabulary of modern film editing. Instead, he finds a pattern of temporal repetition of shots that reflected a different mode of representation, different from the one audiences expect today. Life of an American Fireman did not mark another forward step in filmmaking; rather, it was a mode of pictorial representation that was “briefly explored, gradually discarded, and then finally forgotten” (p. 233). Musser makes it clear that he does not believe in technological determinism. He rejects the popular idea that technological innova­ tion was the driving force of American film. After reading this book it will be impossible to explain the coming of film theaters as a consequence of the perfection of the technology of film projection. Musser shows that the Nickelodeons emerged from the rise of film exchanges, the availability of longer films, and the changing relationship of producers and exhibitors. The book describes plenty of innovation, but it is innovation in the subject matter of films, in technology and culture Book Reviews 167 modes of representation, and in methods of film production as well as in machines. It was the change in the production of films that hastened the end of Porter’s career and his estrangement from the Edison company. Porter worked in a collaborative environment based on informal relationships and a loose division of labor. The important work of film editing, for example, was carried out by both producers and exhibi­ tors. The move to centralized film production brought more special­ ization in filmmaking and a rigid hierarchy of function. Porter resisted this change and the inevitable rise of the studio system. He also lost favor with the Edison company because he failed to adopt new modes of representation in film: the man so often characterized as author of modern film editing was in fact out of tune with audience needs by 1910. Porter’s methods and the way he told stories in his films were obsolete by the time motion pictures became the vehicles for mass communication. The University of California Press has done both Musser and Porter proud: this is a profusely illustrated book which contains stills from many of the films Musser consulted. As the book is meant to be used in conjunction with viewing the films, the author has also...

Before the nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company

Musser takes us into the long-forgotten world of early cinemaunexpectedly sophisticated and yet radically different from current movie-making. Focusing on Edwin S. Porter, most often remembered as the producer of The Great Train Robbery, Musser situates Porter s achievements within the vibrant context of turn-of-the-century popular culture and the commercial pragmatics of the Edison Manufacturing Companythe leading American film-producing entity from 1894 to 1908.

The great training robbery

The great training robbery

Tragedy at Tunnel 13

Train robbery was frequent in the United States from the late 1800s through the 1920s. On October 11, 1923, the southbound Southern Pacific Express was halted by three men at Tunnel 13 in southern Oregon just north of the California line. The railway mail car carrying +40,000 was then blown apart by an explosive charge, killing the clerk and rendering the money unobtainable. The men shot three other train crew members before escaping into the mountains. The investigation was headed by Chief Agent Dan O'Connell, who soon asked that California criminalist, Edward Heinrich, examine soiled overalls found nearby. Using primarily botanical evidence, Heinrich identified them as those of a woodsman, leading to the identification of three Oregon d'Autremont brothers as suspects. After an intensive manhunt, one was captured 3 years later in the Philippines and was tried and found guilty. The twins, captured in Ohio, then pleaded guilty. This crime, typical of those in which unforeseen events lead the perpetrators to panic and to murder, helped to establish criminology and particularly botanical studies as valid scientific disciplines. Its investigation and solution also remain models of scientific crime detection.

Viewpoint

Training is expensive in terms of both direct and indirect costs; so those sponsoring it might reasonably expect a payoff in terms of improved effectiveness — at least in the long term, if not the short. Why is it, then, that much so‐called training has as little relevance to the organisation's needs and objectives as the game of Monopoly has to the property business? Why do so many otherwise sophisticated organisations succumb to the charms of those who peddle off‐the‐shelf training packages which claim to be all‐purpose cures? Why are so many hard‐nosed managers prepared to give unlimited licence to the training alchemists who manage to convince them that they can magically transform leaden personnel into 18‐carat gold managers? What is the explanation of this great training robbery?

Train Robbery: The Birth, Flowering and Decline of a Notorious Western Enterprise

Train Robbery: The Birth, Flowering and Decline of a Notorious Western Enterprise

From an Idealist: “The Great Training Robbery”

Abstract Learning after Collge by Nevitt Sanford & ed. by Craig Comstock, Orinda, California: Montaigne, 280 pp., $14.50 hardback, $9.95 paper.

Motion Picture Exhibition in Manhattan 1906-1912: Beyond the Nickelodeon

On June 19, 1905, on Smithfield Street Pittsburgh, a vaudeville entrepreneur, Harry Davis, and his partner, John P. Harris, opened a theatre devoted to the showing of motion pictures. Audiences on that opening night sat seats salvaged from a defunct opera house and, for their five-cent admission charge, watched The Great Train Robbery unroll on the screen to piano accompaniment.1 There was little more to the performance. The Nickelodeon, as the theatre was called, could boast only ninety-six chairs, a piano, projector, and screen. Yet, with the possible exception of Koster and Bial's Music Hall, the Nickelodeon Theatre is the most famous theatre which motion pictures were shown prior to 1914. It was here, according to most film historians, that movies America entered a new era. Inside this dingy little storefront and the thousands like it which, we are told, sprang up the wake of its success, the motion picture found its own exclusive exhibition outlet and a new audience of working-class Americans. The movies had outgrown their role as minor adjuncts to vaudeville performances, and, while the middle-class patrons of variety snubbed their noses at this upstart amusement, the nickeloden proceeded to revolutionarize American mass entertainment only a few years' time.2 Most students of American film history are familiar with the descriptions of secondary sources. Concentrated largely poorer shopping districts and slum neighborhoods, writes Jacobs, nickelodeons were disdained by the well-to-do. But the workmen and their families who patronized the movies did not mind the unsanitary, and hazardous accommodations most of the offered.3 Sklar locates the (crowded, dark, and smelly rooms) working-class neighborhoods and says their programs of films and illustrated songs lasted no more than fifteen or twenty minutes.4 Hampton also describes as crowded, poorly ventilated places which film programs lasting approximately twenty minutes were given.5 North places the mostly in big industrial cities with large foreign populations of poorly paid laborers.6 Sklar and other film historians maintain that a large portion of the nickelodeon audience was made up of newly-arrived

How to improve the training pay‐off

A lot of so‐called training has about as much relevance to the organisation's needs as does the game of Monopoly to the property business. Furthermore, after witnessing many organisations paying large sums of money for off‐the‐shelf training packages, one can only assume that some of those selling the courses are the direct descendants of the nineteenth‐century pedlars of snake oil and other all‐purpose cures. Whilst a number of trainers are to present‐day management what the alchemist was to the mediaeval rulers, they have convinced them that their magic formula can turn leaden personnel into eighteen‐carat gold managers. Hence, at the risk of mixing metaphors, to term it the great training robbery is fair comment.