Discovery of Bodies (1903) User Reviews

One Of A Three-Part Movie

[boblipton · 3/10 · 27 December 2019]

A house smolders. Three mountain men come and remove bodies from the wreckage, then look at something offscreen.

At two minutes in length - assuming it was shown at the right speed - this is a substantial, although not very informative short for the year of its release; not much happens. If the IMDb is correct, and this was one of a three-part movie, THE PIONEERS, then.... well, it's still not much of anything. Over at Edison, they were producing THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, with a tremendous number of incidents in its 11 minutes. This one drags by comparison.

True, it was 1903, and no one was quite sure what to do with a movie like this, when the standard was one-minute actualities. Even so, it drags.

Context

[JohnSeal · 4/10 · 24 September 2016]

I can only guess at the context of this bizarre little drama. The film opens with a stationary shot of some smoldering ruins. Enter, stage left, a group of three armed men (hunters? soldiers?), who discover two dead bodies on the ground in front of the ruins. The film shows them removing the bodies from the camera's view, then continuing on their way. So why did they move the corpses? They are still, presumably, there: the men had less than no time to bury them. Is this some sort of meta-movie in which characters acknowledge our discomfort with the sight of the dead? Who were the victims? Did an out of control fire do them in, or were they killed by marauding Indians, or...what? If you think you have the answer, drop me a line.

Some bodies are discovered

[Tornado_Sam · 12 June 2017]

This print is featured as an unadvertised bonus to Kino's magnificent collection "The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema" in the second volume, namely "The European Pioneers." The reason they call this an unadvertised bonus is because the print survives in a most faded and blurred condition, thus it is below Kino's standard quality.

This is a very early drama which, as IMDb informs me, is part three of a series of three movies entitled "The Pioneers". I don't know what happened in the other two installments (maybe this is the only surviving one) but no doubt they provided more context and a more sophisticated plot as a whole. All that occurs in this two minute short is that some explorers discover, as the title gives away, bodies--apparently Indians set fire to the unfortunates' cabin. (Comically, all they do is carry them off-screen without holding a burial of any sort). With this being the only available segment, it's pretty baffling to know what they were going for but we can at least appreciate the fine smoke effects they used.

(Note: I am nearly finished reviewing all the unadvertised bonuses. There are 10 and this is the 9th. The others are "Girls Swinging" (1897) "The Draped Model" and "The Interrupted Bathers" (both 1902) "Shooting Captured Insurgents" (1898) "Execution of a Spy" (1900) "Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison" (1901) "The Burlesque Suicide No. 2" (1902) and "Electrocuting an Elephant" (1903). As far as I know, this particular bonus is only available on the set and is no where on YouTube or anywhere else).