Aerial anarchists! (Or the vanished doom of the great city, plus bomb-heaving dogs)


To be remade immediately: Aerial Anarchists, from 1911.

"There is currently no known surviving footage of this film and all information is based upon the original catalog synopsis. The film contains scenes of a bombing and its aftermath throughout London and features prominently the bombing of St. Paul's Cathedral and a railway disaster in which a train is seen to leap into a chasm."

For a sense of how it likely looked, watch Booth's The Airship Destroyer (1909) from the same series:



[Three notes on this.

One: identical to the arc of nearly every contemporary disaster/war film.  i.e. Your dad won't let us be together, even though we have enough lust for each other to put down our tennis rackets while strolling.  Now there is an unnamed threat to the planet/the West/capital/nation.  They have bombed your house in their campaign of aerial terror.  Luckily, I am a misunderstood engineer, even if that fact has led to an absence of social status which has previously prevented us from consummating our love.  I have been working on something that now is our only hope.  It kills the invaders.  Now we can be together, as we should have been all along, the exceptional promise of extinction having served its temporary purpose of laying waste to social convention.

Two: attackers from the sky have a strangely EZLN look to their headgear.  The black stain spreads wider through the films, evidently.

Three: terribly prescient about warfare to come, from indiscriminate carpet bombing of non-military targets to the fact that the "airship destroyer" in question is, for all intents and purposes, a pilot-less missile or self-destructive predator drone.]


Next to follow: The Anarchist and His Dog, 1907.

"An anarchist makes advances to a woman. When these are repelled he throws a bomb at the woman and her gentleman friend, but his dog retrieves it."

Our proposed  re-version:

A bourgeois gentleman non-friend makes advances to an anarchist woman.  Her dog throws a bomb at him and retrieves his bloody wallet.

[thanks to A for the death from above rabbit hole]

2 comments:

jane said...

I trust you are aware that this has been remade already and is called Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon? It's very long, but the aerialists, anarchists and dog all arrive within in the first 20 pages.

ECW said...

Phew, that saves me from having to read the whole thing. Though the urge is stronger now, knowing that it involves three of my favorite things.