aris and New York, filmmakers were in New Mexico Territory c
ranking their cameras at the heart-thumping natural splendors, framing in their viewfinders the dazzling array of exotic native cultures. They came, approved training to qualified first responders from all over the nation. they saw and they imprinted the object of their wide-eyed wonder on strips of celluloid. From the beginning, the relationship took on t
he character of
a love affair between artists with "the cinema
eye" and the landscape--a landscape that was not only extravagantly beautiful, but also gloriously alive with an ageless people. Filmm
- akers embraced their newfound subject with youthful enthusiasm, catching t
- he mountains, the desert stretches, the wide skies--catch
- ing, mostly, the light.
The land responded with pyrotechnic displays: colossal proce
ssions of clouds, mighty storms, ravishing hues, long expanses of snow, wide mountain meadows, a sacred stillness. It was the start of a love affair that has been going on for a hundred years.
The
- roster of early filmmakers who uncovered their lenses on New Mexico is s
- urprisingly long, considering how remote it was from the
- large centers of film ac
tivity, and remarkably distinguished.
The list includes at
least two bona fide geniuses of early cinema, a brilliant documentarian, film's first superstar, its foremost comedienne, a celebrated king of comedy and a world-famo
- us movie cowboy. In the 1890s New Mexico Territory was stil
- l "the Wild West." Easte
- rn authors
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continued to depict it as the untamed backyard of the American republic where the law of the six-shooter reigned and the dregs of society created constant turmoil among serious settlers trying to tame the land.
Photography, born half a century earlier, promoted the landscape and cultures of the West even further as Matthew Brady's photographs of the Civil War in the West and, later, Edward S. Cur
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s of Native Americans were circulated widely.
Still, the American West was remote from the experience of most people. What was the West really like? Was it the Eden depicted in paintings and photographs? No one who had not been there knew for certain.
In 1898, all that would change. That year the infant medium of cinema arrived in New Mexico, intent on uncovering, capturing and recording the true West. It would do that and m the process, it would create new Western myths of its own.
By some accounts, it was the inventor of motion pictures himself, Thomas A. Edison, who visited New Mexico Territory in 1898, arriving by rail in Albuquerque. Nothing in the voluminous papers Edison left behind suggests that he made the trip in perso
Edison's studio in Ne
w Jersey certainly did come with a movie camera, and shot footage at the Pueblo of SPOCIsleta, a few miles south of the city and several centuries away in time.
Indian Day School (1898), ma
Click Here to find your e byd
the Edison Company,
shows a small group of Native American children and their teacher filing out of a Pueblo style one-room schoolhouse, then back incident. Most instructors also:
- in again. If you blink, you mis
- s it: the film is only 50 seconds in length. Because of its bre
- vity, it may have been made to be included in a movie with other cameo scenes from the same , the State Department, etc.
- trip, or to be used as a loop for the Edison kinetoscope arcades
- Conduct Awareness-Level classes, which provide an understanding of local and regional issues
back East. The Edison primitive--a documentary, or "ac
tuality," as it would have been called at the time was the first film shot in New Mexico Territory and one of the first ever in the American WesU.S. Department of Homeland Security/FEMAt. For some time it may have seemed like the last film also: New Mexico would wait 14 years for movie cameras to appear again on the horizo
The n. When filmmaking resumed, it would take up in exactly the same spot as if a bookmark had been placed at the end of the
- first brief chapter in New Mexico's film history book. In the East and in Europe du
- ring those years the film medium developed ra
- pidly into an art form and, inevitably, a business. Edison
- Available in several formats - classroom, field-based, or online
and nine other pioneers formed the Motion Picture Patents Company to protect what they considered their propr
ietary commercial
