Act II represents the dream. It is the medieval age—the age of chivalry, of bold, bad barons and gallant knights. An ancestor of the hero is one of these latter. His love story is depicted vividly. There is nothing lackadaisical about the lovemaking. The bold knight finally seizes the maiden in his arms and carries her off bodily to the altar in the face of strenuous opposition.
In act III the twentieth century again appears. There hero wakes up and follows, so far as modernity will let him, the example of his ancestory shown him in the second act.
— San Francisco Call, 14 December 1906
The IMDb lists Herbert M. Dawley as a co-writer, but Wikipedia lists him as only the producer. The initial three-reel film premiered at the Strand Theater, but an unhappy Dawley cut it from over 40 minutes to about 12. Around six extra minutes were later restored by the Dinosaur Museum of Blanding, Utah, in 2016, but the full version no longer exists.
One review at Silent Hollywood indicates that the ending has Martin awakening from a dream and there is no explicit mention of actual time travel. With this in mind, we’re marking the time travel as debatable. Oh, and Mark Twain himself appears in the film, played by Karl Formes.
This is the earliest story that I’ve seen where the hero goes back into his earlier body and relives something differently. Some of the later stories of this kind have no actual time travel, but merely give knowledge of an alternate timeline (e.g., Asimov’s “What If?”); others live out the two timelines in parallel (e.g., the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, also set in motion by a missed/caught train); and some, like If, are couched in terms of time travel (e.g., the 1986 movie Peggy Sue Got Married).
And then I stumbled upon Jacques Rigaut’s century-old gem that managed all that and more in under 1,000 words more than a century ago.
Normally, we don’t list long-sleep stories, given that they are not true time travel, but this one deserves a spot in the ITTDB, seeing as how it‘s the first long-sleep silent film. As a bonus, you’ll see Houdini doing his own stunts as the frozen man brought to life. The script was based on a story by Houdini.
So the professor was given a free hand, and went below. It was past nine o’clock.
I remained on the bridge enjoying a cigar with the officer of the deck, and chatting over a coming boar hunt we were to have south of the canal during the coming weekend. we had been talking for perhaps ten minutes in the darkness of the bridge, with the black satin of the Caribbean spreading out ahead and about the ship, and the diamond stars projecting just above our heads as though ready for any plucking hand, when suddenly we found ourselves half blinded by a dazzling light in the west.
He would not let me address him in the language intercession. “I am like you,” he said, “but of a different sphere and a different power. I am not immortal; nothing is immortal. Neither the Earth, the Sun, nor the God who made them. Everything is passing away, or rather, dissolving, to be re-fashioned into other forms.”
Safety note: Do not attempt this movie’s method of creating a timeslip—via a fiery train crash—at home.
— The Bioscope, 6 February 1929
Wayne Winsett, owner of Time Warp Comics, tells me that this is his favorite time travel movie. Wayne is not alone in his assessment of Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, as the film now enjoys a mild cult following.
“No,” Charlie said quickly. “I’m sorry.”
His uncle hadn’t finished. “Henry’s parents mourned him, just as they mourned poor little Daphne. James was their only child and, as a result, he was probably spoiled. His father died in the war and his mother left everything to him, including her lovely cottage by the sea. You can’t change that, can you?”
Apparently, people in early 20th-century Cambridge espouse many wise thoughts about time, parallel universes that encompass every possible combination of events again and again, and something about every decision every made creating a branch point. In the end, it's difficult to make a cohesive model of time from the plotline of Dimensions, but we tried our best to do so in our plot notes.
“Time isn’t circular,”
she said to Dr. Kellet. “It’s like a palimpsest.”
“Oh, dear,” he said.
“That sounds very vexing.”
“And memories are sometimes in the future.”
As you might guess, we enjoyed Far and his friends, but the thing that sealed an Eloi Bronze Medal was the fact that when a particular timeline actually managed to branch (not an easy feat) and the traveler then jumped to the future, she found her another self—the her that was born on that timeline—waiting for her. Most branching timeline stories ignore this issue entirely.