Life of an American Fireman is a 1903 film directed by Edwin S. Porter for Thomas Edison's production company. The simple story shows a downtown fire brigade which responds to an alarm. Upon arrival, the fire brigade sees a woman trapped in an upper-story bedroom of a burning house. A brave fireman rescues the unconscious woman, who regains consciousness and begs the fireman to re-enter the house to save her child.
The Edison company used this six-minute movie to try out new techniques for using film to tell a fictional story with a beginning, middle, and end; earlier Edison films had tended to rely on the novelty of the subject rather than on characters or narrative. Porter, a pioneer of early American cinema, took another step forward with his next movie, The Great Train Robbery.
Tropes:
- Big Damn Heroes: They rescue a mother and baby from a burning building, dammit.
- Heroic Fire Rescue: It's what firemen do.
- Hollywood Fire: Averted, if for no other reason than filmmakers of the day didn't know how to stage a Hollywood Fire. Instead, all we get is billowing smoke.
- An Insert: One scene is a closeup of a fire alarm box. Hands enter the frame, open the box, and pull the fire alarm. This may be the first insert in the history of movies—and one of the first close-ups, for that matter, as most film-making prior to this was done in medium and long shots.
- Psychic Link: The fire chief dreams of the mother and child, before the fire alarm sounds.
- Re-Cut: For many years this film was believed to be the first example of cross-cutting, with the latter portion of the film cutting back and forth from the woman's room to the fireman outside and back. Later research has shown that this was actually done decades later. When the film was originally exhibited, it played out the whole scene from inside the room, and then the whole scene from outside the building, without cross-cutting.
- Switching P.O.V.: The rescue of the mother and child is shown from the perspective of a camera inside the room. Then the same events are shown again from an outside street-level view, this time showing the mother waking up and begging the fireman to go back for the baby.
