Technical Note

  The films in the site are divided into clips that last between 20 and 70 seconds. To play the film clips in the Screening Room discussed below, you'll need a Quicktime Player installed on your computer. If your brower doesn't already have the player, you can download a free version by following the link in the archive's "PLUG-INS" section (accessible from the site map).

  Inside each movie's own set of pages, however, you can view clips in any of three ways. 1. You can watch the clip in regular speed with the Quicktime Player. We compressed these movie files as much as we dared, but they're still pretty large, so if you have a slow connection to the Internet I recommend downloading the ones you intend to use before showing them to students. 2. Also with the Quicktime Player, you can watch a "slideshow" version of the clip, containing every 20th frame. It's not the same as watching a movie, but you can get a good idea of the movie with a much faster download time. 3. If you don't want to use the Quicktime Player, or want to look at particular frames, we also provide jpeg images of every 20th frame of each clip. You simply click on a frame to bring up the next one, and there should be no download delays.

  At present, in the UTC AT THE MOVIES section, the archive contains all or part of 4 of the 11 silent film versions of Uncle Tom's Cabin made between 1903 and 1927. Stowe's novel was arguably as central to the development of movies in America as to the history of drama. No story was filmed so often. It was even a "Tom Show" that provoked Thomas Dixon to write his Klu Klux Klan trilogy, which in turn was the inspiration for D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915) -- usually cited as the first "great" American film.

  Students accustomed to the color and, especially, the potent soundtracks of modern movies will have to revise their expectations to appreciate these silent black-and-white moving pictures. One of the ways I try to help them contextualize the films is by pointing out how the 4 versions allow us to watch American movie making from the beginning, as it discovers what it might mean to use this new technology to tell stories. The ten-minute 1903 film, for example, directed by Porter for Thomas Edison's company, is essentially one of the "Tom Shows" acted in front of a camera -- the sets and acting gestures come from the stage (although there are a couple entertaining examples of early special effects: the steamboat race and the angel who carries off Eva's spirit -- these links and all the following ones on this page open a new window; to get back to this page, just close it). If you take one scene -- say, Eva's death -- and show it in its successive cinemagraphic elaborations (1903, 1910, 1914, 1927), you can see how the filmmakers become increasingly more fluent in using the medium to create and shape the re-presentation of the scene. You can conveniently give your students the chance to make these comparisons in the Screening Room, where selected scenes can be viewed side-by-side .

  Comparing the different films with each other and with Stowe's novel also helps students appreciate just how servicable Uncle Tom's Cabin was to America's entertainment industry. Stowe's story could be stretched in any number of directions to accommodate various crowd-pleasing numbers and effects. For instance, one of the longest sequences in the Edison-Porter film is a cakewalk danced by slaves in the garden at the St. Clares'. The African-American cakewalk was one of the dance fads of the 1890s. Similarly, in the 1914 World Producing Corp. film, the "freeman's defense" looks nothing like the scene Stowe wrote; instead it's a shootout imitated from the western movie, one of the first American film genres to establish its popularity and conventions. Or, as a last example of a pattern that shows up in many ways, the Universal 1927 production lavished most of its $2,000,000 budget on re-creating the "Old South" and its elegant plantation life -- or more properly, creating an image of the "Old South" in keeping with the plantation myth that evolved fairly steadily between the Civil War and the publication of Gone With the Wind. Scenes like the ball at the Shelbys' say more about the depth of America's nostalgia in the 1920's than about either Stowe's original text or the ante bellum South.

  Of course, these cinemagraphic re-visions of Stowe's protest novel did more than entertain audiences. The crowds such scenes pleased were white, and these films also reveal the process by which Stowe's anti-slavery fiction wound up enabling later generations of Americans, south and north, to picture a past that was easy to live with. Like the "Tom Shows" of the late 19th century, all these films proclaimed their fidelity to fact. And that claim became more persuasive as movie makers and their technology became more sophisticated. The play version Porter captured on film in 1903 is patently staged, but by the time Carl Laemmle produced the 1927 film audiences might understandably feel as though they were seeing the world Tom actually lived in. The subtitle of the Edison-Porter film is Slavery Days. According to the program for Laemmle's film, "through the limitless possibilities of the motion picture camera, the sunshine and shadows of the plantation life of the glorious Old South become living, vivid realities." I ask students to think and talk not only about these films depict the novel, but also about how they portray American history.