Balaxanida neft fontani (1898) User Reviews

The Mystery of Aleksandr Mison

[boblipton · 7/10 · 10 November 2012]

Who was Aleksandr Mison? There isn't much about him on the Internet, just a short article in Russian wikipedia. I don't read Russian, but he was a photographer born in 1858. He died in 1921 and in 1898 he photographed ten short films which were distributed by the Lumieres in France. This is one of them, a dramatic view of an oil well fire in Baku.

It's quite a sight. Some of the drama is muted by the black smoke that obscures the entire scenery -- that may be a matter of personal taste. I find fire fascinating, but others may be intrigued by the mysteries hidden in smoke.

hypnotic

[Quinoa1984 · 9/10 · 12 May 2016]

Remember that scene from There Will be Blood when the oil derrick finally, truly pays off and starts gushing oil... and then starts to turn into a blazing fire that lasts all day and all night? It's one of those sights that's made for cinema, but well over 100 years before Anderson did it there was this little 1 minute piece where a Russian filmed an actual derrick fire. There's not much else to it than that, it's all in one shot, but I found myself watching it more than once. It seems like some sort of special effect but it isn't; it's right there before our eyes and it has a hypnotic quality about it. I'd even go so far as to call it artistic just by how the image is split between the fire and the smoke, each taking up a massively satisfying composition.