Rip Van Winkle (1903 film) Rip Van Winkle (1903 film) Rip Van Winkle is a 1903 American short black-and-white silent compilation film written and directed by William K.L. Dickson. It is adapted from the play by his friend and investor Joseph Jefferson with Dion Boucicault based on the story of the same name by Washington Irving. The film features Joseph Jefferson as a ne'er-do-well, who wanders off one day into the Kaatskill mountains where he drinks some of a group odd men's mysterious brew and passes out only to find when waking up that 20 years have passed. The film is compiled from a series
Time travel en fût jamais" (1770) by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, "Rip Van Winkle" (1819) by Washington Irving, "Looking Backward" (1888) by Edward Bellamy, and "When the Sleeper Awakes" (1899) by H.G. Wells. Prolonged sleep, like the more familiar time machine, is used as a means of time travel in these stories. The earliest work about backwards time travel is uncertain. Samuel Madden's "Memoirs of the Twentieth Century" (1733) is a series of letters from British ambassadors in 1997 and 1998 to diplomats in the past, conveying the political and religious conditions of the future. Because the narrator receives these letters from his guardian