Journal of e-Media Studies, Volume 7 Issue 1: Early Cinema History (Understanding Visual Culture Through Silent Film Collections)

The Unchanging Sea (1910) Clip 9 - Tsivian_Khitrova.mp4 0-25.01

Eileen Bower observes: “The eternal theme of women waiting for the fishermen who went out to sea was widely popular in literature and films, and was used several times by Biograph (After Many Years, Lines of White on a Sullen Sea, Enoch Arden). As in those films, The Unchanging Sea intercuts the shots of the waiting woman with shots of the faraway husband, maintaining the link between them for a lifetime of waiting. When a new suitor comes to her, the woman shakes her head and points out to sea. In the next shot her husband, on the opposite side of the screen from her, looks out to sea, still puzzled by his memory loss, perhaps feeling a stirring in his mind. In the foreground of a shot on the beach, a young man proposes to their grown daughter, a key moment in their lives: yet the waiting wife’s back is turned to them and to the camera, while she searches the empty sea. In the next shot, on the faraway shore, her husband prepares to return to the sea, the action that will lead him home again. Griffith has found images that meet the words of the Kingsley poem: he has, in effect, set them to music” (TGP 4:70).

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