Fire!

A policeman spots a fire in a home He tries the windows, but they are locked. He runs to the nearest fire station. Will they save the residents?

It's a very impressive movie for 1901, shot in five scenes. Each of the sequences begins with a life-threatening situation: can the policeman get into the house and help the occupants? Can the fire brigade get the equipment on the street? Can they get to the house in time? .... and so forth. The camera placement is simple and the editing is, by modern standards, simple. Time is linear within the movie; cross-cutting has not yet shown up. Even so, it plays very well, even today.

James Williamson, who directed and produced and, presumably edited this movie, was born in 1855 and came into film-making not through photography, but because he ran a chemist shop -- where he presumably developed film -- and expanded into selling photographic equipment, in Hove, quite near George A. Smith's St Ann's Well Pleasure Garden. Besides shooting and directing his own films, he patented a couple of devices useful for film production, founded a company to produce photographic equipment that was active at least until the Second World War, and lived until 1933.

I watched this film on a DVD that was rammed with short films from the period. I didn't watch all of them as the main problem with these type of things that their value is more in their historical novelty value rather than entertainment. So to watch them you do need to be put in the correct context so that you can keep this in mind and not watch it with modern eyes. With the Primitives & Pioneers DVD collection though you get nothing to help you out, literally the films are played one after the other (the main menu option is "play all") for several hours. With this it is hard to understand their relevance and as an educational tool it falls down as it leaves the viewer to fend for themselves, which I'm sure is fine for some viewers but certainly not the majority. What it means is that the DVD saves you searching the web for the films individually by putting them all in one place – but that's about it.

This film stands as one of the first of the recent films that are partly drama but also quite documentary like in their delivery. It shows the reporting of a fire, the response, the fighting and the rescue of those in the house. On one level it is interesting to see this as it happened 100 years ago but on another level it is a well put together film that has some good action, including ladder climbing and an one-storey jump to safety. It is a bit limited by being on just one side of a house but still, it is interesting and technically well put together.

If you've ever heard (or seen) Edwin S. Porter's "The Life of an American Fireman" from 1903 then you should know that this earlier drama from Williamson clearly inspired Porter's film. Not only does it tell a story that would've excited audiences, it also takes 5 minutes to do so which is, undeniably, long for its time. Because of this, I'm giving it a 7.

The story is very simple: the typical rescue of a family from a burning building premise. The film uses 5 scenes to tell it: the first scene is when the cop discovers the burning building, the second the firemen leave to go to the rescue, the third a shot of the racing firemen, the fourth scene is the rescue of the man, and the continuation of the events continue in the last scene, a shot of the outside of the house.

Also, note that firemen rescue scenes were very popular in cinema's first years. In 1896 the Lumiere brothers filmed a street scene of firemen racing to the rescue (A Fire Run), and even before that was an early Edison short depicting a rescue scene ("Fire Rescue Scene"). Filmmakers really must've found firemen to be an exciting subject for early dramas. While the story really isn't involved enough, for 1901 it was exceptional and the film is one that would actually be interesting to see today.

This exciting rescue drama is a film milestone, the first to use an edited series of interlocking scenes to create a narrative. One would have been blase about this in 1903, never mind a century later; look at the early films consecutively, however, noticing how they develop basic film grammar, and the effect is thrilling, cutting from the fireman and victim moving from inside the house to outside on the ladder, a telling glimpse of cinema's power and immediacy.

The plot's simple enough - a house goes on fire and the firemen come to quench it and rescue the inhabitants. The fascination lies in the details. The way the fire's smoke swirls and obscures the view, a subversive element that undermines cinema's clarity, it's claim to record things - the firemen are not just extinguishing a fire, or restoring order, the primacy of property and family, but retrieving cinema's purpose, which here betrays interesting tensions.

The preparations of the firemen, laborious because the engine is still horse-drawn, and the animals are a little stroppy - the proud tumescence of a very phallic wheeled ladder is startling, suggesting that hazards to the social order can only be solved by the Men that run it. The gallop through gorgeous turn of the 20th century Brighton streets, eerily old (to us) and empty, the horses speeding towards the camera before veering to avoid it. The fire itself - the not very patriarchal hysteria of the father who just cries like a big girl without doing anything practical, particularly surprising when we discover he has a wife and child.

After he is rescued he waits in agoinising panic for someone: when his child is brought out and restored to him, the feminisation or maternalisation (sic?) of the father is unusual for the period. We assume his wife is dead, as he wanders off the screen, removing his child from the bourgeois home-haven that suddenly became so treacherous. When we see the wife rescued to her family's general indifference, it's shocking.

the breach in the film's form from the documentary-like preparations and rescue, and the flagrant artifice of the interior settings and the wild overacting results in an interesting tension that filmmakers like Murnau, Welles and Godard would later explore, and which echoes the film's ideological tensions, the vulnerability of the bourgeois myth.

Rounding off this brilliant film is the closing scene, a long shot of the smoking house with the firemen below it. There appears to be a huge peeling of the wall's paint, suggesting the house's age, which is visually startling, a visual violence matching the destructive fire. We discover that this is actually water from the hose - so that the saviours within the narrative create a breach in the film's form.

The activities of fireman and their putting out fires was a common subject in early actuality films and early staged, or fiction, films, dating back to "Fire Rescue Scene" (1894) being filmed in the "Black Maria". "Fire!" is a five-shot fiction film. It shows the rescuing of persons from a burning building, from the initial discovery of the fire by a policeman, who then alerts the fire station (by running there), to the putting out of the fire and rescue of the persons in the burning home by the firemen.

This was probably a rather exciting action film for its time. The onrush shot of the horse-drawn fire carriages, however, is rather unexciting by the camera being placed in front of the action from a far distance--allowing the action to (slowly) come to the camera. But, this was 1901--years before D.W. Griffith made the rescue sequence exciting through editing and varied camera placements. "Fire!" also contains a jump cut (during the second scene). However, the action crosses scenes in a fluid manner and in the appropriate direction, respecting the axis of action, unlike in "Stop Thief!", another film by Williamson from 1901. For example, the policeman in the first shot exits the frame through the left side and enters the second shot from the right. For 1901, the continuity between an interior shot and the exterior shots are fluid, too. One thing I think was noticeably funny, however, is that they were able to use a ladder to rescue one person, but for the other, they take away the ladder and bring in a large cloth for him to jump into. Seems quite unnecessary and a waste of energy; although I'm sure Williamson did it to create some more novel action.

Edwin S. Porter elaborated on this genre in making "Life of an American Fireman" (1903), which contains nine shots.

(Note: According to at least one source, a scene or scenes in this film may have been originally tinted red.)