For just an instant there’s someone standing in the extreme foreground on the left side of the frame. It’s obviously inadvertent, but it’s also pictorial, portentous, a profound index of the actual event. This film is obviously part contrivance, part lark. But that hammer rhythm, those aprons and haircuts, even the beer bottle they pass around as they take a short break, resonate pretty deeply.
Here is the Edison combine, representing the most forward looking visual technology of the day. It turns its attention to a craft that is on the brink of eclipse. Is this an homage, or a joke? Both maybe, but phenomenologically, in the way we now receive and feel it, it’s quite profound.