The Romance of New Mexico

Page 1 2 3 4 5 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 person. However, someone from Edison's studio in New Jersey certainly did come with a movie camera, and shot footage at the Pueblo of Isleta, a few miles south of the city - and several centuries away in time.

Indian Day School (1898), made by 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 in again. If you blink, you miss it: the film is only 50 seconds in length. Because of its brevity, it may have been made to be included in a movie with other cameo scenes from the same trip, or to be used as a loop for the Edison kinetoscope arcades back East.

The Edison primitive - a documentary, or "actuality," 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 West. 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 horizon. 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 during those years the film medium developed rapidly into an art form and, inevitably, a business. Edison and nine other pioneers formed the Motion Picture Patents Company to protect what they considered their proprietary commercial interest in the movies. The Patents people successfully prosecuted any renegade film company bold enough to produce and distribute movies without their knowledge and consent - and, more important, without paying them a stiff license fee.

To escape the long arms of the Patents Company's lawyers, many "independent" film companies fled as far from New York as southern California, where there was year-round sunlight for moviemaking and a convenient backdoor out of the country into Mexico.