Troop Ships for the Philippines

This has some pretty good photography for its time that captures a brief historical moment. The photography catches considerable detail, and it holds up well aside from the physical deterioration to the film itself. The content is of some interest, as a view of a moment in history that is seen a bit differently now than it was at the time.

The footage shows the S.S. Australia, which was one of two troop ships leaving San Francisco that day to carry troops to the Philippines. A great deal of the ship's detail can be seen, making it a rare motion picture of a 19th century warship. The decks are thronged with soldiers, and most of them seem to be in high spirits, which would match the popular mood of most Americans at the time. These soldiers, of course, had not yet seen combat, and they are caught up in the moment. It's the kind of scene that occurs in the early stages of many wars, when patriotic enthusiasm is the mood of the day, and that often looks much more poignant later, once the harsh realities of war begin to set in.

The ship is much too large to fit all at once into the camera field, so the effect is panoramic as it moves past. There is little in the background to serve as a solid point of reference, but if you look very carefully, you can see that the camera moves slightly in order to follow the ship partway, which slightly extends the time that part the ship is in the camera field. So it may be of some slight interest also for this rudimentary use of the technique.

This short film clip is from the Thomas Edison collection in the Library of Congress. It is a marvelous example of a documentary from the early days of the motion picture camera.

The vessels, "SS Australia" and "SS City of Sydney" and "SS City of Peking" (visible only as a distant smudge of smoke in the last few seconds of the film) were ocean liners fresh from the San Francisco-Sydney, Australia route. They were leased by the US Army from the Pacific Mail Steamship Company for $1000 a day to carry the California and Oregon Volunteers to the Philippines. They are prime examples of iron-hulled ocean liners of the 1880s.

The second scene shows the "City of Sydney" passing through the Golden Gate 40 years before the famous bridge was built. You can easily make out Fort Point in the background which still stands beneath the arch at the South approach to the bridge.

It is well worth watching.

Troop Ships for the Philippines (1898)

This film runs for a couple minutes and is actually a tad bit different than most of the pictures from this era. Usually they'd run for a minute and just capture some sort of footage. The footage here is a ship full of troops that are heading to the Philippines (just as the title suggests). What makes this one different is that it uses an edit to capture a second bit of footage so this is obviously a little different than your typical film from 1898 that just showed one thing. There's nothing ground-breaking here but it's an interesting film.

The Library of Congress is a great resource to view these older movies.