Rip Van Winkle (1896)
Stage star Joseph Jefferson plays vignettes from his celebrated theatrical Rip: he meets the ghostly bowlers in the Catskills, drinks from their keg, sleeps, and wakes a white-bearded old man twenty years on.
These eight brief scenes preserve Rip Van Winkle as embodied by Joseph Jefferson, who played the part on stage for roughly four decades, filmed on his own estate by W. K. L. Dickson for Biograph. The record of a vanished nineteenth-century performance tradition was selected for the National Film Registry.
Background
Rip Van Winkle is an 1896 series of short films directed by W. K. L. Dickson and starring stage actor Joseph Jefferson, who had performed the title role for roughly four decades in a popular theatrical adaptation of Washington Irving’s 1819 story written with Dion Boucicault. Dickson filmed the vignettes in August 1896 at Jefferson’s own summer home in Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts. The result is a set of brief scenes, including Rip’s Toast, Rip Meeting the Dwarf, and Rip’s Twenty Years’ Sleep, each capturing a single moment from Jefferson’s stage performance rather than forming one continuous narrative film.
What to watch for
In these fragments, Jefferson meets the ghostly Dutch bowlers in the Catskills, drinks from their keg, falls asleep, and wakes as a white-bearded old man twenty years on, the same beats audiences had already been watching him perform live on stage for decades. Because Jefferson died in 1905, the films stand as one of the only surviving moving-picture records of his signature role, and of a nineteenth-century theatrical acting style that otherwise exists only in written description. The series was selected for the National Film Registry in recognition of that documentary value.
