Rescued from an Eagle's Nest
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| Original title | Rescued from an Eagle's Nest |
 | |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1908 |
| length | 8 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | J. Searle Dawley |
| production | Edison Studios |
| camera | Edwin S. Porter |
| occupation | |
| |
Rescued from an Eagle's Nest or The Eagle's Nest ( German : rescue from an eagle's nest or the Eagle's Nest ) is an American film drama of the director J. Searle Dawley from the year 1908 . The silent film is a production by Edison Studios and shows the later film director David Wark Griffith in what is probably his first leading role.
action
In the early morning, a woodcutter says goodbye to his wife and little baby in front of a hut in the mountains to go to work. The baby then plays unsupervised in front of the hut while an eagle circled the sky in search of prey. The eagle comes up, seizes the baby and flies away with it to its eyrie. The mother notices the misfortune and takes up a rifle, but does not dare to shoot the eagle, which has already soared. Desperate, she runs to her husband and tells him what has happened.
The father and his wife and other woodcutters set out to chase the eagle through rocky terrain. Finally they discover the lost child deep down and barely reachable on the rock face of a gorge in the eagle's eyrie. The father is lowered with a rope by his colleagues and reaches the eyrie with the intact baby. The eagle attacks him and defends his prey, there is a life and death fight between the father and the king of the air on the rock face . Finally, the father defeats the eagle and plunges it into the abyss. Father and child are pulled up on a rope and united with the mother. The participating helpers celebrate the success and cheerfully wave their hats.
template
The plot of Rescued from an Eagle's Nest is probably an adaptation of the scene The Rescue in the second act of The Ivy Leaf . This Irish-American romantic melodrama was written by the now-forgotten author Con T. Murphy and published in 1884. It was performed in US theaters until about 1904 and was particularly popular among Irish immigrants. Hence, it was performed frequently in those cities where large communities of Irish immigrants existed.
In the template, the young daughter of an Irish farmer is kidnapped by an eagle that circles over the farms in the area looking for prey. The farmer cannot shoot the eagle for fear of hitting his daughter. Therefore he follows him to his eyrie, where a fight starts. He kills the eagle and so saves his daughter. Under the supervision of Edwin S. Porter , J. Searle Dawley made minor changes to the plot by turning the farmer into a lumberjack. Otherwise, the plot was taken over almost unchanged, and even the studio sets were modeled on the illustrations on text and music books and announcement posters from The Ivy Leaf .
Until the theatrical poster was accidentally discovered, a diorama in the wax museum at the Eden Musée in Manhattan was a likely model for Rescued from an Eagle's Nest . This theory was proposed in 1991 by film historian Charles Musser of Yale University . The diorama showed the battle scene in the rock face and it was claimed that it was a re-enactment of an incident in the Adirondack Mountains a few years ago .
The motif of the child stolen by an eagle is not a 19th century creation, but goes back to Greek mythology. Ganymede , son of the Trojan king Tros , was the most beautiful of all mortals and was loved by Zeus . There are different variants of kidnapping Ganymede, the most popular of which is Zeus himself - in the shape of an eagle - making the kidnapper. The motif of the kidnapping of an infant also comes from antiquity; a very well-known recent example is Rembrandt's 1635 painting Ganymede in the Clutches of the Eagle .
Production notes
Edwin S. Porter is often named as a director , alone or with J. Searle Dawley. In fact, Dawley directed Rescued from an Eagle's Nest alone, under the supervision of Porter, who was the cameraman there. Richard Murphy was responsible for the special effects, the stuffed eagle hung on wires, whose wings were also flapped by wire, and the scenery moving behind him.
David W. Griffith had repeatedly tried to sell scripts to film studios but was turned away. Even Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Studios took the end of 1907 a screenplay based on the opera Tosca not, however, offered him a starring role in Rescued from an Eagle's Nest on. The role of father in this film was not Griffith's first film role, just a week earlier he appeared in a supporting role for the Biograph Company in Walter McCutcheon's Falsely Accused! on. But it was very likely his first leading role.
The film was shot on January 2 and 7, 1908 in Fort Lee , New Jersey , then the US film capital . The exterior shots were taken in the Hudson Palisades north of Fort Lee .
Rescued from an Eagle's Nest is a one-reeler on 35mm film that is 515 feet long .
The copyright was registered on January 16, 1908 by the Edison Manufacturing Company , the first cinema showing took place on January 18, 1908.
A copy with no main title or subtitle is in the Museum of Modern Art Department of Film in New York City . It was released on VHS video and in 2002 on DVD.
criticism
The Moving Picture World published a brief review of Rescued from an Eagle's Nest in its February 1, 1908 issue. The film is a weak attempt to turn a beautiful topic into an animated film. The reviewer complained that the great material was spoiled by the poor lighting and the mix of outdoor shots with studio shots against poor backdrops. That the eagle hangs on wires and is moved is all too obvious to the audience. After all, the fight between the father and the eagle is only poorly represented and can hardly be followed. There is better.
Griffith biographer Iris Barry found that the style of Rescued from an Eagle's Nest still corresponds to that of The Great Train Robbery, five years older : in the outdoor scenes, a change from painted studio backdrops to real outdoor shots, simple sequences of action, the actors move mostly like on a stage horizontally, and their actions were recorded in full length. Griffith offers a solid acting performance, but like the other adult actors, he is not much more believable than the eagle.
The American film historian Eileen Bowser describes the acting portrayal of the woodcutter who frees his baby from the clutches of an eagle as too theatrical ("hammy"). David W. Griffith was far from the restraint that the game in front of the camera required. Compared to later films directed by Griffith, Rescued from an Eagle's Nest seems strange and primitive. But compared to other productions of its time, the film is an average melodrama that makes use of the conventions of acting and the chase that was already established before Griffith and shows a real plot against a schematic background. A contemporary film audience will have found the film interesting.
The British film historian David Mayer rates Griffith's performance more critically . Rescued from an Eagle's Nest shows impressively that Griffith had little to contribute to the art of acting. His presentation was not convincing, his movements stiff and his gestures exaggerated in number and expression. Even his later congenial cameraman GW Bitzer noticed in retrospect that Griffith seemed to have three or four arms instead of the usual two when playing. He advised Griffith against directing because he couldn't imagine a bad actor as a director.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Rescued from an Eagle's Nest . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 2, No. 3, January 18, 1908, p. 44, digitized .
- ↑ a b c d e David Mayer: Rescued from an EBay Site . In: Film History 2009, Volume 21, No. 4, pp. 336-345, JSTOR 40405945 .
- ^ David Mayer: Deep Theatrical Roots: Griffith and the Theater . In: Charlie Keil (ed.): A Companion to DW Griffith . Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, New Jersey 2018, ISBN 978-1-118-34125-4 , pp. 175-190.
- ^ Charles Musser: Before the Nickelodeon. Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company . University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1991, ISBN 0-520-06080-6 , p. 411.
- ↑ a b c Rescued from an Eagle's Nest , Silent Era website , May 21, 2012, accessed January 8, 2019.
- ↑ a b Iris Barry : DW Griffith. American Film Master (= Museum of Modern Art Film Library Series . Volume 1). Museum of Modern Art, New York NY 1940 (reprint, ibid 2002, ISBN 0-87070-683-7 ), p. 11.
- ↑ a b c Eileen Bowser: Griffith's film career before The Adventures of Dollie . In: Quarterly Review of Film Studies 1981, Volume 6, No. 1, doi : 10.1080 / 10509208109361075 .
- ↑ Rescued from an Eagle's Nest in the Internet Movie Database , accessed January 8, 2019.
- ↑ Our Visits . In: The Moving Picture World , Volume 2, No. 5, February 1, 1908, p. 71, digitized .