San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906)
Footage shot not long after the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco is edited together so that more than one scene and more than one vantage are included. We see fire raging. We see burned-out buildings, piles of rubble, and buildings with only one wall standing. People stand and watch; others walk purposely through the debris. A carriage passes; the camera pans the desolation. A horse-drawn cart is laden with a family's remaining possessions. A sign hangs outside one building: "A little disfigured but still in business. Men Wanted."
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Surprisingly incoherent and boring
everything you have heard about this movie is true.
If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.
It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review
The photography shown here is pretty fascinating, and we get some pretty nice shots of the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake. The film is 1 minute, but in that minute we get some pretty nice views, and the film is short enough that it doesn't really get boring. Recommended for film buffs and historians. This footage was well taken and gives us lots of detail for 1 minute.
. . . the description from the earlier reviewer shows that the Kino people retitled this piece as FILMS OF THE SAN FRANCISCO EARTHQUAKE, tacking on a half-minute scan of headlines from various San Francisco newspaper special editions at the beginning (Examples: "Fire, Following Earthquake, Is Sweeping San Francisco; Dead or Injured Already 5,000;" "Ocean Rushes in, Sweeping Whole Valley;" "Entire City Seems Doomed to Destruction;" "San Francisco Seems Doomed;" "Flames Sweep over Whole City;" "Thousands Dead in Outskirts;" & "Martial Law, Looters Shot, Capital Aids" from THE EVENING TELEGRAM; plus "San Francisco Ablaze; Citizens Flee in Terror--Nothing to Stop the Sweep of Flames, and Aid Is Asked from Outside;" & "One Thousand Lives Believed to Have Been Lost; Palace Hotel and Other Famous Structures Destroyed" from THE WORLD). With these headline scans, this collage of snippets from 13 shorts filmed by Robert K. Bonine (to which pianist Jon Mirsalis has added a score) runs 114 seconds. The DVD film notes guy writes that these 13 shorts were used at 1906 fund raisers back East, and had individual titles such as DYNAMITING RUINS & RESCUING SOLDIERS CAUGHT IN THE FALLEN WALLS.
The photography in this short feature is pretty effective in conveying (and preserving) some of what it must have felt like to view the aftermath of the severe 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. In a little over a minute, it shows footage of several different scenes that illustrate various aspects of the disaster: fires, damaged buildings, disrupted roads, and so forth. Most of the sights are those you would expect, but there are one or two unexpected images as well. The print is not always very clear, but then it's not that bad for having been taken in the midst of a chaotic situation, and then having to endure almost a century of potential deterioration.To those who watched it when this film was first made, it must have been quite an experience to see these kinds of pictures from the scene of such a frightening situation. The images won't seem as overwhelming now, when we see such footage so frequently, but this is still a rare visual record of an event that we'd otherwise know only from prose accounts and still photographs.