San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake

It's exactly hard to say what the title of this interesting, one-minute documentary was originally. Kino's "The Movies Begin" DVD set call it "Aftermath of Earthquake", while their "Edison: Invention of the Movies" set simply lists this as being "Films of the San Francisco Earthquake" with one extra shot included that was not in the other set. In either case, Robert Bonine, who was credited with the shooting of this footage, (it could be Billy Blitzer like IMDb suggests, but the DVD suggests differently) basically stitched together a series of shots of the incredible damage following the earthquake, including store fronts, streets, and even a fire raging. Panning is included, which was becoming standard by 1906, and context is given by the use of a series of closeups starting the film off, featuring newspaper articles describing the tragedy. While one wouldn't mind seeing even closer detail (a five-minute documentary would have been quite interesting) the views are well composed overall and Bonine clearly shows experience, having worked shooting footage for the Edison company at least eight years by this point.

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.