While it is too easy to see Griffith as the sole creative force in early American cinema, even a cursory glance at the other American productions reveals his unique ambition and complexity. Vitagraph of course was his major rival in sophistication and in 1909 produced a number of literary adaptations, including several Shakespeare films such as Midsummer’s Night Dream included here. These films show imaginative staging and costuming, but never quite achieve the new conception of staging Griffith was introducing to film. However, Vitagraph’s more modest narratives such as The Tell Tale Blotter or The Forgotten Watch show a clarity of storytelling often based around a particular object. Selig in 1909 began producing westerns, a genre, which truly found international popularity this year. The Cowboy Millionaire is a comedy that revolves around the contrast between Eastern and Western mores. The film opens with a seemingly nonfictional sequence showing cowboys breaking-in wild horses and bulls, and it ends in a dream where the lost Frontier life is evoked. Mr. Flip is a slap stick comedy from Essanay, where Ben Turpin was begining his career and where Chaplin would later make his first films. The narrative follows the misadventures of a flirt as his unappreciated attentions result in pain and embarrassment from the women workers he accosts (including a close-up of a needle in a chair which ends up in Mr. Flip). Hiawatha represents the first major film of the independent company challenging the monopoly of the MPPC, Carl Laemmle’s Imp, the ancestor of Universal. While a somewhat pedestrian film, it nonetheless shows Laemmle’s keen sense of the market, combining a literary adaptation (from Longfellow’s famous poem known to every American schoolchild) and a western or “Indian” film. Filmed in exteriors, it shows mastery of continuity of action, if little poetic composition.

Tom Gunning