PRESERVED FILMS

Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre (1901)
Production Co.: American Mutoscope and Biograph Co.; Director/Photographer: F.S. Armitage. Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by the Library of Congress. New Music: Martin Marks. Running Time: 80 seconds.

The more than three thousand films in the Library of Con­gress’s Paper Print Collection, made between 1894 and 1915, now provide the fullest surviving view of the origins of Amer­ican filmmaking. Their existence arose from a lucky quirk of copyright law and their preservation from early archival foresight.

Before 1912, U.S. copyright law made no provision for motion pictures, but for a fifty-cent fee one could copyright a still photograph. It was the Edison company, always vigilant in legal matters, that in 1894 hit upon the curious idea of copyrighting a “photograph” thirty-five millimeters wide and many feet long: rolls of photographic paper that documented its movies frame by frame. A few other companies, notably Biograph, followed Edison’s example over the next twenty years.

These legal records gathered dust in the Library of Congress basement until the late 1940s, when a former LC employee championed their value to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which began to fund experiments in copying the paper back onto film. Ex­amples convinced Congress to continue funding the project, which was completed in 16mm by the early 1960s. Thus, while most of the fragile and flammable films from the turn of the century were discarded or deteriorating, these prints on paper survived to become our key record of early American filmmaking—from short actualities through early multi-reel features. The unexpected result is that pre-1912 Amer­ican filmmaking survives more fully than that of the later teens.

Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre is a time-lapse special effects film released in April 1901 and showing the demolition of the Star Theatre (formerly the Wallack Building) at the corner of Broadway and Thirteenth Street in New York City. According to publicity from the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, “a specially devised electric apparatus” took single exposures every four minutes, within brief normal-speed views at the film’s start and close. The full title seems inexplicable—we see only demolition—until one reads Biograph’s recommendation to exhibitors that the film also be run backward: “When this view is shown in the reverse, the effect is very extraordinary.” —Scott Simmon

About the Music
It seemed natural to accompany this film’s start and finish (the normal-speed “frame” shots) with phrases from a nostalgic tune, “The Sidewalks of New York” (Lawlor & Blake, 1894—often known by its opening words, “East side, west side, all around the town”). But the sped-up footage of the demolition prompted a more fanciful approach: a “deconstructed” version of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumble-Bee.” The latter was certainly never played when the film was first screened. (Indeed, piano transcriptions of the piece were not available until decades later.) The purpose of this unusual musical coupling was to mirror the film’s mix of nostalgia and whimsical trickery. —Martin Marks

About the Preservation
Over the last few years, the Library of Con­gress has mounted a long-term project to rephotograph the paper prints in their original 35mm format. It’s a labor-intensive process in large part because the paper has no sprocket holes and thus each frame must be individually aligned. The new preservation copies are not merely an aesthetic enhancement; in films from this era before widespread close-ups, it becomes possible to see details long obscured. Especially for those who have seen the films only in 16mm, the new preservation copies are a revelation.

Further Information and Viewing
A descriptive catalog of the complete Paper Print Collec­tion is published as Early Motion Pictures: The Paper Print Collection in the Library of Congress, edited by Kemp Niver (Library of Congress, 1985). Many paper prints, including more than three hundred Edison films, are available for downloading or streaming from the Library of Congress’s American Memory website. Also featured on the NFPF website are Move On (1903) and Dog Factory (1904).