People are voting emotionally.

Fantastic!

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This print is featured as an unadvertised bonus to Kino's magnificent collection "The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema" in the second volume, namely "The European Pioneers." The reason they call this an unadvertised bonus is because the print survives in a most blurry condition, thus it is below Kino's standard quality.Apparently this film is a reenactment of an event in the Spanish-American war. There is not much here. A group of soldiers line up some other soldiers against a wall. The commanding officer signals and the soldiers shoot at the ones lined up against the wall. As the smoke clears the soldiers are seen falling to the ground. That's practically it.A dramatic picture, shocking for 1898. But it has good historical value and must have been a great achievement. Of course it is not a real event, but looks pretty believable even today.(Note: I plan to review all of the unadvertised bonuses at some time. This is the fourth I've reviewed. The others are "Girls Swinging" (1897) "The Interrupted Bathers" and "The Draped Model" (both 1902).

Shooting Captured Insurgents (1898) This here is a rather violent, for its time, film that shows some Spanish soldiers being lined up against a wall and shot dead.From what I've gathered this here isn't real footage of an execution, although there are some of these movies out there. It seems this one here was staged just to tell a story or give people the idea that they were watching the "bad guy" being executed. You have to wonder what people in 1898 would have thought about material like this and I can only imagine that it probably met with some controversy or at least some outrage by certain folks.

You may remember from my review of the 1896 Edison offering, LONE FISHERMAN, that I found compelling evidence establishing that allegedly fictional offering as film history's first snuff pic. Edison, the guy who filmed Dumbo being electrocuted on purpose--complete with flames shooting out of the chained pachyderm's feet--in order to win the contract for Osing-Osing's death chair, and who hung out with future Nazi enablers such as Henry Ford, always had a nose for the sick, macabre, and the quintessentially American. What could be more red-white-and-blue than marching four poor souls with their wrists tied into a courtyard, making them face the wall, and having some bozo with a drawn sword race around till ordering a quartet of riflemen to put bullets into the backs of heads four feet in from of them? (Edison probably gave Insurgent #2 from the left highest marks for his death flop, what with the leg kick and all). In its day, this short would cause only the richest of taxpayers to puke up their poached eggs over the waste of the price of four bullets (but Ford's buddy Adolph would get much more bang for his killing jar buck a few decades later, thanks to Edison docs such as SHOOTING CAPTURED INSURGENTS).

This staged war feature - grim and a bit unsettling in itself - is an interesting early example of the power that movies have to blur the line between reality and illusion. It was based on reports of similar factual events, but the movie itself was staged. It looks quite realistic, though, especially by the standards of its day, and it would not have been surprising if its original audiences interpreted it as a factual record.The footage depicts a stylishly dressed Spanish officer leading a firing squad in the execution of a small group of Cuban freedom fighters. There seems to be little doubt that it was intended to influence public opinion in favor of the war against Spain, and as such it would have been one of many such efforts from the press and other influential institutions of the day.Many history books record the efforts at the time of the Hearst press and others in support of war, but moving picture footage like this - even if it is only a fictional recreation - is much more likely to be seen by future generations, in addition to whatever influence it may have had in its own time.