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The few texts available today that describe the "picture plays" produced by Alexander Black in the years 1893-1894 seem to indicate that many of the cinematic devices, both narrative and technical, that we commonly assume "originated" with Porter, Melies, and Griffith were nothing more than carry-overs from other media that were in their heyday in the last half of the nineteenth century. As John Fell has pointed out in Film and the Narrative Tradition,1 the dime novel with its Western and detective heroes, the stage melodrama, the vaudeville theater, the comic strip, and the magic lantern show are but a few of the myriad sources that went to make up what was to be labeled later as the "cinematic language" of the American narrative film. Black's photoplays predate many of film history's classic landmarks: Porter's technique of cross-cutting to reveal simultaneous action, Griffith's flashback, and Eisenstein's use of montage editing. This article will examine the work of Alexander Black and show how early cinema was, for the most part, a carry-over from the above-mentioned media. Black's work is unique in that it spans the gap in film history between the precinematic period of 1860-1896 and what we presently regard as the beginning of modern narrative film.