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Thomas A. Edison's early "Holy Land" films
Still from The Holy Land, 1917
Georges Kline Collection
These are among the earliest films recorded abroad for American audiences. The earliest of these films were likely viewed in a mutoscope or other individual viewing device in an amusement arcade. The later film, “The Holy Land,” would more likely be projected onto a screen before a group audience—perhaps in a nickelodeon, perhaps for an audience in a school or house of worship. Although it is a silent film, it would likely have some kind of sound accompaniment when screened—either musical (live accompaniment by a pianist, violinist, or even a small ensemble of musicians) or spoken (a narrator reading the captions and commenting on the images as they were projected).
Title: “Tourists Embarking at Jaffa” Year: 1903
Running time: ca. 2.2 min.
Source: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division, Paper Print Collection
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Title: “Street Scene at Jaffa” Year: 1903
Running time: ca. 1.3 min.
Source: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division, Paper Print Collection
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Title: “Jerusalem’s Busiest Street” Year 1903
Running time: c. 1.5 min.
Source: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division, Paper Print Collection
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Title: “A Jewish Dance in Jerusalem” Year: 1903
Running time: ca. 1.3 min.
Source: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division, Paper Print Collection
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Title: “The Holy Land” Year: 1917
Running time: ca. 7 min.
Source: Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting, Recorded Sound Division, George Kline Collection
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Discussion questions:
1. How do these films compare to other turn-of-the-20th-century representations of the Holy Land? How might viewing them—especially when they were first produced—be experienced by first audiences as different from other available forms of representation (including other photographic media, such as still photographs, picture postcards, lantern slides, and stereopticons)?
2. What do these films suggest about how an American view of the Holy Land was being constructed by the camera? How do choice of images, camera angle and movement (if any), contribute to this?
3. In “The Holy Land” (1917), what roles do intertitles and editing play in shaping how viewers understand individual shots included in the film?
4. How do these films provide viewers with a sense of what would be like for an American viewer to travel to the Holy Land? What do they suggest is the nature of such a trip, and how do they convey these suggestions?
5. What images that appear in these films are familiar to you from more recent representations of the Holy Land? What images are unfamiliar to you? What does the reappearance of certain images (e.g, landmarks, geographical features, types of people) suggest about how the Holy Land has been represented over the course of the past century?
6. How do these films address the notion of the Holy Land as a spiritual place? How do the films relate other aspects of the Holy Land—as an exotic place, an ancient place—to the notion of it as sacred? How are different faiths identified, how are they associated with the Holy Land and juxtaposed vis-a-vis one another?
http://hdl.handle.net/1964/168
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