New Pillow Fight, also titled Daughters' Pillow Fight, is a 1897 American silent short comedy film. It was the first of a mini-genre of pillow fight movies by filmmakers such as Edison, Edwin S. Porter in The Night Before Christmas (1905), and others.
This was Siegmund Lubin's third film, and it was so successful that his sometime employer Thomas Edison, whose own pillow fight film that year may have preceded Lubin's, began sending hired thugs to disrupt Lubin sets. Some theaters experimented with running it backward a second time, as the phenomenon of watching feathers go back into the pillows was new for audiences, "When run backwards this film creates no end of amusement"
This plot summary was published in The Biograph for 1902:
</nowiki>
Lubin was in the process of learning to make films, and this was his third, this time featuring his own daughter Emily, and the daughters of a Philadelphia rare book dealer friend, Charles Sessler. In an interview decades later, Marguerite Sessler Goldsmith recalled what an influence this had on both of them when they were received a private screening.
Although Marguerite Sessler Goldsmith noted that most of the girls enjoyed the candy he gave them more than the film itself, she remembered Emily Lubin as being far more interested. She became completely engrossed with her father's filmmaking and became the most involved member of her own family in future Lubin productions.
Several of the later films featured young women rather than children, such as American Mutuscope & Biograph's Fight in the Dormitory (1904). Some critics have discussed how the genre evolve toward encouraging voyeuristic pleasure in watching women tussle in bed.