The Great Train Robbery (1903)

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Hello and welcome as we continue Silent September, today's film is the 1903 classic "The Great Train Robbery".

Now it's well known that Edison invented film, however they didn't really start doing narrative films until the turn of the 20th century. Most of their early films were shorts showing people doing things like kissing, sneezing, boxing and dancing. However by 1900 they had begun making more narrative films such as Jack and the Beanstalk (1902).

What truly made The Great Train Robbery stand out was it's use of composite editing. Films of that era were usually filmed and edited in a linear fashion, so at the time it was truly revolutionary to see a film that jumped between two different stories happening at the same time.