okiesurveyor

Intriguing anti-western by first time director Scott Blake. A story of a government surveyor circa 1848 on a trek home after surveying land on the Western frontier. It's a highly accomplished period piece with meticulous attention to detail re: costumes, props, location. A rare formalist feat by a young filmmaker who appears to have no interest in the rickety realism he has every right making at his age, 26. Surveyor may require a little patience - it begins minimally and is long for a short at 25 minutes - but it's far from stagnant, and includes a notable last minute pivot into hallucinatory darkness. What begins as a rigorous exercise unfolds like a gothic nightmare - you can't quite make sense of it all, but it feels real. Impressive and mysterious debut film [Watch in full screen mode for better quality video]

I don’t know.  But that is what was specified in the original instructions to the government surveyors when the State of Oklahoma was first laid out. I do, however, have a neat fact about the chain that was used when measuring the original sections. It is called a Gunters chain and it was 66 feet long. It was that specific length for a reason; to calculate acreage of tracts of land. 80 Gunters chains placed end to end measured one mile (5280 feet). 80 chains x 80 chains = 6400/10 = 640 acres. So the product of the number of chains measured on each side of a tract of land divided by 10 equals the number of acres Example: 5 chains x 5 chains = 2.5 acres 10 chains x 10 chains = 10 acres 20 chains x 20 chains = 40 acres 40 chains x 40 chains = 160 acres How does that work?  I don’t know. But one acre of land would then, by default, be the sum of 66’ x 66’ (1 chain x 1 chain) divided by 0.10 = 43,560 square feet, which is the number used in al...