“blue mantle was shot along the Massachusetts coast. Images include paintings by Winslow Homer and illustrations from Harper’s Weekly accounts of disasters and rescues at sea. The main musical sources are Debussy’s La mer, Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and ‘Lowlands’, a sea shanty. Texts range from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Thoreau to Melville. The only cinematic representations supplementing my own footage are Edison’s 1900 A Storm at Sea and a model-size Eidophusikon (a pre-cinematic 18th-century theatrical spectacle described in its day as ‘moving pictures, representing phenomena of nature’). The 40 miles of sea between Chatham and Provincetown came to be called an ocean graveyard due to the thousands of wrecks that occurred there during a time when sea-going vessels were the primary means for “bringing man nearer unto man” (Longfellow).” (RM)
