This is another very early Dickson/Heise short film that does not focus on athletes or dancers this time, but shows us some music. And even if you can't hear what's going on and this film is hurt more than most from that era by the lack of audio, you could still feel the music sort-of while watching the musicians and how they blow into their trumpets as strongly as they can.
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"Band Drill" is an example of one of the very earliest films ever made in the silent era that takes a well-known theatrical skit or play, and films it to create a motion picture version of the original spectacle. Before cross-cutting, closeups, medium closeups and other modern film techniques came into play (which started to take over at about 1910 and later) one of the most commonly used methods of storytelling in film was, quite frankly put, a drudgery of long shots taken in a certain order, one after the other.
This is the kind of movie that seems to have little to offer when viewed by itself, without reference to its original context. If it were nothing more than one simple scene of a band at practice, then there are only a couple of details that would be worth noticing, so that it would be of limited interest at best.
Band Drill (1894) *** (out of 4)This Edison film runs a very short 20-seconds but from a historic point of view it remains quite entertaining. In the short running time we see a group of men performing a section from the play "The Milk White Flag", which was apparently very popular back in the day.
This movie makes you to wonder yourself, in which year audio has became part of movies? Why?
