1906 - Down Market Street, San Francisco
Cable Car, the Sutter Street Railroad, view from 1905(http://www.cable-car-guy.com/html/ccsfssr_tech.html)
I dedicate this post to Ms. Marica Solomon who brought to my attention today one of the early movies that she knew for sure I would enjoy. The movie is twelve minutes long and it's made by the Miles Brothers, a pioneer film company that made some thirty movies between 1903 - 1907.
This movie is their best known, and for good: it's a little gem. They installed their camera on a cable car that operated on Market Street, the Fifth Avenue of San Francisco (or their Champs Élysées, if you prefer). And so, set on the car, the camera filmed the view of the street, as they were slowly going down to the Ferry Building.
(Musical Background - Air, La Femme d'Argent, album: Moon Safari)
(courtesy of Ms. Marica Solomon)
(video by cleaverb)
Watching this movie is like traveling in a time capsule that brings us over hundred years ago in a jiffy. The impression is incredible, we fall under a charm. It is the Market Street in San Francisco, everything is there in place, something doesn't fit. There is much less traffic, but it's so chaotic! Cable cars coming from the other side, buggies, carts with their horses, some kind of trolley buses or electric cars or whatever crossing the street every now and then, cars, bicycles, and above all pedestrians, circulating in all directions, crossing the street just in front of the vehicles, hanging themselves by the back of the cars for fun, running in front of the street car having the camera and making funny things, just to be caught in the movie, to remain on the screen for eternity. It's a formidable impression of chaos, of joy, of nice irresponsibility, it's La Belle Époque American style. Or rather it's the beginning of big urban life, that particular moment when people just enjoy the novelties: the big city, the industrialization, the cars, the filming. This moment can actually take a couple of years, then the reality becomes the king. But that moment is wonderful. It's a moment of enthusiasm, it is superbly caught by this movie. Watching it calls in mind the mastership of Dziga Vertov, The Man with a Camera. The movie of the Miles Brothers is a lesson of sociology.
The movie was long considered to have been made in September 1905. That was the date set by the Library of Congress. Actually it was made several months later, and a cinema historian (David Kiehn from the Niles Essanay Film Museum) made the demonstration, studying the license plates of the cars in the movie and finding their registration dates in the archives of the city: the car with plate 5057 was registered in February 1906 by the Reliance Auto Company. Wow! That is something!
By the way, the number of cars in San Francisco that time was much smaller than it appears in the movie: what we see on the screen is deceiving, they arranged that the same cars circulated more than once in front of the camera. It can be demonstrated the same, by studying their license plates.
The movie was made in the spring of 1906, just days before the big earthquake and fire that hit San Francisco, and many of the enthusiast people appearing in the movie would die very soon after the filming.
It happened that the negatives of the movie were sent by train to New York in the night before the earthquake. The following day the studio of Miles Brothers was destroyed by the cataclysm.
And the name this movie remained known as A Trip Down Market Street Before the Fire.
(Early Movies)
posted by Pierre Radulescu at
4:06 PM
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