Solar Eclipse
- 1900
Classic early fire brigade turn-out film sees engines emerge from fire station
This looks like the Newcastle fire station, as seen in Mitchell and Kenyon's Turn Out of the Newcastle Fire Brigade (1901). Whether this is an earlier film as recorded, or part of the same footage, will probably remain a mystery. It's one of many fire brigade demonstrations films, which were clearly popular in the medium's early days.
It was a lucky filmmaker who managed to be on hand to capture real 'hard news', as in the disastrous launch of HMS Albion. The second Boer War, the biggest international story of the late-Victorian era, lured several cameramen to South Africa. Others responded to audience demand for moving pictures of such events by dramatising them for the camera.