It was Porter, however, who produced the very first movie whose name has lived on through the half century of film history that has since ensued. The movie was The Great Train Robbery and its effects on the young industry and art were all but incalculable. Overnight, for one thing, Porter's film multiplied the standard running time of movies by ten. The Great Train Robbery is a one reel film. One reel -- from eight to twelve minutes -- became the standard length from the year of Robbery, 1903, until Griffith shattered that limit forever with Birth of a Nation in 1915. The reel itself became and still is the standard of measure for the movies.

The material of the Porter film is simplicity itself; much of it has continued to be used over the years and the heart of it -- good guys and bad guys in the old West -- pretty well dominated television toward the end of the 1950's. A band of robbers enters a railroad station, overpowers and ties up the telegraph operator, holds up the train and escapes. A posse is formed and pursues the robbers, who, having made their escape, are whooping it up with some wild, wild women in a honky-tonk hide-out. The robbers run from the hide-out, take cover in a wooded declivity, and are shot dead by the posse. As a finale is appended a close-up of one of the band taking aim and firing his revolver straight at the audience.

All this is simple enough, but in telling the story Porter did two important things that had not been done before. Each scene is shot straight through, as had been the universal custom, from a camera fixed in a single position, but in the outdoor scenes, especially in the capture and destruction of the outlaws, Porter's camera position breaks, necessarily, with the camera position standard until then, which had been, roughly, that of a spectator in a center orchestra seat at a play. The plane of the action in the scene is not parallel with the plane of the film in the camera or on the screen. If the change, at first sight, seems minor, we may recall that it took the Italian painters about two hundred years to make an analogous change, and the Italian painters, by universal consent, were the most brilliant group of geniuses any art has seen. In that apparently simple shift Porter opened the way to the sensitive use of the camera as an instrument of art as well as a mechanical recording device.