User Reviews

This one-minute short movie, which is a turning point in the career of Edwin Porter, is a one-shot skit in the actualite (former documentary) genre of the time. He actually used time-lapsed photography to develop a circular panorama of the exhibition by modifying the camera to expose a single frame every ten seconds.

Combining the night and the day footages is an experimental innovation of the time, where the fade-in technique helps a fairly smooth transition.

This is an important work (and in general Porter's work) in developing the concept of continuity editing, influenced by the works of the Brighton School members such as George Albert Smith and James Williamson.

During the Pan-American Exhibition of 1901, the Edison company's film crews made a series of short movies of the exhibition that allowed them to try some new techniques, while also preserving the sights of the exhibition for later generations. This is one of the most interesting, for its successful use of some resourceful ideas.

Like several other movies in the series, this one consists of a circular panorama of the exhibition. But it adds an experiment that comes off quite well, in that the footage combines daytime and nighttime views, using a couple of then-experimental camera techniques to make it look continuous. The transition is not completely smooth, but it works well enough.

The nighttime footage in itself would make it worth seeing, with the pretty patterns of lights that still show up clearly on the print. The resourceful technique just adds one more reason to see it.

Edison put together a nice panorama of a major event of the early 1900's. We see it first in daylight and then glowing in artificial light. The scenery is quite breathtaking and epic. I know that many see Thomas Alva as a nasty poser when came to his inventions, but this film is quite marvelous.

This is a panorama film, which was a very common camera effect in the early cinema of single shot-scene actualities: the camera pans over a view, which in this case is at the Pan-American Exposition. Nothing special there. The notable trick here is in the edit, or the stopping of the camera and the resuming of the pan, so that half the film is a pan in the daylight and the latter half continues the panorama into a night scene. As an Edison Company catalogue description put it:

"The emotional and sensational effects were also secured by starting the panoramic view by daylight and revolving the camera until the Electric Tower forms the center of the field of the lens. Our camera was then stopped and the position held until night, when we photographed the coming up of the lights, an event which was deemed by all to be a great emotional climax at the Pan-American Exposition."

This effect is well done in that it is as near to seamless as can be expected, with a fade in between the time-lapse edit and excellent work at continuing the pan at the same steadiness in both shots (although, as I said, panoramas were common, so the filmmakers had plenty of practice). In addition to an early instance of time-lapse photography, although not as impressive in that respect as "Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre" (also made in 1901), "Pan-American Exposition by Night" is one of the first films where lighting is used as an effect. Historian Charles Musser ("The Emergence of Cinema") called it "a technical tour de force".

(Note: One of the filmmakers of this film was Edwin S. Porter. In early cinema, film-making was generally a collaborative process between two filmmakers—sometimes they exchanged camera duties, and, often, neither one could be distinguished as a film's sole director or producer. There seems to be some uncertainty as to whom the other filmmaker here was; James Blair Smith and James H. White have been suggested.)

Pan-American Exposition by Night (1901)

The legendary Edwin S. Porter directed this film for Edison a few years before he would change history with THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY. This film shows the Pan-American Exposition as it is in the day and then the final seconds of the picture gives us a rather amazing view of it by night. I must admit that I really thought this film was excellent and especially the cinematography and the way it brings you in with the slow-moving pan of the scene during the day before giving you that jaw- dropping image at night. The way the spotlight fills the sky was amazing to look at and it was a nice little trick starting the film in the day and then hitting the viewer with the lights.