16mm san-francisco-1955

[aj]

Amateur at work in the 1950's
16mm Bell & Howell Cinemascope lens with the wonders of Kodachrome
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archiv ... 55/251633/

[carllooper]

Amateur at work in the 1950's
16mm Bell & Howell Cinemascope lens with the wonders of Kodachrome
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archiv ... 55/251633/

Thanks Andre. Some great material there. The ability to look into the past, through film, is so refreshing. Especially that decade when widescreen went mainstream. What I enjoy about amateur footage is the way it taps into (consciously or otherwise) the "ordinary".

But what is so interesting is that while shots like this may have been considered ordinary at the time (although the very act of capturing the ordinary is by no means ordinary) it's with time that such ordinariness becomes increasingly extraordinary. It is not just it's unfamiliarity (with out own realities) but a kind of "shock of the old", as young again.

It's also great to see the 1950s, when widescreen went mainstream, actually in widescreen (cinemascope). Very apt.


Lev Manovich, a digital age media theorist, envisaged a form of cinema he called "database cinema" (1998) in which the shots of such a cinema would be navigated (like browsing the web), rather than observed in a pre-assembled fixed order. While he references Peter Greenaway and Dziga Vertov, their work was never completable (at the time) as a database cinema, although their material was definitely orientated towards such a future.

The act of browsing the film archive and bringing into focus this or that work, according to this or that motive, can be regarded as what Manovich means by a database cinema.

cheers
Carl

[Nicholas Kovats]

This is truly a superlative K40 Cinemascope record! Wonnderful!

Check out Mr. Tullio Pellegrini's cinematography. Excellent composition with a few amazing POVs from the car interior as he zips down hills. Such cinematographic Chutzpah...considering the era!

No anamorphic skew! I wonder what Bell & Howell camera was used?

[Tscan]

Thanks for posting, this is a great historical document. I saw another fillm much like this on PBS once (without naration), shot on 16mm Kodachrome in New York City in about 1943. It was called something like "The Magic City" but iv've never been able to find it again.