The Georgetown Loop (Colorado)

The Georgetown Loop in Colorado was apparently a favored site for some of cinema's early pioneers, and you can see why - the scenery is both interesting and attractive. This 1903 feature does a good job both in picking up a lot of sights worth seeing, and in conveying the motion of the train that is carrying the camera.

The main point of the feature is just the scenery, but some of the vistas that come into view could hardly have been better chosen if they had been carefully set up as still photos. There are also a couple of amusing shots when the train rounds a bend, and some of the cars come into the camera's field of view. While it's certainly nothing spectacular, it's a pleasant feature, and a worthwhile look at some sights from over 100 years ago.

This film was in fact shot in 1901 a part of a whole series of films taken on the Union Pacific Railroad in July of that year by Billy Bitzer. Just a couple of years after William Henry Jackson's famous 1899 photograph of the loop ("The Far-Famed Georgetown Loop").

The train is, I assume, the Overland Limited, which featurs by name in several of the other films. The rote was a particularly dramatic one and it would be good to also have the films taken as it traversed "The Fish Cut" in Wyoming, crossed the Dale Creek Fill and went through the Sherman Hill tunnel through the Rockies.

Mutoscope was more careless about copyrighting its material than its rival Edison and 1903 is in fact the copyright date. It does also appear correctly in IMDb under the 1901 date.

The concept of filming scenic views from a train (known as "Phantom Rides") was a very well-practiced--not to mention very popular--idea, seen in early cinema mostly throughout the late 1890s and into the early 1900s. The genre originated with what I believe to be the Lumière Brothers' "Panorama de l'arrivée d'un train gare de Perrache pris du train" (1896) which uses a sideways angle to capture the scenery in a sideways motion as opposed to the standard forward motion from the front of the train. This was followed a year later by the second example I've seen, Alexandre Promio's "Leaving Jerusalem by Railway" (1897). In that film, the movement of the train was in a backwards direction capturing the scenery in back of the train rather than the scenery ahead--still preliminary to what became more common, but nonetheless part of the genre. Finally, the idea was shaped into adapting the typical forward motion it was appreciated for, with such films as Georges Méliès's "Panorama from Top of a Moving Train" (1898). While most filmmakers were fascinated with the basic concept and interested only in the motion caught on camera, there were also some filmmakers who incorporated the technique into more structural movies, for instance the well-known "A Kiss in the Tunnel" (1899) by G. A. Smith and the infamous Edwin S. Porter film "The Great Train Robbery" (1903). In the latter, the concept was used to show action occurring on top of a locomotive while it was moving, in order to add to the plot while simultaneously showing off the effect.

"The Georgetown Loop (Colorado)" from 1901 (thank you, kekseksa, for the date correction) certainly qualifies as a "phantom ride" film but is more of an advancement from the shorter train movies from the late 90s. G. W. "Billy" Blitzer's ingenious camerawork utilizes what looks like panning to not only capture the beautiful scenery--which is the main point of interest to the footage--but also to depict quite accurately the danger and precariousness of the train as it swerves around the titular Georgetown Loop. Being in back of the train, the camera capturing the train cars and the scenery adds this intense aspect to watching the views, with the passengers in the back of the train waving to the cameraman with their hankies in addition. Despite the blurriness of the footage, plenty of detail can also be seen within the three minutes of film, including a person leaning against a telephone pole and a broken-down farmhouse. A bridge can also be glimpsed later on.

The puzzling aspect of this three-minute short is that it appears to consist of two separate, yet very similar-looking, shots. At the beginning of the film the passengers seen in the back car consist mainly of men for half of the run-time, but later on, when the camera turns away from them for a moment, there is a cut and one of the men in the car is replaced by a woman. So, either the film consists of two different shots made the same year at different times that were later edited together when it was copyrighted in 1903, or a section in the middle of the film has been lost or extracted due to deterioration (which isn't too entirely uncommon). As it is, this film is a pretty worthwhile addition to the "Phantom Ride" genre, and the apparent panning of the camera makes it close to revolutionary for 1901.

If you consider that this was done the same year as "The Great Train Robbery" and the reports of people ducking so they wouldn't be shot, I can imagine that quite a few people thought the train might fall off the track at times. There are times where the train is either traveling across a very high bridge or it appears that there isn't much, except for a huge drop-off, on the left side of the track.

It's interesting the number of people waving their handkerchiefs out the window of some of the passenger cars. I don't know if this was still an issue in 1903 or not, but I thought early train travel had the added danger of getting burned by hot ashes or embers (maybe it depended on if the engine was burning coal or wood).

I don't know how many scenic rail lines there are still in Colorado over a century later, it might be interesting to see how that area has changed. Well, as long as you're not afraid of heights...