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Second sight
Peering back through the mists of time with the BPL’s ‘First Films of Boston’
BY PETER KEOUGH

The triumph of the CGI effects in The Lord of the Rings trilogy notwithstanding, one of the dreams of some of the first filmmakers was to record and preserve reality. To an extent they succeeded. And this week, some primitive images made of Boston as early as 1898 return, ghostlike, to the screen of the Boston Public Library in its extraordinary program "Boston at the Bijou: First Films of Boston." It’s kind of a collection of our city’s earliest home movies, a reincarnation of everyday life from a century or more ago.

"Because they are the first films, I thought it would be a great way to look into history," says Stephen Kharfen of the library’s Reader and Information Services, who organized the show. "It’s the earliest means we have to see the city in motion, and also, since these are the films people themselves watched at the time, to see how people saw themselves."

Kharfen had worked previously at the Library of Congress in the Motion Picture Division. Among the LOC holdings are numerous paper copies of short films, many of Boston subjects, made by such film pioneers as Thomas Edison. Unlike the actual photographic material, which long ago disintegrated, the paper copies survive. Kharfen enlisted the preservation group Northeast Historic Film of Maine to process the material and put together the program.

Although some may come to the show jaded from the Orc armies in Rings, there is wonder to be had here as well. "G.A.R. Parade, Boston" (made sometime in the first decade of the 20th century) is a three-minute slice summoning up 140 years of history. Graybearded veterans of the Civil War march down a Boston street as trolleys pass by indifferently and schoolboys gawk. And in the end, the parade vanishes, like the war and the old soldiers’ heroism, swallowed up by the "present day" of pedestrians and horsed and horseless carriages.

Another eerie encounter occurs with "The Boston Horseless Fire Department" (1899), a 165-second snippet of early fire equipment hurtling out of a station. At least, one assumes that’s what’s happening — the image is so blurred that they look like phantoms storming out of a pointillist past. "At first it was thought that the deterioration was from aging," Kharfen says. "In fact, that’s the original condition. The film was badly developed and poorly focused when shot." This is all the more remarkable when you consider the filmmaker: Edwin S. Porter, who a few years later, in 1903, would make "The Great Train Robbery."

Porter isn’t the only famous name. G.W. "Billy" Bitzer, a native of Roxbury who would go on to become D.W. Griffith’s cinematographer in Birth of a Nation, is represented by "Seeing Boston" (1906), a four-and-a-half-minute tour of downtown Boston and the Back Bay via electric trolley. (Bitzer may have been picking up experience here for some of the great tracking shots in the battle scenes of Birth of a Nation.)

For the native Bostonian, seeing one’s neighborhoods as they were 100 years ago is both uncanny and illuminating. Jordan Marsh and the Boston Public Library appear unchanged amid the strange surroundings and the unlikely figures dressed in derbies and long dresses like people in a Magritte painting. And if you’d like to see what these figures look like in less formal attire, there’s the high-kicking barelegged dancer in the minute-long 1898 item "Ella Lola à la Trilby."

"Seeing familiar things and unfamiliar things in familiar surroundings" is how Kharfen sums up the appeal the films have for him. "Seeing ourselves reflected in the people who lived here long ago." Unlike today’s films, which synthesize the marvelous, these films indeed travel through time.

"Boston at the Bijou: First Films of Boston" screens for free next Thursday, February 12, at 6:30 p.m. at the Boston Public Library, 700 Boylston Street in Copley Square; call (617) 536-5400.


Issue Date: February 6 - 12, 2004
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