PRESERVED FILMS

The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912)
Production Co.: Thomas A. Edison Inc. Director: Harold Shaw. Writer: Dorothy G. Shore. Cast: Martin Fuller (Joe, the newsboy), Mrs. William Bechtel (his grandmother), Bigelow Cooper (the minister), Walter Edwin (the manager of the Fresh Air Fund). Transfer Note: Copied at 18 frames per second from a 35mm print preserved by George Eastman Museum. New Music: Martin Marks. Running Time: 14 minutes.

Most one-reel films—considered full-length before multi-reel features gained popularity after 1913—squeeze elaborate plotlines into their quarter-hour running time. The Land Beyond the Sunset, an Edison one-reeler filmed around New York City in 1912, instead takes its unhurried story through diverse genres: from a social-problem drama through a pastoral fantasy and into an unclassifiable poetic finale.

Joe, a tattered newspaperboy living in the tenements with his abusive, alcoholic grandmother, gets a ticket from the benevolent volunteers of the Fresh Air Fund. This nonprofit organization, founded by
a Protestant minister in 1877, pro­vided brief summer trips away from the unhealthy slums. (More than 120 years later, the organization still annually provides vacations for three thousand inner-city New York children to its camps in the Hudson River Valley.) Although Edison collaborated on films with the Red Cross and other charities, one wonders how fully the Fresh Air Fund sanctioned its depiction. The female volunteers, solicitous though they are, lose track of Joe after filling him with a fairy tale about the happy “land beyond the sunset.” He wanders off to find a boat and drifts away into the horizon.

Following the inviolable pattern, The Land Beyond the Sunset valorizes the healing powers of the country for urban ills. The little-known director Harold Shaw—the film is sometimes attributed to J. Searle Dawley—clearly had an eye for both landscape and city compositions. Where a D.W. Griffith one-reeler would presume that taking a slum child to the country was in itself a happy ending—see his A Child of the Ghetto (1910)—this film uses fantasy to arrive at a less sanguine resolution. The ambiguity of the final long shot—does Joe die? or drift into a transcendent realm?—makes for something quite rare.

Thomas Edison proved better at managing technology than overseeing moviemaking. The Land Beyond the Sunset comes near the end for his film company. A federal antitrust suit in 1912 against the Motion Picture Patents Company, which Edison dominated, was one blow. The death knell was Edison’s adherence to single-reel dramas as the rest of the industry moved toward longer features. The later Edison one-reelers have long been unavailable for public viewing and have gener­ally been dismissed by scholars. With recent and forthcoming preservation, they can be reassessed. —Scott Simmon

About the Music
For this marvelously crafted, heartfelt, and disturbing film, I turned first to some of Schumann’s piano miniatures from his Album for the Young: notably, an exquisitely simple piece appropriately titled “The Poor Orphan Child.” In addition, I felt a need for a “maternal” soprano voice, singing songs periodically to comment on the film’s meanings. The singer is Margaret O’Keefe (a colleague at MIT), and the selections consist entirely of songs available to singers at the time the film was made. One of these, “Beautiful Isle of Somewhere” (Pounds, Fearis, 1897), was reissued in 1901, after being sung at the funeral of President McKinley. It is heard at the beginning and again near the end of the film, thus constituting a kind of theme song. Indeed, it seems very like the sort of lullaby the boy of the story might imagine being sung to him by his absent mother.

It should be noted that the practice of using songs in accompaniments to films was, if not widespread, at least recognized as a possibility throughout the silent period. It can be traced back to the century’s first decade, when many small theaters featured vocalists as part of the show. Although most were employed to perform songs illustrated by lantern slides, some began to sing for the films as well, and received approving comments from observers. —Martin Marks

Further Information and Viewing
For the charitable work of the Fresh Air Fund, see www.freshair.org. Another nonprofit organization, the National Child Labor Committee, collaborated with the Edison company in 1912 to make Children Who Labor, which is included in the More Treasures from American Film Archives DVD set. More Edison one-reelers from the 1910s, preserved by the Museum of Modern Art, can now be seen in Kino International’s 2005 DVD set Edison: The Inven­tion of the Movies.