I suppose this might have been of interest to village dwellers who had never travelled to the big city, but it's difficult to see what interest it could have held for anyone else. By 1902 cinema had already begun to move on and people were growing bored of the movies. In fact they had been relegated to the status of 'chasers,' the last act of a vaudeville show, considered so dull that they would drive reluctant patrons from the theatre. This is probably a good example of a chaser. It shows a couple of trams, one travelling towards the camera, the other travelling away, and the passengers who get on and off. Very dull.
2 Reviews
the Mutoscope "experimental"
kekseksa31 January 2020
AM&B ad a policy at this time (the film was in fact shot in August 1901) of giving a certain leeway to their cinematographers to produce photographic studies that would be listed in the catalogue (as was this one) as "experimental". This was an acceptance of the really very poor quality of photography in US films by comparison with their French counterparts. But since the company knew that the lowest-common-denominator viewer - the average Joey the Bronx as it were - was not necessarily going to appreciate the interest of a film that neatly caught the moment of intersection of two trams, the films were designated in this way, as would not have been necessary in a more sophisticated European film market. The notion, probably introduced by Wallace McCutcheon unquestionably helped enormously in improving the quality of photographic work at AM&B and their cinematographers - Armytage, Marvin (who shoots this film , Weed and Bitzer - were soon quite the best the US had to offer, a fact that would contribute very greatly to the company's success towards the end of the decade under D. W. Griffith.
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