b9 wrote:
well i guess that this video will bore people to tears, but i find it incredibly interesting.
it is a film taken 105-106 years ago of a trip down market street in san francisco in 1906. most old films i see seem sped up and unreal to me, but this one seems to be shown in a real time manner that enhances my experience of it.
it is interesting to me on 2 levels.
the first level is that i know that everyone in the film is now dead, and when i look at individual people going about their daily lives, i know that each and every one of them died of something or another. death is rarely uneventful for those who die, and i look at a person and i think "how did you die? was it cancer? was it a heart attack or stroke? was it an accident you were in?" etc. i did not notice anyone younger than about 8 years old in the film, and given the odds of them surviving to 114, i would be confident that they are also dead.
so it is eerie to me to watch this film because if there is an afterlife (which i am not sure there is not), then these people populate it. every living thing in it is dead now. the horses and birds (i did not notice any birds) as well as the people. no one on earth today has that time in their memory, so i am truly seeing an un remembered world.
as well as this, almost all those people would be long forgotten by their descendants. they were the current population then, and they had friends, and some people were important and some less so, but every person felt that they mattered, and now their names are almost eroded away on their gravestones. people going about their business and jumping out of the way from traffic are long lain in their graves so that even their bones would be disintegrated in many cases.
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the second level that i am interested in is how people behaved in those days.
i notice that everyone wore hats, and i wonder if one did not wear a hat, then were they considered rude or immodest ?
i noticed that many people seemed to be aimless, and they were just standing around as if they were not actually going anywhere in particular. i thought about that, and i came to the conclusion that because there was no TV or even radio in those days, that to stay at home on non work days would be excruciatingly boring, and i think that when people got out of bed, they soon went out, and their destination was just to stand in the streets and watch life happen around them. they seemed to not be pressed for time.
i noticed that people "gawk" at things with no concept that they should look away after a reasonable amount of time. they do not avert their gaze like people do these days to be polite. they just looked at things like people watch TV's nowadays. there are so many people "gawking", that they just blend into the crowd.
i noticed the amount of people who's attention was drawn to the cameraman, and i realize that the capture of moving pictures was a very rare thing in those days, so they were interested, and at least payed attention, and some posed by sticking their thumbs in their vests and pushing out their chests.
i noticed that there was almost no traffic rules, and people ran hither and dither in front of vehicles, and i can tell that they felt that the road was still their domain, and they did not feel as if they should pay any special homage to the traffic.
the roads were very basic and i was amused at the early automobile's primitive suspension that seemed like it would throw passengers out of the car in some instances. the cars bounced along and were quite ungraceful.
i noticed that there were some "hoons" in cars that cut in front of the camera man and sped into further traffic, and they looked like they were angling to find a way to speed ahead of it, and all of a sudden, they made a u turn and went the other way. after a while, these cars would again overtake the cameraman, and i surmised that because cars were a novelty then, that they were just driving for the sake of driving.
i noticed that children would run after cars and hop up onto the back of them to go for a ride, and the drivers of those cars did not care. also, some adults used to hop onto the back of the cars and get a lift to where they wanted to hop off, and the drivers paid no attention to them
i noticed that the length of many people strides was different than it is today. their gait was completely different than it is now. they seemed to place each foot far further in front of their other foot with every stride. i am not sure why. one consideration is that because they are not used to vehicular travel, they make each step longer to get where they are going faster. another consideration is that they do not like walking on a road that has horse dung on it, and so they want to step as few times as they can on it.
The first part, I think in the same ways. I strangely have found graveyards and looked at the dates, the social status by the monument, the spouse, and sometimes children will be in all one section. I've found on monument dated in 1830's, and it was telling: it was a stone cut, cut-in-half half tree, with the words written, (and paraphrased):
here lies our boy smitten and cut down early in life. There was more to the grief in the inscription here.
The rain water eroded much of it but it is still in good shape. Usually, they turn over graveyards when they think the line has separated enough in time, but this one sight is very old. No one was likely around at the turn of the next century. The parents were laid next to it.
Just musing and you may be interested in some disjointed details: In 1906 that was a much different time. The Great War changed the attitudes and dramatically shifted the social climate-- World Wide. My great grandfather would have been 11 there, and later in his life he lived with us until his death in '83. He was a Sergeant during that war. In those days he said no one locked their doors. Those cars in vid. were before Ford started the famous Model T. Btw the Model T had 20 horsepower between 6-7 compression ratio-- that's in terms of about a small lawn mower engine. My lawn tractor has 20HP. Later Holley made the carburators. He commented on the difficulty to start those cars; he said you wound up it with a hand crank and sometimes the crank kicked backed and could break your forearm, if you weren't careful. I noticed your details in the commentary, and the "behaviors" are to me the relatively same. The strides there were longer to get across and out of the way, (I think). I do wonder if games occupied the times for the city folks. Most of the US was rural here, and those people worked to death
to live. No free time. Baths were once a week and the family used the same bathwater. Was father first?
14 Feb 2012, 10:43 am
