A Trip to the White Sea Fisheries (1909) User Reviews

The Deadliest Catch

[boblipton · 6/10 · 23 November 2023]

"A beautiful sea" reads the first title, following by wave after wave that seems about to swamp the ship. Four minutes later, we are informed there is a storm, and it looks even worse.

Joe Rosenthal's documentary does not seem to survive in full; there are reports of the ship setting out from harbor at the start that the copy I looked at lacks. Still, it's a picture of the hard and harrowing work that fishermen undergo.

Rosenthal started out as a cameraman about 1900, and usually worked in documentaries through his last credit as a camera operator in 1935. He died in 1946. 87 or 88 years old.

Beware of imitations

[kekseksa · 24 July 2018]

A film purporting to be this film appears on the BFI site and was also issued on DVD as North Sea fisheries and Sea Rescue (an evidently fake title)

It is a curious case. The first part of this film is indeed Joe Rosenthal's A Trip to the White Sea Fisheries made in 1909 for his Croydon-based company Rosie Films. There is a little bit missing at the beginning, of the ship setting out, which you can see in another short extract from the film that was issued as Trawlers Ahoy! (and falsely dated 1899). The scene of the small boat in the storm is also from the Rosenthal film.

But the sea rescue at the end, although it is proudly claimed by the BFI who include a still from it on their site, is nothing whatever to do with Rosenthal or with the North Sea fisheries. It is simply clipped out of a very famous Portuguese short of 1913 called O Naufrágio do Veronese by Nunes de Matos, a rare case when a cinematographer was on hand to film a genuine disaster happening (which is what made it famous). The ship in this part of the film is quite obviously the Veronese and not a fishing boat.

A Trip to the White Sea Fisheries review

[JoeytheBrit · 7/10 · 13 May 2020]

Interesting documentary that does a good job of capturing the sheer physical toll of working on a fishing trawler in the White Sea. Also features some dramatic footage of ships on stormy seas.