What I'm Watching: A Trip down Market Street, 1906

 

Only in San Francisco: a world without rules!  The libertarian's dream.  What would that look like?  This film shows you clearly, with a camera mounted on a streetcar proceeding leisurely through the heart of the great city in a very casual mix of streetcars, horses, buggies, automobiles, bicycles, and fleet-footed pedestrians - a jaw-dropping sight sure to raise the hair on your head.

Just four days later, it all came crashing down.  Alas, Babylon!

The film speed has been corrected, and a bit of sound and color added.  The video description on the YouTube page explains how the film was made and much later found and restored.  A priceless piece of American history you won't forget.

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To Hear the Past

One of the movies playing at a theater passed by the camera.

Back when talkies were the Big New Thing, Fox Movietone News put a camera and microphone on a truck and drove through the Times Square district on a day of melting snow:  a fascinating glimpse of life just as it was then.




British Movietone News did something similar in London around the same time: this selection begins with the procession of King George V and Queen Mary to the State Opening of Parliament in the Gold State Coach.  Also featured are the wedding of the Duke of Westminster, and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his Cabinet.

London in Color - 1927

A delightful glimpse into the past by pioneer filmmaker Claude Friese-Greene:



Be sure to mute the mindless, annoying modern soundtrack, which has no relation to anything in the film - which was a silent film, anyway.

World's First Color Film Found

Along about 1902, a young British photographer named Edward Turner came up with a way to film movies in natural color.  Unfortunately, Turner died a couple of years later, and his technique was forgotten, along with his pioneering films.  But now researchers at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, have reprocessed the 110-year-old film found in their vaults, with amazing results:



Read more about the discovery at the museum's website.

In Living Color

These beauties from 1922 live again in this early test of Kodachrome motion picture film, newly scanned and digitized by Kodak.  The first feature-length movie in color didn't appear till 1935.

Miraculous.




Honk to my truckbuddy dave for tipping me to this clip.

Summer Fun - A Hundred Years Ago

Early films are wonderful to watch because they happily correct the erroneous impression we all get from looking at old black-and-white photographs in books:  our great-grandparents looked rather solemn when they put on their formal faces for the still cameras, for dignity's sake - "say cheese" didn't really become the norm until after World War I. 

But as these clips by Edison and others show so vividly, our collective ancestors were not carved out of stone, but just as human as we are.  Young women were just as silly and giggly then as now, and young men just as silly and show-offish as today.  Human nature does not change.  And this ought to correct another wrong idea:  just because you are loaded down with every technological gadget you can afford, and think nothing of jetting across the continent or around the world whenever the whim strikes you, does not mean you are one whit different from, or intrinsically better than, your ancestors.  Quite the opposite.

You are still just a human being, as they were.  Think about it.

Folkestone, Kent, England, 1904:



Blackpool, Lancashire:



Coney Island, New York City: