Fire Rescue Scene (1894)

Excellent but underrated film

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

The Edison team of William Heise and W.K.L. Dickson work together to create this short film. It features a firemn, standing on a ladder, rescuing children from a burning building. He hands the children to another fireman, while smoke twirls around them.Various firefighting themes where very popular during the beginnings of film. From staged runs of fire trucks to short scenes of firemen rescuing victims, people from the turn-of-the-century loved watching anything to do with firefighting. Heise would go on to film other firefighting movies, such as "The Morning Alarm".I give it a 2 out of 10 as an important early short film.

The title says it all already what this short film is about. The house is burning, smoke is everywhere and a fireman climbs up a ladder to get a woman out. He carries her, hands her forward to another one waiting downstairs and she is in safety. Is all good now? Not really. Her little child is also still caught in the flames, but rescue is near. The execution is done very convincingly in this one. It's totally clear what happens in these 30 seconds and this can certainly not be said about every movie shot during that very early period of filmmaking. Good effort from silent film dream team Dickson and Heise here and one to watch for admirers of the early days of cinema.

From my studies of early films, it seems filmmakers at the turn of the 20th Century were fascinated with, perhaps more so than with any other subject, fire and firemen at work. That fascination began here, as with so many firsts in film history, in the "Black Maria" at the Edison Laboratories. The Edison Company, American Mutoscope, the Lumière Company and probably just about every other filmmaker took to making actuality films, or documentaries, of firemen putting out fires, or they staged fire scenes such as the one here. Some filmmakers became fire-engine chasers; in one film, "Atlantic City Fire Department" (1897), the camera was accidentally run over by a horse-drawn fire engine. In early, multi-shot fictional story films, firefighting remained a popular subject, such as in James Williamson's "Fire!" (1901) and Edwin S. Porter's "Life of an American Fireman"(1903).The production values within these 50 feet of film from 1894 and within the cramped space of the "Black Maria" shanty are quite remarkable. In under a minute, four firefighters, one of which is on a ladder and another holding a hose spraying water, rescue two children from what spectators would assume to be the second story of a burning building located out of frame. (Of course, there was no two-story structure within the "Black Maria".) Smoke covers most of the background of the scene, except for, the careful viewer will notice, the "R" logo in the lower lefthand corner, which stands for Raff & Gammon, who funded this Edison Company production. This film must have been rather exciting to spectators peeking through the peepholes of the Kinetoscopes; in a way, "Fire Rescue Scene" was the 19th Century equivalent of the big action flick, complete with the special effect of smoke.

Footage of fire-fighters in action quickly became one of the popular genres of 1890s motion pictures, and this very short feature is one of the very earliest examples. Unlike most of the later movies of similar subjects, it was filmed in the studio rather than outdoors. Yet it is still successful for its time in conveying the inherent sense of danger and urgency that made the fire-fighting genre popular to begin with.The footage of "Fire Rescue Scene" consists of a staged enactment of a typical rescue operation, most likely using real professional fire-fighters, in which one of the fire-fighters uses a ladder to reach residents trapped in a burning building. By using children as the endangered residents, it adds extra tension and suspense. The then-standard 50 foot length of film limits how much can happen, but it fills almost the entire running time with action.It must have been both difficult and hazardous to stage such a scene inside Edison's 'Black Maria' studio, but they were able to pull it off. The thick smoke is effective, and only the lack of any background detail limits the realism.It was not long before film-makers realized that outdoor photography worked better for features like this, and soon many movies would be made of live fire-fighting scenes as well as staged enactments, with almost all of them being filmed outside of a studio. This pioneering effort, though, is quite creditable for its time.