Fire!

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.

For having been made over a century ago, this short movie creates a good sense of action and suspense with its story of firemen coming to the rescue of a family in a burning house. It uses almost every technique then available, and there is a pretty good amount of detail in many of the shots.

While the basic idea was fairly simple, the film-makers were resourceful in including shots of several aspects of the situation. It's worth paying attention to the details, both in the reactions of the persons in the house, and in the settings. Not least among the interesting aspects of this movie is the chance to have a detailed look at the fire-fighting equipment of the era.

A lot of action is packed into a few minutes, and while the way that it is pieced together may be just a bit rough in places, the editing is very commendable for a time when there was little experience to go by. All in all, this is among the better-made narratives of its time.

For an early film, this one is actually pretty good. In this silent movie, the crew re-creates a fire and shows the firemen doing their job--starting with leaving the firehouse all the way through rescuing all the victims. It's sort of like a documentary of their job that is done by re-staging what looks an awful lot like a real fire. Unlike some similar films, this one looks authentic enough that it both entertains and gives us insight into the profession in 1901. I particularly liked seeing the horse-drawn fire wagon as well as the people jumping out the window into the trampoline-like device the firemen use. Pretty good stuff and a pretty good historical record to boot!

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.)

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.