1) The girl in the white dress is completely useless in a fight, isn't she?
1a) Unless you need someone to dance around and flap her arms -- in which case, send her an urgent IM.
1b) Why didn't she bean one of the guys with that big flowerpot?

2) I can't figure out WHAT is going on in "Our Hebrew Friends," but I believe this may be a portrayal of a harmful ethnic stereotype.
2a) Maybe the guy in the cop's uniform is actually being Bar Mitzvahed, and the other guy is his uncle, and the other guy is slipping the kid a twenty and telling the kid, "Spend it on yourself -- don't tell your Mom and Dad."
2b) And then they all dance the hora.

(Which isn't to say that I think it's good that Mr. Macdonald is getting an error message--just that's it's nice to not be alone.)

Someday, some enterprising young dance historian in need of a diss topic is going to go through that collection and figure out exactly how much Astaire absorbed from the African-American tap dancers of similar vintage. IIRC, he was in vaudeville about that time, and on Broadway shortly thereafter.

Also: watching the soloist to the tune of Vivaldi's "Domine fili unigenite" is really, really funny.

There is something about these very old movies -- those aren't costumes those people are wearing, it's their actual clothes. I'm convinced that there is a naturalness to people wearing their own natural style of clothes that not even the best actor can reproduce. This isn't a stage set we're watching -- nobody's going to yell CUT and then all the actors mill about and the stars go back to their trailers to check their e-mail and everybody pulls their cell phones out of pockets and checks voicemail. This is real life, people wearing their own clothes and feeling natural in them -- TNH nailed it with the observation about the hats but of course that's only part of it. These people wear these clothes every day, they know how to move in them so they don't pull or bind, and they know where the pockets are and know what's in those pockets (or, at least they're very familiar with rifling through those pockets looking for stuff.... ). And what's in those pockets isn't, as I said, cell phones, and it isn't Palm Pilots or even car keys, either -- it's wallets containing large-sized bills.

To some extent, it's a blessing that there are so few films this old, because when we do encounter one, it's magic, as close to time travel as we're likely to ever come.

Taste would be beside the point.

C.

I particularly like this: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ndl.html (Here's my attempt at making that a live link, which I'm not sure if I know how to do in this commenting system: http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ndl.html)

Among other things, it's introduced me to the bluesman Buster Ezell; they've got a couple of tunes by him that are classic time-capsule outsider art.

Buster Ezell, "Obey Your Ration Laws": http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ftvbib:@field(DOCID+7052a1)
Buster Ezell, "Roosevelt & Hitler (Strange Things Are Happening In This Land" (featuring the priceless lyric "He's treating us so mean with his dreadful submarines."): http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?ftvbib:79:./temp/~ammem_rnVF::

Similarly, there's Deacon Sam Jackson's belligerent anti-Japanese gospel song "(If I Had My Way I'd) Tear Tokyo Down":
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?ftvbib:93:./temp/~ammem_rnVF::

In case those links don't work, all three of those are from "'Now What a Time': Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943."

I was in the Flatiron building last week, for a training course. I was struck by the elevators-- mirrored all over, with an iron scrollwork style of thing in front of the mirrors. And a domed ceiling to top (ha) it all off. Very very nice. Also the up-to-date button panel, much better than the dingy 1960s-techno that we've got here. Also, those elevators didn't echo with the sounds of metal smacking against metal like mine do.

A favorite Flatiron story is that when an entrepreneur wanted to make a "vending machine" to sell gum for a penny, the gum manufacturer doubted people would put money in a machine. As a test, they went to the windy area near the Flatiron and put up a box with a slot, and the legend "Put a Penny in the Slot and Hear the Winds Blow." People filled it with money so fast, the police came around. The manufacturer (I think it was Frank H. Fleer, but I'm too lazy to go look) was sold.

Here's the corrected URLs, if anyone's interested.
Buster Ezell, "Obey Your Ration Laws": http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ftvbib:@field(DOCID+7052a1)
Buster Ezell, "Roosevelt & Hitler (Strange Things Are Happening In This Land": http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ftvbib:@field(DOCID+7053a1)
Deacon Sam Jackson's "(If I Had My Way I'd) Tear Tokyo Down": http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ftvbib:@field(DOCID+7051b1)

While I was figuring that out, I ran across another of Buster's songs, in which either the original recording medium has either deteriorated so badly it's not playing at the right speed, or Buster's guitar is way, way out of tune - "Do Right By My Country": http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/ftvbib:@field(DOCID+7046a1)

And truly, the past is another country.

One of my favorite discoveries is a series of early industrial films made at Westinghouse plants in Pittsburgh, downloaded when I was in search of reference on period machinery.

While watching "Panorama of Machine Co. aisle, Westinghouse works", an amazing overhead tracking shot taken high above the factory floor, I realized that I was watching a time before the assembly line--a chaotic plethora of tasks being done in a seemingly random cheek-to-jowl layout. Workers pushed, pulled, carryed, and hammered away, but where parts came from and how they were proceeding toward a finished product is far from obvious.

Oh, and many of the factory workers are wearing hats.

Truly a different time, and I'm incredibly grateful that some of it has been preserved and made available. (Of course, I'll still join the grumbling about how difficult it is to link to specific items in the collection...)

You're not the only one to notice this. Some time back, my local SCA group was helping out at a community college "Renaissance Night". As I was going from somewhere to somewhere else--in SCA garb, of course--I got stopped and asked whether I was from the SCA. When I said yes, the response was essentially, "I knew it!" What gave it away? It seems that the person who asked had noticed that the SCA people were treating the period attire as clothing, as nothing more than what they'd happened to pull out of the closet that evening, while everyone else treated it as costume, something strange and uncomfortable, and the difference was clearly visible.

Of course, I found that mildly amusing but by no means titillating -- even if that woman took off her dress entirely and stood in her undergarments, she'd STILL be extremely modestly dressed by 21st Century standards. Whatever entertainment there is in her getting her skirt blown up comes from her startlement rather than anything else.

What's fascinating to me in that video is the stuff that the 1901 audience would've considered barely noteworthy: the people walking around, their clothes, the horses and carts and the fact that horses and carts in those days were still practical means of transportation.

Audiences back then were more patient about setups -- I doubt an audience of today would sit through a full minute-and-a-half of nothing much going on on a city street, waiting for a pratfall, but that was the language of film in that day, you showed a lot of setup that isn't necessary -- or even tolerable -- today. We talk about the MTV generation, lots of quick cuts, I think it's just because we've all gotten more fluent in the language of film and don't need to be spoken to v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y for fear that we will miss something. You see this in old TV shows from the 50s: the hero looks at a clock, puts on his coat and hat, walks out the door, shuts and locks it, walks in the car, gets in the car, starts it (close-up of the hand turning the key), pulls away from the curb, drives down the road.... etc. etc. etc. until he arrives at his enemy's office. Today, they'd just show the hero looking at his watch, exiting the scene, and then cut to the hero storming into his enemy's office -- who needs all that intermediate stuff? Who cares if the hero drove? He had to get there somehow.

Those are the html tags for starting and ending comments; they and anything in between don't show up on the finished page.

Those are the html tags for starting and ending comments; they and anything in between don't show up on the finished page.

Someone else mentioned this awhile ago, but it's probably worth mentioning again. You can write the brackets in text by using character codes:
&#60; or &lt; for <9(less than symbol)
&#62; or &gt; for > (greater than symbol)

You can see this site and this site for more.

I accept the fact that Adam can tell exactly how much I know about HTML.

I wonder who was the first person to make bunny-ears with their fingers while standing behind a sibling while both of them were being photographed?