• Director: Frederick S. Armitage
  • Year: 1901
  • Runtime: 3m

This is a very early time-lapse of the tearing down of the Star Theatre on Broadway which, when played in reverse afterwards as advised by the production company, then makes it look like it was appearing out of the rubble like a Phoenix.

Like Solar Eclipse, this film captures another one of those universal fascinations that joins us together across time and space—humans like to watch normally imperceptibly slow things sped up. It's illuminating! It's magical! Hell, it's just plain fun!

The fact that there are horse drawn carriages and ladies in bustles under their dresses just makes this one even more fun.

The director set up a camera across the street from the theatre and took a frame once every four minutes, eight hours a day, until the theatre was in the dirt.

Consider that we're not even twenty years in to the birth of cinema and we’ve seen the invention of dissolves, picture-in-picture, pans, compositing, and now time-lapse. An explosion of creativity!