Rare color film shows what London looked like in 1927

[dipsydoodle]

In 1927 Claude Friese-Greene shot some of the first-ever color film footage around London. He captured everyday life in the city with a technique innovated by his father, called Biocolour.

Though we usually think of French names like Lumiere and Melies when we think of early film pioneers, Friese-Greene’s technique captures London in striking detail, as if putting the whole city in a time capsule. The people, most now long since gone, pass before us like ghosts. What’s striking is, apart from the noticeably formal clothing and a few old cars, how familiar and unchanged everything seems. Trafalgar Square, which the film’s title card describes as “another monument to a hero of the past,” looks the same now, as does London Bridge and the London Tower.

Urban Peek notes British Film Institute used computer enhancement to reduce the flickering effect of the original Biocolour and bring us this striking rare film which transports us back through time. Watch below.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/198876/rare-color-film-shows-what-london-looked-like-in-1927/

[surrealAmerican]

1. Not that it isn't a moderately interesting bit of film, but ...

... the comparison to Melies and the Lumieres is just silly. This film was shot a generation later, at a time when the motion picture industry was very well established.

I wonder what the process was. Did it perhaps use three negatives shot through different filters, and combined during projection?

[cyberswede]

2. Biocolour

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Friese-Greene

Claude, born Claude Harrison Greene was the son of William Friese-Greene, a pioneer in early cinematography. William began the development of an additive colour film process called Biocolour. This process produced the illusion of true colour by exposing each alternate frame of ordinary black-and-white film stock through a two different coloured filters. Each alternate frame of the monochrome print was then stained red or green. Although the projection of Biocolour prints did provide a tolerable illusion of true colour, it suffered from noticeable flickering and red-and-green fringing when the subject was in rapid motion. In an attempt to overcome the colour fringing problem, a faster-than-usual frame rate was used.

[patricia92243]

3. One said "the entrance to London's Lung" What does that mean and where is it??? I googled.

[dipsydoodle]

4. Refers to Hyde Park

Last edited Tue Jan 14, 2014, 12:31 PM - Edit history (1)

but even I must confess I've never heard that expression before and I'm a Londoner.

I THINK that was this arch into Hyde Park which is the one from Piccadilly.



Learn something everyday.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. Calling parks "a city's lungs" is fairly common

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22city%27s+lungs%22

in use in Australia in 1918: http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/119710899

[hunter]

5. It's cool how they reconstructed it using computers.

The final result looks very much like the original two-color Technicolor process, which exposed two frames at once, thus requiring both a special camera and projector. This "Biocolour" process did not require a special projector, but the method of using alternate color frames created an irritating flicker.

It strikes me that innovation in color film processes were quite rapid, similar to that of personal computer graphics. I remember the first time I saw Amiga color graphics, and they were far better than anything IBM or Apple computers offered at the time.

I later bought an Amiga that had been used to produce local television commercials for next to nothing. Now that I think about it, that may have been one of the last computers I ever bought for myself. Since then all my computers have been scrap, too slow for the latest Microsoft cruft, restored to usefulness with Linux.

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

7. Did anyone else see that blue police box in the background?!

.

[snooper2]

8. looks like how people drive in Tijuana LOL

make your own lane!

[MattSh]

9. And then there's this...

London 1927 and 2013 side by side.

http://vimeo.com/81368735

[dipsydoodle]

10. I like that.

Quite tasteful. The comparison of a hand signal with a traffic light made me laugh.

I prefer this version of Canon in D.

Crack me up those Korean kids.