Firefighting films was probably one of the most popular early film genres of the silent era. This is understandable; audiences were normally treated, when this film was made, to short snippets of everyday life: babies being fed, dancers performing, etc. This film is far, far from being the first of these firefighting films (years before, in 1896, Edison made many different films that were static shots of firemen racing to the rescue, and several fire rescue scenes) but this is one of the very first films to actually make a story out of it. Unlike Edison's previous static scenes of fire rescues, this film has multiple shots; nine in all, and manages to tell an exciting story at the same time that can be easily followed.While Edwin S. Porter made some ground-breaking steps in the making of this film, it cannot be denied that the film is a remake actually of James Williamson's "Fire!" drama from 1901. Two years earlier, that film was much simpler: instead of nine shots there are four; the film is shorter with a running time of five minutes instead of seven; the pace itself is faster. Porter's remake is much more elaborate and expanded on Williamson's ideas. The film begins with a postman (I think it's a postman) dreaming about the fire starting through the use of a matte shot. He sounds the alarm, and the firemen come and save the mother and child. It's a pretty simple story but the way it's told is more important. Yes, it is sometimes a drag; I find watching it with music makes it much more enjoyable. While there isn't much to it, it was one of the most well-known movies of its era, and thus is a must-see for silent film buffs.

Edwin S. Porter and his colleagues, James H. White and George S. Fleming, expand their ambitions. While Life of an American Fireman does not compare with the contemporary works of Ferdinand Zecca or George Melie, it shows the workman-like techniques of the Edison company.The film is a straight-forward tell of a fire company responding to a fire. Much of the film is the driving of the fire engines, focusing on the movement and action of the race to the fire. When the firemen get to the house on fire, a fireman, played by co-filmmaker James H. White, races up the ladder, into the room. He rescues a woman and her daughter, then fights the blaze. Interestingly, the same action is then shown again, but from the perspective from outside of the house. This is a less elegant and dramatic way of presenting the action than later directors would employ. As later films by Griffith and Porter himself would prove, cross-cutting between the two locations builds drama and tension.Overall it represents a step foreword for the Edison filmmakers, yet was still far behind the inventiveness and wizardry of the contemporary European filmmakers.

"Life of an American Fireman" is a landmark early story film, which features techniques and style that its director Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Company would use later in 1903 for the more famous "The Great Train Robbery". As with that film, "Life of an American Fireman" employed an action plot (rescue from fire instead of train robbers) and covers a large space—from the fire department to the burning building—requiring a series of shots and an ordering of spatial and temporal relations as the action progressed and allowing for dramatic excitement within its nine scenes and 425 feet of film.Until recently, "Life of an American Fireman" was an especially misunderstood early film. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired a print that consisted of fifteen shots, with crosscutting between the film's original final two scenes of the rescue of the mother and child from the fire. Despite it contradicting the Edison Company's catalogue description and early cinema film-making strategies adopted elsewhere by Porter and the Edison Company, the print led to erroneous histories and appreciation of the film. It's since been established that the Library of Congress paper print of nine shots and no crosscutting is an authentic representation of the film that the Edison Company produced and distributed, and that the MoMA print had been reedited in more modern times to conform to new editorial sensibilities. While the film was innovative for its part in the development of the story film, especially in America, it was just as much a product situated in its time as any other, with no such anachronistic crosscutting. (Although there are a few early examples of brief and undeveloped crosscuts, it didn't become a common editing practice until a few years later, perhaps, most remarkably employed by D.W. Griffith at Biograph.)The film's final scene is a temporal replay, or overlap, of the previous scene; that is, we first see the rescue in its entirety from the interior view of the building and then see it again in its entirety but from the exterior view. (By the way, there's a continuity error when the mother opens the window in the final scene after it hadn't been opened until the fireman opened it in the previous scene.) As Charles Musser ("Before the Nickelodeon") has also pointed out, slighter overlaps appear from shots two to three (an alarm is pulled in shot two, but shot three begins with the firemen asleep), between shots three and four (the firemen are seen twice sliding down the pole), and from shots four to five (the horse-drawn fire engines race off at the end of shot four and then begin their charge again in shot five after the gates are opened). Georges Méliès employed similar overlapping in "A Trip to the Moon" (Le Voyage dans la lune) (1902) when the rocket lands on the moon. Porter had used temporal replays in his earlier film "How They Do Things on the Bowery" (1902) and continued to do so in "The Great Train Robbery" and subsequent productions.Another oddity in this film from a modern perspective, but which was common practice in early cinema, was the tendency to show an action from one camera angle from its beginning to its end, from inaction to until the action is completed or to begin shots about when or even before figures enter a frame and remaining on the scene until all or nearly all of them leave the frame. This has been called an "operational aesthetic"; that is, early filmmakers were more concerned with staging and capturing the process of operations in the action, as opposed to more cutting to action in progress to create excitement by pacing. The panning in shot seven is an interesting exception, as the camera comes to action at the site of the burning building already in progress.Two other interesting scenes in this film are the close-up insert shot of the fire alarm and the opening scene-within-a-scene showing the fireman's dream. The dream may be his longing for his wife and child, or it may be a premonition of the peril of the mother and child from the burning building to come, or it may be both. The double-exposure photography and its use for scenes-within-scenes had been around for a while by 1903. An early example of its use is George Albert Smith's "Santa Claus" (1898). Méliès was also quite fond of it, and Porter had previously created such dreams in "Jack and the Beanstalk" (1902).The fire rescue genre of early cinema dates back to the Edison Company's "Fire Rescue Scene" (1894), a single shot-scene staged in the cramped "Black Maria" studio. In numerous actualities, or documentary films, cameramen took to chasing firefighters and recording their actions in containing fires. An earlier story film to use the fire rescue plot was the British film "Fire!" (1901) made by James Williamson, which contained five scenes in 280 feet of film. Its scenes of horse-drawn fire engines racing and the rescue of persons from a burning home are strikingly similar to those in "Life of an American Fireman". Musser suggests other sources of inspiration for Porter may have been Selig's 450-feet "Life of a Fireman" and Lubin's 250-feet "Going to the Fire and Rescue" (both 1901). Apparently, Lubin, in turn, made an imitation of Porter's film in 1904 with the same title.

THE LIFE OF AN AMERICAN FIREMAN is one of the earliest narrative films. It was made in 1903 by Edwin S. Porter. The extremely short film tells of the life of an American fireman. In the finale, he races to save a girl from a burning building.Arthur White stars as the fireman. The film is very fascinating, as it gives a look at a bygone era. It is fascinating to see horse-drawn fire trucks. And this was just at the beginning of the 20th Century!