A fireman has a dream of a woman and a child in trouble. Later, an alarm goes on and several firefighters rush from a fire station to their carriages in order to go to a house on fire. The fireman breaks the window, enters the house on the first floor, and saves a woman and her child from the burning building by climbing with them down the ladder.
One of the movies from the early days of cinema, "Life of a Fireman" is also an example of an "exercise" in cinema, a time when film was a new medium and various directors and pioneers still had no ways of finding out how their stories should look like or how to achieve that, except through a long 'trial-and-error' process while making movies. Like most movies in the 1900s, this one is also "rudimentary", presented in static, long wide shots — except for an interesting, albeit rudimentary example of the cross-cutting technique: the scene of a bedroom burning is presented in an interior shot, showing the fireman entering through the window and saving the woman and the child by carrying them outside; and this scene is then repeated again in the exterior shot of the house. This is not quite an example of cross-cutting, since it is shown only once in the entire film, while it also seems more like an error since the action is repeated, instead of switching from one half of the scene to another. Still, some film scholars thus often cite it as helping in the progress of cinema techniques. The only other interesting moment is the scene where the fireman has a "dream bubble" of a woman in danger, while the rest is routine, standard, though still valuable from the perspective of cinema ontology.
Grade;++
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