The Great Train Robbery (1903): Edison’s Movable Close-Up

At 13:14.5 of this copy, a man in a wide hat points his revolver straight into the lens. He is not robbing anyone in this shot, and nothing around him belongs to the story. The Edison Manufacturing Company's catalog of 1903 calls him Barnes, “leader of the outlaw band,” and says the shot could go at either end of the film, “as the operator may choose.” In the copy examined here, a video file on Wikimedia Commons credited to the Library of Congress, the close-up comes last, right after the gunfight in the woods.

That single catalog line is the reason this page exists. The order of a film's shots is usually treated as settled, decided once and then printed. For this one shot, the company said in its own sales literature that the order was open. What follows is one copy, timed scene by scene; every claim is tied either to the catalog page or to a frame you can find again in the same file.

What the 1903 catalog says about Scene XIV

The catalog is a short printed sales booklet, marked “Copyright 1903,” with a “Synopsis of Scenes” numbered from Scene I to Scene XIV. Its opening paragraph promises a subject “posed and acted in faithful duplication of the genuine ‘Hold Ups’ made famous by various outlaw bands in the far West.” Its last scene, though, is not part of the hold-up at all. It reads, in full: “A life size picture of Barnes, leader of the outlaw band, taking aim and firing point blank at each individual in the audience. (This effect is gained by foreshortening in making the picture.) The resulting excitement is great. This section of the scene can be used either to begin the subject or to end it, as the operator may choose.”

The operator here means the person running the projector. So the catalog hands one editing decision to whoever showed the film, long after it left the company. The catalog offers no such choice for Scenes I to XIII; only the close-up is described as a loose piece.

The same page sets the terms of sale: “Sold in one length only. Length 740 feet. Class A. Price $111.00.” That works out to 15 cents a foot. The words “one length only” matter here: a buyer could not order a shorter version, or the robbery without its close-up. Where that one shot went was the only choice the sheet offered.

The catalog does not say which end most showmen preferred. This page does not guess. The printed page proves that the choice existed; the copy below shows only what one later copy did with it.

Close-up first or close-up last

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Put the close-up at the start, and the film opens with a stranger firing at you before you know who he is, so the robbery that follows plays out as the story behind that face. Put it at the end, and the shot lands after the posse has caught up with the gang, where it works more like a parting jolt than an introduction.

In this copy, scene XIV starts at 13:09.5 and runs to the end of the file at 13:27.7, a total of 18.2 seconds. That makes it the shortest of the 14 scenes. The catalog does print Scene XIV last in its list, but a numbered list has to put it somewhere, and the sentence about the operator undoes that position on the same page.

Nothing in the shot ties it to the plot. There is no train in it, no posse and no mail bag, only a plain dark background. That emptiness is what made the shot movable, because a picture with no place in the story can sit at either end without breaking anything.

The gun hand moves toward the camera rather than across the frame. The catalog's own note explains the effect: “This effect is gained by foreshortening in making the picture.” Held close to the lens, the revolver looks enormous and seems to point at every seat at once.

Fourteen scenes in one copy

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The copy is a WebM video file uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2019, where its source is given as the Library of Congress, digital ID 00694220; the library's own record was not consulted for this page. The file measures 1,440 × 1,080 pixels with square pixels, which gives a 4:3 picture. It has no sound track. Its sha256 checksum, a fingerprint of the exact file, is 5b603517655b144e2148df2f8233237408cbdacc9511f06d2aa55a3564d22499, and every timecode on this page belongs to that file and no other.

The first 39.9 seconds are not the film. They hold a library title card, a handwritten card reading “C.R. #38748,” and an Edison title card held on screen. None of those frames appear here, so the story starts at 0:39.9.

All 14 catalog scenes are present, in the catalog's order. Here they are, timed in this copy:

The longest is scene VI, at 121.4 seconds. It is a single shot of passengers lined up beside the train with their hands raised. Distinct images are the pictures left once the file's repeated frames are removed; a later section explains how. The full table, with the catalog's wording for each scene and a note on what can be seen in it, is available as a spreadsheet: Download the scene table (CSV) · source and license notes.

Shots taken on a moving train

The catalog takes pride in where the camera stood. Its text for Scene IV says: “This thrilling scene was taken from the mail car showing the tender and interior of locomotive cab, while the train is running forty miles an hour.” The speed is the catalog's figure, and nothing in a picture can measure it, but the view matches: the frame looks back over coal and a water tank to the cab, with fields and telegraph poles beyond.

In this copy the fight on the tender follows, and at about 4:50.5 a body is lifted and thrown over the side, as the catalog describes. Scene V then shows men working at the coupling while engine 921 pulls ahead. The catalog puts that distance at “about one hundred feet,” another figure that the picture cannot confirm.

The camera keeps working from the line: in scene VII the gang carries sacks to the engine at about 7:48, and the engine pulls away down the track toward the horizon. The catalog's Scene VIII then has the robbers “bring the engine to a stop several miles from the scene of the ‘Hold Up,’ and take to the mountains.” In this copy the engine comes to rest beside the camera, the men jump down and run, and at about 8:30 the view turns to follow them down a brushy bank instead of staying fixed on the track.

What the frames show, scene by scene

Most of what the catalog describes can be found in the frames. In Scene I, two men overpower the telegraph operator and tie him up on the floor. In Scene II, men wait behind the legs of the water tank as the train pulls in. At 4:04.5 in scene III, a column of smoke rises from the safe, and through the car's open door at right, trees can be seen outside.

Some catalog details do not show up in this copy. The catalog's scene VI ends with the gang firing “their revolvers in the air,” which is not visible in this copy. A passenger does break from the line at about 6:45 and falls, as the catalog says. In scene XI the dance floor is crowded, but the forced dance and the beaten operator's entrance are not visible in this copy in the frames checked.

Scene XII follows its catalog line closely. The catalog says one of the robbers “is shot and plunges head first from his horse.” At about 11:44 a rider leaves a white horse and lands in the road, gets up, and is down again by 11:49; in the catalog's next sentence he staggers to his feet and is shot dead. Whether he went head first is not visible in this copy.

In scene XIII, three men crouch over the mail bags, the catalog's “remaining three bandits,” and from 12:37 gunsmoke drifts through the trees.

No frames from scene X appear on this page. A real child, the operator's daughter, appears in it. Frames showing real children are not used here. Its timing is in the table, but its content is not described frame by frame.

Six frames of the close-up

Read the strip from left to right. At 13:10.0 and again at 13:12.0 the man only stares into the lens, and at 13:13.5 his hand swings the revolver up, blurred by the speed of the movement. At 13:14.5, the frame at the top of this page, the barrel points straight out of the screen. At 13:16.0 white smoke spreads from the muzzle, and by 13:16.5 his face shows through a cloud.

The first shot comes about six and a half seconds into the close-up. A fresh puff of smoke at the muzzle around 13:20 looks like another shot. Through the smoke and after it, he keeps the gun on the lens, firing at “each individual in the audience,” in the catalog's words, and the copy ends at 13:27.7 with the close-up still running.

The whole shot holds 292 distinct images in this copy: a few seconds of performance built around one effect. The catalog's word for that effect was excitement.

Sixteen images a second, stored as 24

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The file plays at 24 frames per second. Many of those frames repeat the one before. Comparing every frame with the next, by this site's count the story section from 0:39.9 to 13:27.7 holds 18,426 file frames and 12,344 distinct images, an average of 16.08 distinct images per second.

The repeats follow a steady beat. Of the 12,344 images, 6,265 fill one file frame, 6,076 fill two, and only 3 fill three. Single and double mostly alternate, so on average every two images take three frames. That is how 16 images a second are spread across 24 frames: one second at 16 images per second becomes 24 frames, 8 of them repeats.

This tells you how the file was made, not how fast the film was projected in 1903. A transfer set up for 16 images a second could reflect the source, a laboratory choice or a standard setting, and this copy offers no way to tell those apart. This page makes no claim about the original speed. A spinning phenakistiscope disc raises the same question of how many pictures pass the eye each second.

Looking for the splice scar

The splice scar is a physical join in a film copy, from editing, repair or added titles; it counts as an original editing choice only when version comparison or records support that reading. On a print, you could hold the join up to the light. In a video file, only its traces remain.

The obvious place to look is file frame 18950, at 13:09.6, and the frame before it, which looks the same. The top third shows the forest floor from scene XIII, the rest shows the close-up from the nose down, and a ragged edge runs between them. Two pieces of film meeting out of line can look like this. So can damage, or a fault in copying or scanning.

The same kind of frame sits at four other scene changes in this copy: 8:17.0, 8:36.4, 11:22.1 to 11:22.2 and 12:07.5. Faults inside scenes turn up too, at 8:13.8 and from 12:59.1, where part of the picture goes dark.

None of these marks can be dated from this file alone, so none shows whether a join was made in 1903, in a later print, or during transfer. No splice scar is confirmed in this copy, and none is read here as an editing choice. The split at 13:09.6 does sit where the close-up meets the story, but with the same mark at four other cuts, its place says nothing about how the close-up was attached.

The catalog promised a choice that this copy cannot settle. The 1903 booklet gave the operator either end; this file shows one answer, made at some point between 1903 and its upload, by someone it does not name. Sequence photographs raise a similar question about order and time, and The Horse in Motion takes it up with a row of still frames.