1900's Media | The Great Train Robbery

Movie stills

By: Edwin S. Porter

Date: 1903

Source: The Great Train Robbery (1903). Description and screen stills at The Library of Congress: American Memory, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/gtr.html; website home page: http://memory.loc.gov (accessed May 26, 2003).

About the Author: Edwin Stanton Porter (1870–1941) worked odd jobs for much of his youth. After U.S. Navy service, he worked with famed inventor Thomas A. Edison and began directing his own motion pictures. The Great Train Robbery, produced in 1903, placed Porter in the pantheon of American filmmaking and cemented the national popularity of motion pictures. Porter invented and developed critical techniques in filmmaking, but he never produced another movie comparable to The Great Train Robbery and...