Solar Eclipse
- 1900
Lively example of a popular early film genre
The ever-popular public spectacle of intrepid firefighters demonstrating their preparedness - here photographed from a closer-than-usual camera position. The occasion draws the usual enthusiastic crowd who, in this instance, make for at least as entertaining an image as the main event.
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.