cricket30 Review of Lone Fisherman

Lone Fisherman (1896)

If you think itz hilarious to see someone drown . . .

[6/10 · 5 February 2013]

. . . then LONE FISHERMAN may be your cup of tea. While some previous reviewers allege that this short is a staged prank, it is actually the oldest surviving example of the infamous "snuff" film genre. I viewed all 44.56 seconds of it four times with Dean, and he agrees with me that an actual drowning is filmed here. Nowadays someone who takes pictures of someone else in a precarious position instead of helping them to safety gets into trouble. (Just ask that cell phone picture taker who got castigated for the New York City subway station incident last month.) But apparently old Tom Edison and his cameramen could get away with anything back in the day--they electrocuted an elephant, with flames shooting from the feet, for darn sake! The cameramen here no doubt are in cahoots with the "prankster" who dumps the unsuspecting fisherman into the river. Only too late does the prankster realize his victim is drowning and jump in himself (which dousing would be incomprehensible if the fisherman were in on the gag, too). When the prankster comes to shore empty-handed, a horrified expression on his face, the cameramen quickly cram the lens over their crime accessory, which would be called "obstruction of justice" in the present day. What is a real shame is that the Edison people not only were crass enough to release this carefully sanitized version of the tragedy to the public, but they were proved correct in their thinking that people of the 1890s were so naive about the motion picture medium that they would never suspect anything was amiss with the LONE FISHERMAN film. As they say on CSI all the time, there is no statute of limitations on murder, but all involved in this peccadillo probably have joined their victim on the other side of the river by now.