Amazingly, the smell was the least of the problems arising from all those urban horses at the time:
The walking stick business looks like it was another money-maker at the time.
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Adding color and sound only makes it more real if, by some magic, you can completely accurately duplicate the actual colors and sounds at the time of filming. These added gimmicks only make the footage less authentic.
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So just like Seattle’s Monorail…
Seems like there are plenty of bikes, especially when one considers how small/compact Paris is. I was struck by how many of the cyclonauts had mastered riding with no hands.
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I think it makes a big difference whether you’re colorizing a work of art in which a director made aesthetic decisions based on the knowledge that the final film would be black & white versus colorizing a historical recording to give people an idea of what the world once looked like.
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Is the footage real? Is the sound real?
I have seen convincing historical fakes before, but I’ve never seen smooth crisp video from over a hundred and twenty years ago that happens to have legible audio.
If this is real it’s incredible, and I would ask anyone who knows more what’s the oldest actual videos we have of humanity are. I mean even as a bleeding edge technology there would have been several hyper rich people around the world who could afford to take a short video.
When did it all start? Is there a catalog or location that collects all of the oldest normal non movie videos?
The footage is real and digitally speed adjusted as FPS was not standard in the early days. The sound has been added.
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So bicyclists have always been crazy. Did anyone catch the nutjob that cut across however many lanes of traffic dodging right in front of a team of horses? That’s a trampling waiting to happen.
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I saw that smooooth move and thought to myself, “WTF?”
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(This is the original, black and white Addams Family set.)
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There weren’t really traffic laws back then. Nobody needed them until the motorcars showed up and started slaughtering everyone.
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At equivalent speeds, being an auto-ped victim versus being a horse-TEAM-vs-pedestrain…
Even modern horses aren’t designed to minimize pedestrian damage. THe big problem seems to be that cars go so very fast …
I have ridden a pennyfarthing on the streets of Denver. Once you are used to riding Fixed, it is not different (but the start/stop IS different!).
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I wonder how many of those small boys playing in the pond with boats ended up 15+ years later as Poilus wearing a Casque Adrien and holding a Lebel Rifle while wondering where it all went wrong.
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Adrian, not Adrien.
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You know, there’s a special hell for Youtube commentators.
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VERY IMPORTANT distinction 
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It’s a hybrid. 
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The commenters might be pleased to know that the ‘pure, white France’ of the film was every bit as anti-Semitic and xenophobic as they could want, and that around the time that the film was shot, there were two notable massacres of Italian immigrant workers. Plus ça change, hein?
That film is shot almost exclusively in the fanciest districts of Paris, reducing the likelihood of any non-white folks making it onto the celluloid. But, in fact, there may not have been many in Paris at the time: France had plenty of overseas colonies, but the folks in what are known known as les DOM-TOM (domaines d’outre-mer, territoires d’outre-mer) seem to have been obliged to remain largely where they were: non-European immigration to France didn’t really begin until later, and at first only in very small numbers.
So while racist nostalgia for a ‘pure, white’ past is often ahistorical as well as obnoxious, it does seem as if France of that time really was pretty soda-cracker white. I’m sure not everyone in 1890’s France would meet the racial purity standards of les p’tits fachos du YouTube, but it does seem as if non-white people were rare enough that if the Lumières had seen any they might have put them in their movie.
I think the small boys playing with boats are mostly from the upper classes, and not exactly poilu materiel. So rather than a Casque Adrian and a Lebel, they might have had a képi and a pistolet Ruby, but they probably had similar questions.
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