Public Reel

Things to Come · Beat 44 · permalink

Field

19:59–20:21 Registered 1936

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 4 quotes checked against the transcript; 2 names checked for a spoken or on-screen source; 0 of 3 visible events checked against a frame. Not human-reviewed. Observations and transcript may still be wrong.

Frame at 20:0420:04Frame at 20:1320:13Frame at 20:2020:20

Play from 19:59 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 23 · shots 86–88. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
field (field, exterior) evidence: frame:1, frame:3
People
  • soldier in helmet and uniform, kneeling, holding another man visible
  • man in uniform, lying back, head tilted up, appears injured or dying visible
Seen happening
  • A soldier kneels beside a fallen comrade near a crashed aircraft. [frame:1]
  • The soldier holds the dying man close, looking down at him. [frame:2]
  • The camera shows a desolate field with wreckage and tall grass. [frame:3]
Also said
“God, why do we have to murder each other?” 20:11 · “Go, my friend.” 20:14
Seen
aircraft propeller [frame:1], military uniform and helmet [frame:1, frame:2], tall grass and field [frame:1, frame:3], wreckage in background [frame:3]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: somber and despairing; themes: war, loss, futility, human cost; style notes: grainy black-and-white, medium close-ups on faces, low-angle shot of wreckage, natural lighting under overcast sky

A soldier holds a dying comrade in a field near a crashed aircraft; the dialogue expresses despair over war. The scene ends with a view of the desolate landscape.

“Bad save, eh?” 20:07 · “Why does it come to this?” 20:08 automatic transcript, may be wrong

The record

No renewal found An automated finding, not a verdict. A renewal would have appeared in the Copyright Office's renewal registrations 27 to 29 years after the term began. Those volumes are loaded and our parse of them found no matching renewal. If that is right, a work published 1931–1963 that was not renewed entered the public domain at the end of its 28th year; the volumes are OCR of old print, and the method page reports how often the parse has been found to miss one. Evidence dossier. The finding concerns the US copyright record for the film; it is not clearance for any use, and this page's annotation is machine output.

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Frame from Things to Come (1936) at 20:04 (passage 19:59–20:21); US record: No renewal found

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