High Diving Scene (1901)

Fantastic!

As Good As It Gets

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The acting in this movie is really good.

High Diving Scene (1901) *** (out of 4) This Edison film is another one of theirs where they basically just went to a popular event and filmed what was going on. In this one we see a man riding a bike down a very high slide where at the end he flips off with the bike landing in a net and him crashing into a pool of water. At just 48-seconds there's obviously nothing terrific to be seen here but I always enjoy watching these older films because they give you a realistic view of what people did back in 1901 to be entertained. The stunt itself was quite impressive but after he lands in the water and the camera pans, you can see hundreds of people standing around in amazement. I wonder what these people would think that this event they witnessed was being viewed by someone 114 years after the fact?

. . . which Lance probably would appreciate quite a bit right now, as it would give him an opportunity to revive an ancient sport no one does any more, which no doping agency could ban him from, which would enable him to start raking in the dough again by selling all those yellow Live Wrong bracelets for his foundation (by the way, the earlier reviewer SAW A DIFFERENT SHORT, and described something else!). What actually happens in HIGH DIVING SCENE is a bicyclist rides down a wooden ski ramp, jettisons the bike at the end of the ramp, and dives into a large retention pond as hundreds of spectators surrounding the pond shout and clap, swimming overhand from the middle of the water to the far end, and climbing out of the water to mount a small wooden podium in order to bow in all four directions and swiftly depart the scene. From his previous triathlon efforts, Lance has the biking and swimming down pat, and I think there is a new TV reality show coming out soon on which he can learn to dive. The only problem I foresee here is his ability to depart the podium in a timely fashion.

This is an average looking film with a little technical fillip. A couple of men plummet down an enormous slide into a small pond -- the slide looking pretty much, except for scale, like the ones we used to go down when I was a child. The men do not actually dive, but land on their fannies, which probably elicited a sympathetic grimace or two from the audience.Technically, though, there is a small pan leftward near the end as the sliders swim across the pond and exit. The purpose of the pan seems to be simply to keep the men near the center of the frame; they are, after all, the interesting moving objects. Earlier, pans were used to show you more interesting stuff beyond the edge of the frame. Later this sort of pan would become more elaborate as the cameraman would work to maintain the shape of the subject's composition. This appears to be an intermediate phase in the evolution of the pan.