Though by no means the first with a Western setting, this film was a breakthrough for the genre and, with a plot involving black-clad trigger happy bandits holding up a train then receiving rough justice at the hands of a posse following a horseback chase, helped established several elements of its iconography. Like so much else that was later to seem newly minted for the cinema, these images had precedents in other media, including popular fiction, graphic art and touring stage spectacles known as Wild West Shows which presented a romanticised, gun-totin' version of the American West in the late Victorian period. But location filming provided the opportunity to present these elements in a new setting of realistic visual grandeur and scale – even if, as here, New Jersey stood in for the West.
Like various other longer narrative films in these early days, The Great Train Robbery tells its story largely by stringing together a succession of tableaux, with studio and location scenes staged alike in long shot. At around 12 minutes, with 14 shots, it builds in length, ambition and achievement on Edison director Edwin S Porter's Life of an American Fireman, released a few months earlier, though in some respects is less visually imaginative. A lengthy scene where the villains force passengers off the train and rob them shows the limitations of the technique: the shot is perfectly set up for the dramatic death of a would-be escapee who runs towards the camera before being killed, and later after the bandits depart and the crowd swarms round the corpse, but otherwise it's difficult to see what's going on.
Elsewhere Porter makes good use of the opportunities for movement and energy. He shoots from the back of a moving locomotive across the top of the cab to the track ahead as the villains stalk towards the crew. And a contemporary director would likely choose a similar camera position for the shot where the mounted bandits are chased through the woods by the posse, exchanging gunfire as they go. Notably, there are two early examples of camera movement, put to very good use when the villains leave the hijacked loco. The camera pans and tilts with the characters, setting up the expectation that there's something of interest just off frame, which is then revealed as a group of waiting horses on which they make their final escape.
But the film is best known for a shot completely tangential to the narrative, in which actor Justus D Barnes, as the leader of the gang, expressionlessly points his revolver at the camera and fires six shots at point blank range. The shot is usually placed at the end of the film, after the character has been killed on screen, but Porter suggested it could also be re-edited as the opening shot if distributors preferred. It's a striking image of violence directed at the audience, but there are now no reports of screaming and ducking as with the Lumières' train.
Far from being 'realistic', the shot, and the film as a whole, exemplify the growing tendency of cinema to exploit the vicarious thrill of danger and violence in a contained, safe space. The image is cinema's second enduring icon after Méliès' moon, and has been much parodied and homaged, most notably in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Joe Pesci's psychotic gangster standing in for Barnes' outlaw. But in the later film it's actually the penultimate shot. It's followed by a view of the narrator, Ray Liotta's police informer, smiling smugly at the camera before retreating into the comfortable suburban home he occupies under his new identity, safe in the knowledge that the bad guys and their guns are now illusions, locked in their cel(l) of film.
Like various other longer narrative films in these early days, The Great Train Robbery tells its story largely by stringing together a succession of tableaux, with studio and location scenes staged alike in long shot. At around 12 minutes, with 14 shots, it builds in length, ambition and achievement on Edison director Edwin S Porter's Life of an American Fireman, released a few months earlier, though in some respects is less visually imaginative. A lengthy scene where the villains force passengers off the train and rob them shows the limitations of the technique: the shot is perfectly set up for the dramatic death of a would-be escapee who runs towards the camera before being killed, and later after the bandits depart and the crowd swarms round the corpse, but otherwise it's difficult to see what's going on.
Elsewhere Porter makes good use of the opportunities for movement and energy. He shoots from the back of a moving locomotive across the top of the cab to the track ahead as the villains stalk towards the crew. And a contemporary director would likely choose a similar camera position for the shot where the mounted bandits are chased through the woods by the posse, exchanging gunfire as they go. Notably, there are two early examples of camera movement, put to very good use when the villains leave the hijacked loco. The camera pans and tilts with the characters, setting up the expectation that there's something of interest just off frame, which is then revealed as a group of waiting horses on which they make their final escape.
But the film is best known for a shot completely tangential to the narrative, in which actor Justus D Barnes, as the leader of the gang, expressionlessly points his revolver at the camera and fires six shots at point blank range. The shot is usually placed at the end of the film, after the character has been killed on screen, but Porter suggested it could also be re-edited as the opening shot if distributors preferred. It's a striking image of violence directed at the audience, but there are now no reports of screaming and ducking as with the Lumières' train.
Far from being 'realistic', the shot, and the film as a whole, exemplify the growing tendency of cinema to exploit the vicarious thrill of danger and violence in a contained, safe space. The image is cinema's second enduring icon after Méliès' moon, and has been much parodied and homaged, most notably in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas, with Joe Pesci's psychotic gangster standing in for Barnes' outlaw. But in the later film it's actually the penultimate shot. It's followed by a view of the narrator, Ray Liotta's police informer, smiling smugly at the camera before retreating into the comfortable suburban home he occupies under his new identity, safe in the knowledge that the bad guys and their guns are now illusions, locked in their cel(l) of film.