In the Swimming Pool, Palm Beach, Florida (1905) User Reviews

Backwards, Turn Backwards, Oh Time in Your Flight

[boblipton · 4/10 · 18 August 2015]

People dive into a pool, some from a diving board at the pool's edge, and some from the second floor of the building. Then, through the miracle of printing the film backwards, they leap from the pool to the diving board and the second floor.

Palm Beach was established as a resort for the wealthy by the time this film was made, although I'm sure the occasional middle-class couple might honeymoon there. Because of that, the reverse printing of the second half of this film has an air of satire about it as the super-rich of the Gilded Age perform ridiculous feats for the amusement of the lower-class nickelodeon audience.

Jump In, Jump Out

[Michael_Elliott · 19 August 2015]

In the Swimming Pool, Palm Beach, Florida (1905)

The title tells you what pretty much happens in this film but there's a trick. The film starts off with people jumping off a diving board into a pool as well as jumping from a second story into the pool. Then the movie puts the footage in reverse and we see them jumping backwards. This type of "trick" film was done as early as the late 1890s but the biggest difference between those and this film is that this one lasts nearly four minutes and it becomes very boring very quickly. The cinematography is weak to say the least and the trick itself is just so obvious that I'm sure people in 1905 felt cheated by this.