Early films often served, according to film historian Charles Musser, as "living newspapers." Filmmakers, film exhibitors, and early film audiences highly prized filmed records of celebrities or current events. Film companies sent cameramen around the world, providing a priceless record of the people and events that shaped the first two decades of film. However, at this same time standards of visual authenticity were still being formed. Newspapers at the turn of the century were only beginning to be able to print photographs, and the practice of illustrating events through drawings and sketches was still current. Likewise, early film companies frequently produced films of current events using actors and re-staging. Did audiences of the time see these as fakes or simply as useful vivid re-enactments?

Most likely their judgment depended on how the films were exhibited. Many re-enactments were announced to their audiences as such, but some exhibitors undoubtedly claimed that films showed "the real thing." So we must ask whether an early film image is a representation of an event or a re-enactment. For instance, Edwin S. Porter produced a film entitled The Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison for the Edison company in 1901. Leon Czolgosz, a mentally disturbed anarchist, had assassinated President McKinley at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo in 1901. Czolgosz was executed with the fairly new invention of the electric chair in the prison of Auburn, New York. Porter's film begins with a panorama of the actual prison seen from outside, followed by a scene staged in the Edison studio of the execution, which carefully reproduced the actual electric chair and descriptions of the electrocution process. While the film is certainly an important historical document, revealing popular fascination with both the fact and the manner of Czolgosz's execution, it cannot be taken as a record of the actual execution.

Researchers can determine which films are inauthentic by using documents that surround the films. The Edison bulletin for the Czolgosz film makes clear what is authentic (the view of the prison) and what is inauthentic (the reenactment of the execution). In addition, close examination of films themselves often reveals the theatrical nature of sets (painted backdrops and flats), the compression of events, and clear overall lighting that indicates a film studio rather than an actual location. Other elements, such as behavior and are "staginess," are more subjective judgments but also can alert a viewer that a purportedly documentary scene was arranged for the camera.

The Philippine-American War (1899-1902) was one of the first U.S. wars to take place in the era of moving pictures. View the three film clips below and decide which are reenactments and which filmed actual events. After you are done, click Commentary for more information on authenticity and reenactments in early films.

Description of this clip A title card reads “Capture of Trenches at Candaba, ©June 5, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.” A line of soldiers in light shirts and broad-brimmed hats fires rifles from behind an earthwork in a wooded area as gun smoke drifts across the frame. Soldiers carrying an American flag then come down the slope toward the trench, where men in white clothing lie along its edge firing back, and the flag-bearers stand over the trench at the end.		Capture of Trenches at Candaba Reenactment Actual Events
Description of this clip A title card reads “Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan, ©June 5, 1899, Thomas A. Edison.” A line of men in white clothing stands behind thick brush at the edge of a wood as a burst of smoke rises. Soldiers in dark shirts and campaign hats, one carrying an American flag, then push forward through the brush and smoke away from the camera, some firing as they go; at one point the flag dips into the undergrowth before the troops move on into the trees.		Advance of Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan Reenactment Actual Events
Description of this clip A title card reads “25th Infantry, ©May 21, 1902, American Mutoscope & Biograph Co.” From a fixed camera beside a dusty dirt road lined with trees and thatched-roof buildings, a group of mounted officers rides toward and past the camera. A long column of infantry in campaign hats, rifles on their shoulders, follows and marches past in a cloud of dust for the rest of the clip.		25th Infantry Reenactment Actual Events

Commentary