The Eclipse

The Academy celebrates the year 1907 and its developmental contributions to motion pictures with a program of selected films in “A Century Ago: The Films of 1907” at the Linwood Dunn Theater.

After years as a technological novelty presented as added attractions in vaudeville lineups, at fairs and in contained machines called kinetoscopes, motion pictures finally found a home of their own when local storefront nickelodeons expanded their operations dramatically beginning in 1905. This proliferation continued in 1907, challenging established film producers to deliver more films with higher production values; doors opened to new entrepreneurs whose exhibition and distribution interests soon expanded into production as well. Filmmakers were shooting films both in studios and on location while continuing to push the boundaries of narrative storytelling.

The Kalem and Essanay companies opened their doors in 1907, contributing to continued growth in production activity beyond the East Coast, and an actor named David Wark Griffith began working for Biograph in December of that year. Several films from Lubin and European companies instigated the first organized national call for film censorship.

“A Century Ago: The Films of 1907” presents a partial survey of turn-of-the-20th-century international filmmaking with trick films, actualities, primitive dramas and gag films, all produced during this year of creative expansion. It will be highlighted by the pixilation sensation The Haunted Hotel, by J. Stuart Blackton of Vitagraph; the first film version of Ben-Hur, from the Kalem Company, which led to a precedent-setting copyright infringement case; a hand-tinted print of The Red Spectre, from the Pathé Studios in France; actuality footage of the Shriners’ Conclave at Los Angeles, photographed by Miles Bros. of San Francisco, whose headquarters had been lost in the earthquake of the previous year; and An Awful Skate; or, the Hobo on Rollers, the first film from Essanay. The program also features such popular box office hits as The Love Microbe from Biograph, Liquid Electricity from Vitagraph, An Interrupted Outing from Lubin, The Dancing Pig from Pathé, The Eclipse from Méliès’s Star Films, The Little Girl Who Did Not Believe in Santa Claus from Edison, and fragments of The Bandit King and The Girl from Montana, both shot in the wilds of Colorado by the Selig company. Most prints are in 35mm and are drawn from the collections of the Academy Film Archive, the Library of Congress, George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive.