The Sunday Intertitle: It’s the sudden stop at the bottom.

I found this while researching an online film archive — checked to see if it was on YouTube — OF COURSE it was.

There’s no reason to watch this film, except to see a horrific tragedy play out with uncanny comic timing. Franz Reichelt was an inventor and tailor who got permission to dive off the Eiffel tower wearing a parachute costume of his own devising — it seems to work on the principle of the flying squirrel, or rather, it seems to want to work on that principle. Instead, all Reichelt invents is a new technique for making six inch deep humanoid indentations in a public lawn.

Anyhow, I was stunned, horrified, amused and guilt-ridden by the above film, which is the first and hopefully the last snuff movie you’ll see on Shadowplay.