Incoming Tide

Worthing
1 Jan 1898
Silent

Worthing waves at us in this mesmerising early film

There is a tide in the affairs of film... In the Victorian period, films of rough seas constituted a genre unto themselves and, as this example filmed at Worthing demonstrates, a strangely engaging one at that. We should think of films like this not as precursors of mainstream cinema but as the new media of its day: not narratives but mesmerising meditations on movement itself.

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From the collection

Sea Wave Films

The 'sea wave' genre might be one of the more surprising genres to come out of early film. But for Victorian audiences there was something hypnotic about these compact studies of movement.

Surely most of us, if we've ever stood before the sea have found ourselves transfixed by the rhythms of gently lapping waves. The violent churn of a really rough sea gives us something else again - a real sense of the ocean's magnificent, sometimes alarming power.