Quartile rating: 5.5/10 · 1 rating
A short Edison Black Maria studio film featuring famed sharpshooter Annie Oakley, known as “Little Sure Shot.” Born Phoebe Ann Oakley Mozee in Ohio in 1860, she rose to global fame performing with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Accompanied (likely) by her husband and fellow marksman Frank Butler, Oakley’s diminutive stature belied her legendary marksmanship.
This 1894 Edison Black Maria short is a primitive but historically singular artifact — one of the earliest motion picture recordings of a celebrity performance. Plot and ending are essentially nonexistent as categories given the documentary nature: it is a brief unedited demonstration of trick shooting. Acting is not applicable in any dramatic sense, though Oakley's natural stage presence registers. Cinematography is rudimentary even by early cinema standards, a static single-camera setup in the Black Maria studio with harsh lighting. Novelty, however, is genuinely exceptional: this is among the very first films ever made of a real-world celebrity, a foundational document of both cinema history and American cultural mythology, utterly one-of-a-kind in its historical position.