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

The catalogue in 3D

The film shelves have a room of their own that you can walk around in. The cat behind the counter is the AI Catbot, and they pick real films from the same catalogue when you tell them what you feel like watching. Nothing is for sale, here or in there. Go in from here and this film is already out on the counter, with more like it waiting on the shelf next to it.

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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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• More like this film, on a shelf you can walk up to.It's the lit case on the top shelf.