This short film about the building of a ship in a British shipyard -- Ship Number 242 during its construction -- is a fairly standard-looking piece, held together by a narrator who sounds a bit like Leslie Howard and some great editing.
Visually, this piece is striking because it seems to be built of shots that made up at the dawn of cinema. The first shot is of the open water and might have been a clip from ROUGH SEAS AT DOVER (1896); other shots seem to include LES FORGERONS (1896), the series of industrial films that Billy Bitzer shot at the Westinghouse factory in 1904 and there is a scene of workmen leaving the shipyard that might have been lifted from the Lumieres' LA SORTIE DES OUVRIERS DE L'USINE from their first show in 1894.
It's the editing together of these clips, these now-standard images with set meanings, that make up the basis of this movie. Try looking at it and figuring out where they were lifted from.
Visually, this piece is striking because it seems to be built of shots that made up at the dawn of cinema. The first shot is of the open water and might have been a clip from ROUGH SEAS AT DOVER (1896); other shots seem to include LES FORGERONS (1896), the series of industrial films that Billy Bitzer shot at the Westinghouse factory in 1904 and there is a scene of workmen leaving the shipyard that might have been lifted from the Lumieres' LA SORTIE DES OUVRIERS DE L'USINE from their first show in 1894.
It's the editing together of these clips, these now-standard images with set meanings, that make up the basis of this movie. Try looking at it and figuring out where they were lifted from.
