Shooting Captured Insurgents

The only reason I'm reviewing this particular film now is because-according to this site-it's the first one partly directed by one Edwin S. Porter who would go on to helm more story-oriented shorts like the famous The Great Train Robbery. But he's not IDed as such on Wikipedia so this will not be my first in a series of reviews that I'm calling Early Works of Film Directors. Anyway, it depicts an execution by firing squad of a group of soldiers who, I guess, were betrayers of their country. That's it. If this was really a recreation and not an actual depiction of a real-life event, then it was certainly convincing enough to me as I'm sure it was to the original viewers when this was possibly viewed on what was known at the time as a kinetoscope. I saw this on YouTube...

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.

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.

Of course, it would've been dangerous and extremely difficult to film actual events during the Spanish-American War. So the Edison Manufacturing Company did the next best thing by re-enacting an event for this short.

Even though it wasn't "real", I can only imagine how disturbing it would have been back in 1898 to see people being lined up and killed. Due to its gritty, documentary-like feel, it is still somewhat unsettling to view even today. This short has been preserved by the Library of Congress and I viewed it as one of the unadvertised bonus shorts found in the DVD boxed set of "The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913".

I assume that when this incredibly short film was made that it was passed off as actual footage of Spanish atrocities in their colonies. Perhaps they admitted it was a re-creation, though I doubt it as many times studios pretended to show real events (such as the execution of McKinley's assassin which was faked and passed off as real). The bottom line is that films like this helped propel the US into a war with Spain and the film footage either was used to drum up support for the war OR excuse the war after the fact....it's hard to tell since it came out in 1898 and the war was over and done with that same year. Regardless, it had its intended purpose...sleazy as it was.