Public Reel

Water Rustlers · Beat 54 · permalink

Riverbed

11:39–11:57 Released 1938; registered 1939

Machine annotation by Qwen/Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Instruct, cut beats-0.2, prompt beats-0.2. Machine checks passed (partial). 1 name 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 11:4111:41Frame at 11:4611:46Frame at 11:5411:54

Play from 11:39 on the Internet Archive This passage on the film's page

Evidence and details

Starts here: pause in speech. Sequence 31 · shots 95–97. Observations cite a frame (frame:n) or a time (t:m:ss); frames are the sampled ones above.

Place
riverbed (field, exterior) evidence: frame:1
People
  • man wearing a hat and long-sleeved shirt, standing beside a horse visible
Seen happening
  • A cow lies motionless on a rocky riverbed. [frame:1]
  • A man stands next to a horse in a rocky field with cattle grazing nearby. [frame:2]
  • The man bends over near the horse while cattle continue to graze in the background. [frame:3]
Seen
dead cow [frame:1], horse [frame:2], cattle [frame:2], rocks and dry vegetation [frame:1]
Interpretation
Model opinion, not evidence: mood: somber; themes: death in nature, rural labor, isolation; style notes: wide shots, high-contrast black and white, natural lighting, static camera

A cow lies dead on a rocky riverbed while a man tends to a horse nearby; other cattle graze in the background. The scene is set in a dry, open landscape with no visible structures.

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 Water Rustlers (1938) at 11:41 (passage 11:39–11:57); US record: No renewal found

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