Watch full movie online. This short film serves as a poem-on-film about the coming of the machine age on the eve of World War I. Images and sounds combine to recreate a bygone era of scratchy phonograph records, faded photographs, hand-cranked movie cameras, staccato Morse telegraph messages, and rhythmic steam pumps. Machines of every description were shaping peoples' lives and changing them more rapidly than at any other time in history.