Incoming Tide

Worthing waves at us in this mesmerising early film

There is a tide in the affairs of film... In the Victorian period, films of rough seas constituted a genre unto themselves and, as this example filmed at Worthing demonstrates, a strangely engaging one at that. We should think of films like this not as precursors of mainstream cinema but as the new media of its day: not narratives but mesmerising meditations on movement itself.