Spiders on a Web (1900)

Directed by

George Albert Smith

Genre

documentary film, silent film

Country

United Kingdom

Runtime

1 min

Rating

4.0 of 10 from 4 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A silent close-up shot shows two spiders inside an enclosure. The film documents the insects with a fixed camera, offering an early example of nature photography on screen.

observationalclose-upstillcuriousscientificshortsilentstatic

What happens

Spiders on a Web is a 1900 British short silent documentary film, directed by George Albert Smith, featuring a single shot close-up of two spiders trapped in an enclosure (not on a web as indicated in the title). The film is, according to Michael Brooke of BFI Screenonline, "less formally ambitious" than the director's "groundbreaking multiple close-up study Grandma's Reading Glass (1900), made the same year, but is nonetheless, "one of the earliest British examples of close-up natural history photography, predating Percy Smith's insect studies by a decade." (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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