Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/13/restored-film-of-san-francisco.html
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Fabulous to see horses, streetcars, bicycles, cars and people all trying to get where they’re going. It really makes me appreciate sidewalks, crosswalks and street lights!
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They passed my street, lol.
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Yeah, people think of the old trope of “Boy Scouts helping the elderly cross the street” as an example of over-exuberant do-gooders looking for an excuse to perform a helpful deed.
We often forget that in the olden days anyone who didn’t have speed, dexterity and lightning reflexes was putting their life at substantial risk every time they tried to cross a busy street.
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Watching the guy with the baby in his arms exit the streetcar and cross in front of it, as well as a few cars, made me cringe.
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It almost reminds me of North East Philly.
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Things I don’t think about on streets now: horse-shit everywhere, urchins hopping a ride on the back of your car, wagons slowing me down…
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I see things like this* and I think about people in the future “up-rezzing” our low-fi phone footage and wonder what they’ll make of that.
*Which I love BTW
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This was a time when nothing on the street was moving faster than a horse-drawn carriage. Cars were just barely a brand new thing at the time. In fact I think the whole point of this video was to show what cars were like - the only ones on the road are the handful that are looping around the camera over and over.
I think it’s just that most cars looked alike back then. You can see at least six individual automobiles within a span of a few seconds around the 40 second mark. Not yet as numerous as the horse-drawn carriages but far more numerous than the people who traveled the city riding on horseback.
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And now please step into our holodeck recreation of the dumbest period in human history. Mind the delivery drones.
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Astonishing, haunting and scary. The way that the cars were weaving haphazardly though the traffic was quite startling.
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From the Wikipedia entry on the original version of the film:
I saw the film in a presentation in the state capital a few years back and it was noted then that there were only something like 50 automobiles registered in S.F. at the time of filming, so a significant fraction of them were rounded up to make this film.
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What?! It was Fake News Olds?!
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Can someone explain who those two characters are on the right side of the frame @ 13:17?
Are they wearing masks? Facepaint? wtf?
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In no way does colorizing a black-and-white film “restore” it.
They are nuns in habits, I think.
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Daywalkers. Definitely daywalkers.
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