Life of an American Fireman

Early on in this documentary clips are shown from Edwin Porter's Life of an American Fireman while Martin Scorsese generally goes on like he does about how the great intercutting of the different actions was the first great use of editing. The viewer is left to imagine how amazing this narratvie editing would have been to the audience in 1903. Great story.

Except none of it is true.

The Life of an American Firefighter is one fo the great hoaxes of cinema history.

Porter DID make Life of an American Firefighter in 1903, but at the time he hadn't really grasped the concept editing. So if you ever manage to see the original version, you'll see the entire story told from inside the house, then the film cuts to outside the house and you get to see the entire story again form the firefighters point of view. None of that fancy parallel editing that Scorsese was raving about.

Years later, Porter recut the film to the way most people have seen it, then cleverly presented it as the original cut, instantly (and retroactively) making him the first director to ever use linear narrative editing.

This documentary came out in 2004. This information isn't exactly new, I learned about it in film class years ago and it was hardly new information then. For a documentary about the history of editing, it didn't do a very good job.