Edwin S. Porter
cinematographer, director, writer
- Birth name:
- Edwin Stratton Porter
- Born:
- 1870-04-21, Connellsville, Pennsylvania, USA
- Died:
- 1941-04-30, New York City, New York, USA
- Professions:
- cinematographer, director, writer
Biography
While projection reels whirred and gears clicked in the late-1890s, Edwin S. Porter—part showman, part tinkerer—moved from servicing machines to composing moving pictures for Edison Manufacturing. The rowdy Brighton school and Georges Méliès’s dreamlike fantasies fed his imagination, and in 1903 he turned out two landmarks: Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery. Within those brisk reels he stitched shots into sequences that obeyed an inner logic, hinting that the true heartbeat of cinema lay in the cut, not the tableau—a notion D. W. Griffith would soon amplify. When nickelodeon fever hardened into an assembly-line business, Porter slipped away from Edison in 1909, founded his own studio, and, three years later, sold the company rather than surrender to the factory rules he had helped create.
