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Coney Island Silent Film
By Trevor Valescu | February 26, 2017
The first major big-audience outlet for Thomas Edison’s films was at Coney Island, & Edison Manufacturing Co or American Mutoscope reciprocated by making a number of short-short films set there, for use in kinetoscopes. Some anonymous short-shorts include The Aerial Slide at Coney Island (1897) putting bathing beauties on the popular amusement ride; ‘King’ & ‘Queen’ the Great High Diving Horses; or, its full title, (1899) with A horse-diving act, forty feet down into the Shoot the Chutes lagoon; Around the Flip Flap Railroad (1902) which was the first rollercoaster to include a loop-de-loop.
Shooting the Chutes at Luna Park (1903) at two minutes’ length is one of a handful of such films that focus on individual rides at Coney Island. This one features “The Chutes” which consisted of a giant sliding board for flat-bottomed boats.
Viewed from the lagoon, we see boats launched from the top of the slide, racing downward, & shooting across the water. Boats would eventually be hooked to a lift & ratcheted to the top of the slide for another go. What a great ride, looks like a wonderful way to get killed too. (As an aside, Captain Paul Boyton who designed the Chutes also built one at the World’s Columbia Exhibition in Chicago in 1893, & sold the design to be built again at Fulton Street Park built along the same plan, opened in 1895.)
Orphans in the SurfOrphans in the Surf aka Children in the Surf (1903) at just under a minute & a half shows tiny toddlers in a straight line, fully clothed or in their diapers, jumping up & down & splashing in the Coney Island surf, cute as the dickens. A few kids wade out further. They then play ring around the rosies at the tame surf’s edge, then it’s back to wading.
Orphans is reported to have been filmed by A. C. Abadie, with assistance from G. W. Bitzer. Abadie also did the Coney Island film Baby Class at Lunch (1903). These two films really do portray orphans, so there’s an underlying sadness even to the sweetness of these films of children. Baby Class at Lunch showing a couple dozen toddlers having a meal on a staircase isn’t obviously about Coney Island but was probably shot the same day as Orphans in the Surf.
Tragedies caught on film during that first wave of cinema were the precursors to newsreels. A Total Accident (1903) shows bicycle trick rider William Gordon wiping out while circling the loop; & Great Fire Ruins Coney Island (1903) shows the Bowery section of the park after a fire swept through.
Quite a few more anonymous films in the half-minute to three-minute range could be cited from just before & just after 1900, keeping the kinetoscopes full of new product.
The longest Coney Island film from Edison’s company was a veritable epic at just over twelve minutes, Rube & Mandy at Coney Island (1903) directed by one of the company’s best directors, Edwin S. Porter.
With special focus on a young couple, we’re shown many of the things one can do at Coney Island, including riding stuffed horses around the steeplechase, riding on yoked cows, tightrope walking for clumsy amateurs (with extra ropes to cling to by hand or armpits), & sliding down a tube called “The Down & Out” onto a pile of adults & a few kids, into a different area of the park.
After a long panoramic view of the park, we rejoin Rube & Mandy riding a camel (a criminally short ride), riding little boats, watching a cutesy dog-show plus monkey.
There Rube is misbehaving like a drunk though he has not been filmed drinking. Lastly while in Luna Park they go “shooting the chutes.”
In “the Bowery” section of the park, Mandy & Rube are accosted by a barker, but he never succeeds at getting them to go inside his attraction.
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