This Biograph movie from 1904 is a prime example of the pre-Griffith story-telling technique at the studio. It is not a particularly interesting or cinematic movie, but it does show the form at its best and makes it clear why Griffith, once he entered the field, was able to change film so utterly. It's not that Griffith would invent the techniques that made his movies superior for the era and still watchable today; he put them together in a way that we still use.
The way director Wallace MacCutcheon tells this story of moonshiners versus revenue agents is that of an illustrated book. The movie is offered as a series of titles that tell the viewer what is about to happen, followed by showing the viewer. This means that the viewer is told what is going to happen and obliterates all dramatic tension. Nor, for the first ten minutes of this twelve-minute film, does much happen of much interest. We see people driving in wagons and unloading them. We see people standing around talking. We see people walking. At the end, there is fighting and shooting and people dying, but it's a long wait to get there, given the one-shot-per-scene editing.
Cameraman Billy Bitzer offers some pan shots early on that gives the viewer a sense of movement and the feeling that something is going on outside the small image on the screen, but that ends after the first few set-ups MacCutcheon would expand the scope of this style of movie-making, but it would never amount to much on its own. It would prove to be too and uninvolving. It would vanish like a puff of smoke.