Solar Eclipse
- 1900
The camera captures the sense of being part of the audience at this Victorian sporting event.
The camera is well placed in this film, capturing the sense of being part of the audience at this equestrian event. In 1877-8 Edward Muybridge used the young technology of photography to analyse a horse's gait in his Animal Locomotion series. Here, less than 25 years later, film continues to photograph horses, but in the name of entertainment rather than science.
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.