Actualities - 1897-1910

On "The Movies Begin Vol. 1".

President McKinley at Home - 1897
Packtrain on Chilkoot Pass - 1898
Skyscrapers of New York City - 1903
TheGeorgetown Loop - 1903
San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake - 1906
The Dog and his Various Merits - 1908
Moscow Clad in Snow - 1908
Airplane Flight and Crash - 1910

While I'm not sure why they are titled Actualities beyond the simple fact that they actually exist, this was the title given to these on the DVD containing them. They were put together as a single series of short films, though these are longer than the typical ones.

 

The first two with McKinley and the Packtrain are more like the older shorts just showing a slice of life from a stable camera, though I'll admit it interesting to see McKinley on film.

The rest get a little more interesting as the filmmakers apparently experiment more and more with their art to get some real motion and storytelling going on.

Skyscrapers has the camera on a boat traveling down a river, so the whole thing consists of what looks like a long tracking shot of the city as seen from the river. Easy concept: put the camera on something; it moves.

Georgetown is basically the same concept except now we have the camera on a train. However, this one introduces something else. As the train is cruising through the landscape, the view pans slightly around the curves. I thought it was just viewing out the side of the train, but the camera was actually panning around as sometimes we got views of the train's passengers waiving and other times was a view of the landscape.

San Francisco gives us an early distaster movie/news shots. This one was far more complex than the earlier ones as we have multiple shots of the aftermath including people milling around and lots of destruction. The camera pans around in several shots as well giving us a better panorama of what San Francisco looked like at the time of the quake.

Although the subject matter of the Dog and its Merits is kind of silly, it plays out more like a documentary with multiple shots of the various dogs and their jobs, and this one throws in intertitles (cards between shots that describe what is happening or coming up) that describe the upcoming dog we're about to see. It's an amusing watch.

Moscow Clad in Snow takes us one step further than the Dogs with more intertitles and even more shots of Moscow's various views. This one is a much grander style though and paints Moscow in a very touristy light to include a grand panoramic shot of the city from a high rooftop. It gives a very simple view of what happens in the snow in Moscow, and that is: life goes on. We have horse drawn sleds in two laned city streets. A marketplace where people notice the camera and stare and smile at it. Even got a group of people "walking" on skis. Kind of neat.

The final one doesn't match the quality of the last two. Someone gets his primitive plane out of his garage. The camera misses the takeoff as it basially disappears in the distance of the field, and we miss the crash as well. We get some aftermath shots, but on the whole, it's a disappointing ending to a progressively more interesting collection.