Dec 28 2007
A Winter Straw Ride (1906)
As a collector of material related to photography and film I have gathered a lot of very early movies on my hard drives. I love this material, but I do often find it tiring to watch very long silent movies, because I am used to today’s editing techniques. Somehow the rhythm of the scenes, especially in early 1900s movies is a bit too slow for me.
Just yesterday, while mining Usenet for old material, I stumbled upon an old short entitled A Winter Straw Ride, made in 1906 and I was surprised to see scenes following up on each other in a rhythm that is almost modern. Maybe one could even describe it as ‘action packed’. The photography is brilliant too. It is hard to work in the snow, using black & white material. Either the whites start to lose detail, or the darker shapes lose most of their grays.
I could not find any information on the director or the camera crew, just that the film was produced by the Edison company.