You can see another object in front of the “mobile phone”; the woman is holding two objects on her left hand.
Here’s the video cued to 18 minutes 16 seconds:
Four seconds later, you can see the same woman from behind at 18 minutes, 20 seconds:
If you watch these two sections in slow-motion (playback speed 0.25), you will see that it seems that she is just holding her glasses along with the glasses case.
Mystery solved.
How did the cell phone work without any cells?
No way man. Those things took so many batteries. I had one in the 70s. The thing ate batteries.
A guy I knew in the 80s used one to sample incidental sound for (student) films and for his band, he had an the optional rechargeable battery that plugged into a car lighter.
Camera still works, as does recording audio. You just have to remember your charger!
Looks like she enjoyed the show more than the guy who went to see JFK.
But! Can you say with certainty those glasses are not f om a future where we have time travel but still can’t fix vision problems? Or maybe those are her AR glasses that overlay the concert with the time travel equivalent of a museum guide?
In the movie Somewhere in Time, the protagonist goes back to the turn of the 20th century wearing a clownish looking, slightly anachronistic suit because he didn’t quite nail his research.
Spoiler Alert: Tragically, a detail in the suit undoes our hero at the end of the movie.
It’s a pretty good flick. I have a theory that all time travel tales are romantic, but it’s not very well resolved.
Is it just me, or does he kind of start looking like Meatloaf towards the end of his days?
We should upscale those to 4k120p and harness the power of computer assisted pareidolia.
Looks like a cassette tape to me. I saw the picture and assumed she was changing tapes in a recorder we can’t see.
That’s the first thing I thought of when I saw it.
Hmmm…
I wonder what service provider she would use in 1977.
Ah, you’re falling for the mistaken assumption that time travel will be controlled by competent people or regulated by reasonable governments. In reality, time travel will be invented by a small group of physics nerds who sell their ideas to a South African mining heir who proclaims himself smarter than everyone else for buying other people’s inventions. He will then charges $3.50 for “verified travelers” to skirt the temporal rules and safety guidelines. This will result in all sorts of crazy shit like a series of pretend cowboys and a failed real estate magnate rising to the office of POTUS, fast food restaurants developing social media accounts and doing battle with political leaders, and corporations being granted personhood. I know…it sounds crazy!
That’s a theme in Connie Willis’ novels about the Oxford time-travelling historians, Doomsday Book, To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Blackout/All Clear. Time travel is strictly controlled by Oxford academics, but despite their good intentions, they never get it quite right. A young woman sent back to a 14th-century English village, for example, has the wrong dialect, too-fine clothes, and is too clean.
Connie Wills wrote Doomsday Book in 1992. There’s an important plot point regarding a character waiting for hours by a landline phone for another character to call. This scene is set in 2054.
