Early films of Princeton football, 1903–1951

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The old­est known silent movie of a Prince­ton foot­ball match is a four minute record­ing of a Yale-Princeton game, shot at Yale’s sta­dium in 1903. The film, which was pro­duced by the com­pany of Thomas A. Edi­son, inven­tor of the motion pic­ture cam­era, is held at the Library of Con­gress and can be viewed online. Fea­tured below is the old­est foot­ball film in the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives, which is also the old­est film in our entire audio­vi­sual col­lec­tion: a record­ing of the 1919 Princeton-Harvard match at Palmer Sta­dium. It is inter­est­ing to com­pare the anno­tated movie, shot from just one spot in the bleach­ers, with two news­reels of matches in 1941 and 1951, when the excite­ment of the game could be cap­tured in move­ment as well as sound.

 

While Thomas Edison’s cam­era­man in 1903 tried to cap­ture the excite­ment of the game with a vari­ety of shots and angles, the unknown cam­era­man who shot this 1919 Princeton-Harvard match was anchored to one spot. His aim was just to film the high­lights, result­ing in this anno­tated 25 minute film of the game on Novem­ber 8, 1919, which ended in a 10–10 tie. We do not have any infor­ma­tion about the con­text of this film. The ear­li­est ref­er­ences to the prac­tice of film­ing Prince­ton foot­ball and other events date from the early 1920s. The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Archives holds some foot­ball films from 1928, but most films found in the Foot­ball Films col­lec­tion date from the 1950s for­ward. (Addi­tional news­reels of games from the 1950s will be posted at a later date.)

The 1941 foot­ball news­reel, which cap­tures Princeton’s loss to Penn­syl­va­nia 23–0, includes footage of the tra­di­tional tear­ing down of the goal post after the game (1:18). The sec­ond news­reel cap­tures Princeton’s 5th game of 1951, which ended with a 53–15 vic­tory (mis­tak­enly announced as 53–14) over pre­vi­ously unde­feated Cor­nell (01:44). The game has been called the ‘finest hour’ of Dick Kaz­maier ’52, who was voted “All Amer­i­can” in both his junior and his senior year, and won the Heis­man tro­phy as the player of the year in 1951.These films are part of the Uni­ver­sity Archives’ His­tor­i­cal Audio­vi­sual Col­lec­tion. The 1919 film is a 16mm film (item no. 0166) and the news­reels were found on a Beta­cam 30 video cap­ture of the orig­i­nal news­reels (item no 1344).

 

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