On a misty, windy morning in April 2007 Chris Kennedy, Martha’s Vineyard superintendent for The Trustees of Reservations, had just returned from the part of South Beach in Edgartown known as Norton Point. The night before Katama Bay had filled to overflowing by the flood of an astronomical high tide, topped off by the overwash and storm surge of a Patriots’ Day gale.

More than anything else, a revolution in technology made the Tuesday edition of the Vineyard Gazette possible back in the summer of 1929. Ironically enough, it was another revolution in technology that rendered it more or less obsolete 84 years later.

If you had walked the shoreline of the Vineyard between roughly 1870 and the middle 1930s — especially the muscular, rocky north shore from Lambert’s Cove west to Gay Head — you would have seen something there’s absolutely no sign of today: row after row of wooden stakes stretching up to 100 feet outward from the beach into Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds.

For nearly 30 years, it has solved disputes that were heading to small claims court. It has helped resolve differences between business partners, those going through divorce or custody cases, and it has even run seminars on how town conservation commissions and other agencies deal with emotional and consequential issues involving land use and planning.

The film is just 23 minutes, 14 seconds long. It’s silent, black and white and there are moments when the images jump around due to the choppiness of the sea — or of the editing. There’s a shot of a man with a long harpoon and dart leaning against the rail of a bowsprit. There’s a wooden keg bouncing over the wave tops toward the horizon.

He was an artist and historian, author and harbor master, boat yard owner and model maker, designer of homes, builder of lobster boats and family yawls, a husband, father and grandfather. Three times he was denied the chance to enlist in the armed forces after the attack on Pearl Harbor. He finally joined a volunteer ambulance service working with the British army and was present at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.