As its title describes, Blacksmithing Scene shows three blacksmiths (played by staff in Thomas Edison’s laboratory) hammering a piece of metal. They pause to pass around a bottle of beer and then resume their work. Because their activities were shot with a fixed camera and are confined to a single, unedited, 35-second-long take, Blacksmithing Scene resembles a moment of live theater more than it does the complexly structured movies that would begin to be developed in the early years of the 20th century.
Blacksmithing Scene is one of the first films ever made and one of the earliest generated out of the laboratory Edison established in New Jersey. Since the inventor used it during his debut of the Kinetoscope in Brooklyn, New York, it was also the first film in a commercially viable format to be shown publicly. Edison himself did not direct films, but he oversaw a stable of filmmakers who produced them under the auspices of his company. Blacksmithing Scene was made by William Heise and Edison’s assistant and protégé, William K. L. Dickson, who would later co-found The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, much to the consternation of his former boss, who attempted to sue Biograph out of existence.
Shot with the Kinetograph for viewing in the Kinetoscope, Blacksmithing Scene was filmed in still another of Edison’s and Dickson’s inventions, a multi-chambered structure dubbed the Black Maria (1892–93) that they used as their film studio, the world’s first. Dickson set this purpose-built studio on tracks so that it could be moved into optimal sunlight and outfitted it with a roof made of panels that could be raised to allow in light, which is how they illuminated the action featured in Blacksmithing Scene. Here Edison filmmakers shot many of the hundreds of films that the company released between 1893 and 1918, its final year of active production.