Movies: Edison Studios

After the train station clerk is assaulted and left bound and gagged, then the departing train and its passengers robbed, a posse goes in hot pursuit of the fleeing bandits....

Frankenstein, a young medical student, trying to create the perfect human being, instead creates a misshapen monster. Made ill by what he has done, Frankenstein is comforted by his fiancée; but on his wedding night he is visited by the monster....

The forerunner of all serials, What Happened to Mary was a series of twelve monthly one reel episodes, each a complete entity in itself, revolving its immediate dramatic and melodramatic problems within the framework of a single episode and designed ...

On Christmas Eve, Santa feeds his reindeer and loads his sleigh, before going on his journey to deliver toys to the children of the world....

Marguerite is seated in front of the fireplace, Faust standing by her side. Mephistopheles enters and offers his sword to Faust, commanding him to behead the fair Marguerite. Faust refuses, whereupon Mephistopheles draws the sword across the throat o...

Justus Morrow, a young Englishman of family and some wealth, went to Alaska to make his fortune ......

At the express wish of her father, Lucy Martin marries Leo Noakes, a stingy man and one twice her age. When they are at church one Sunday a fire breaks out and everybody manages to escape with the exception of Lucy, her husband and her former sweethe...

A baker's assistant throws a handful of dough at a rat. The dough sticks to the side of a barrel and the assistant proceeds to sculpt the dough into various faces and shapes. There is some experimental use of stop motion....

A short film depicting the execution of Mary, Queen of the Scots. Mary is brought to the execution block and made to kneel down with her neck over it. The executioner lifts his axe ready to bring it down. After that frame Mary has been replaced by a ...

William K.L. Dickson and William Heise shake hands in this early experimental film....

Miser Ebenezer Scrooge is awakened on Christmas Eve by spirits who reveal to him his own miserable existence, what opportunities he wasted in his youth, his current cruelties, and the dire fate that awaits him if he does not change his ways. Scrooge ...

An early Thomas Edison short. A young woman is kidnapped while attending a play in Chinatown. A reporter attends another play in Chinatown, is likewise kidnapped and rescues the young woman. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011 in partnersh...

This holiday-themed melodrama released by Edison Studios in 1910 concerns Robert, a young man who leaves his mother’s home in New England to forge a career in the big city. When he achieves “fame and fortune” six years later, his proud mother can’t w...

“This film is remarkable in several respects. In the first place, it is full life-size. Secondly, it is the only accurate recent portrait of the great inventor. The scene is an actual one, showing Mr. Edison in working dress engaged in an interesting...

Three men hammer on an anvil and pass a bottle of beer around. Notable for being the first film in which a scene is being acted out....

In a long, diaphanous skirt, held out by her hands with arms extended, Broadway dancer Annabelle Moore performs. Her dance emphasizes the movement of the flowing cloth. She moves to her right and left across an unadorned stage. Many of the prints wer...

“Showing the entire height of this wonderful structure from the base of the dome and return, with the great Paris Exposition in the background, looking down Champs de Mars. A most realistic picture.” According to Edison film historian Charles Musser,...

A cartoonist defies reality when he draws objects that become three-dimensional after he lifts them off his sketch pad....

“Shows how a full carload of coal is loaded onto a vessel every thirty seconds at the great Erie Railroad Docks, Cleveland, Ohio. Great clouds of coal dust rise as each car is unloaded.”...

When a burglar dressed as Santa Claus steals a family's Christmas presents, amateur detective Octavius sets out to recover the loot....