Works, By Duration: 11-15 minutes (77)

Total: 364 works

The White Caps

The two men renown as pioneers of early US cinema, Edwin S. Porter and D.W. Griffith, shared another claim to fame/infamy: each created a work inspired by Thomas Dixon Jr.'s 1905 The Clansman. Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was adapted from the stage version of the novel. Edwin S. Porter was inspired by the novel to create this film. According to Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company, Edison advertisements held a pro-vigilante view, proclaiming: A lawless and criminal element almost invariably accompanied the advance guard of civilization and to keep this element in check the law abiding citizens were compelled to secretly organize themselves for their own protection...We have portrayed in Motion Pictures, in a most vivid and realistic manner, the method employed by the “White Caps” to rid the community of undesirable citizens.

While the White Caps role here as Morality Police may seem relatively benign compared to the lynch justice in The Birth of a Nation, the book also points out: This film narrative exactly parallels an earlier account of “White Cap” activity in a turn-of-the-century newspaper. In the newspaper account, the tar clogged up the man's pores and he eventually died.

What Drink Did

Yet another moralizing tale of intemperance, this one a 12-minute 1909 rework of the much better 1902 "Les Victimes De L`Alcoolisme" that was less than half the length.

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1912]

Is Jekyll a sincere scientist, who becomes the unfortunate victim of his own research? Or is he a mad scientist who craves the hyped-up stimulation of the drug he's discovered? Or is the drug actually nothing more than a placebo, that provides him a pretext for violently escaping his staid bourgeois existence? Or is he actually a psychopath who imagines himself as a scientist, and imagines that his violent psychotic episodes result from a drugged state? A multitude of possible interpretations is one reason for the enduring popularity of this tale.