cricket30 Review of Blacksmith Scene

Blacksmith Scene (1893)

13 seconds of work, 14 seconds of beer breaks . . .

[8/10 · 25 July 2013]

. . . with no apparent fear of catching meningitis from sharing a common bottle. The film notes guy for EDISON: THE INVENTION OF THE MOVIES 4-disc set (Yalie Charles Musser) assumes the contents of the shared drink are booze-based, since he deems it necessary to explain "the mixing of work and alcohol had been common in the early 19th Century . . ." (which means 1800 to 1850, for the mathematically challenged) " . . . but by the 1890s, was part of a bygone era." What he is alluding to is the fascist work place of New Amerika invented by Edison and his hometown drinking buddy, Henry Ford, in whose namesake museum BLACKSMITH SCENE recently was rediscovered. In just one of millions of examples, Ford hired a racketeer named Henry Bennett to supervise pistol-toting thugs installed along all of his assembly lines, with orders to shoot any workers who attempted to talk to each other while assembling Model T's shortly after BLACKSMITH SCENE was released. Though Edison churned out 2,000 films by 1918, not ONE of them has the title "MODEL T ASSEMBLY LINE SCENE"!!