20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1916 · Silent · Drama
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1916), the first feature shot underwater, filmed in the Bahamas from a steel diving globe. Watch the silent film free online.
Stuart Paton's Verne adaptation folds in The Mysterious Island, hands you a full-size navigable Nautilus, divers walking the sea floor, and a fight with a rubber octopus that is exactly as dignified as it sounds.
The underwater work belongs to the Williamson brothers. J. E. Williamson lowered a steel sphere he called the photosphere down a tube from a barge, put a cameraman inside it, and shot out through a window into shallow, sunlit Bahamian water. It is generally held to be the first feature with real underwater photography, and it cost Universal so much that Verne went quiet at the movies for years afterward.
Everything down there is actual water and actual light, in 1916.
Free to watch via internet-archive.
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