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To viewers’ great good fortune, the institution that holds the film, the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont, California, across the bay from San Francisco, has posted the film on YouTube, with a commentary by archivist David Kiehn about the short film’s history, including the institution’s 5K transfer of it. How the Museum acquired the footage is a typical tale of film discovery serendipity. In August 2011, an elderly couple came to the museum with an unmarked film can they’d found in their basement 42 years earlier. The film within would turn out to provide a remarkable record of a circus parade at the turn of the century...
Kiehn relates that when the donors brought the film to the Museum, he held the print up to the light and could immediately see images of a parade of some kind. Upon closer inspection he saw a circus rolling into a city somewhere in the US.
He set about determining the history of the film, starting with the location of the shoot. First he noticed that the perforations along the edge of the film stock were irregular in size and spacing. “They looked rather crude,” he explains in an introduction to the YouTube posting...
“That meant that the film was made sometime before 1910,” he says. That’s when Bell & Howell made a standardizing film perforator. “To this day, if you buy a roll of 35mm motion-picture film to put in a camera, it has Bell & Howell perforations. But this particular film did not.”
Kiehn relates that when the donors brought the film to the Museum, he held the print up to the light and could immediately see images of a parade of some kind. Upon closer inspection he saw a circus rolling into a city somewhere in the US.
He set about determining the history of the film, starting with the location of the shoot. First he noticed that the perforations along the edge of the film stock were irregular in size and spacing. “They looked rather crude,” he explains in an introduction to the YouTube posting...
“That meant that the film was made sometime before 1910,” he says. That’s when Bell & Howell made a standardizing film perforator. “To this day, if you buy a roll of 35mm motion-picture film to put in a camera, it has Bell & Howell perforations. But this particular film did not.”
Full article: http://www.movingimagearchivenews.or...om-the-screen/
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