Manhattan 1939 -- in Kodachrome!

[LizzieMaine]

8mm home movie footage shot by a tourist -- scenes of midtown, Chinatown, Harlem, and then back to Rockefeller Plaza. So many men without hats or ties! And pullover t-shirt-like sportswear! Bunch of slobs, don't they read Esquire?

 

[HanauMan]

Well, I didn't wear a shirt & tie in NYC either in the summer - way too hot!

What a great film, though. I was intrigued by the color schemes of the buses. Thanks for sharing this little gem.

 

[2jakes]

Good old days when I could run about bare-foot.
The summer heat was no problemo since we didn’t have
a/c to know the difference.
Just a rotating fan.

The perspiration and breeze from the large open windows
kept you cool.

 

[Fading Fast]

You mean the world back then wasn't black and white, it was only the limited amount of color film that made me think New York in the '40s (heck, the world in the '40s) was truly in black and white.

Kidding aside, every time I see films like this one, I (1) think NYC looks better in B&W and (2) in my mind, when I think of that period, I see it in B&W (probably having grown up with B&W movies as being my first exposure to it).

Fun film - thank you for posting it.

 

[GHT]

Lizzie, that was absolutely wonderful. You might enjoy this little gem too. it's taken in London in 1939, an amateur film, in colour showing many of London's famous landmark sites. You can also see the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, the soldiers in their ceremonial uniforms. As I watched it, like Manhattan, I kept going, oh wow. Places where once the traffic flowed freely that have now been pedestrianised. Amazing. Edward, are you watching?

 

[2jakes]

I liked the variety of colors and fondly remember the running boards too.
As time passes on the memories of
vivid hues have become pastel.

 

[HanauMan]

Great photo. Every time I see one of these old photos showing cars I always think why brown was such a popular color back then!

 

[2jakes]

Great photo. Every time I see one of these old photos showing cars I always think why brown was such a popular color back then!

Same with leather jackets and shoes. The variety of browns was great
and made in the USA to last.

 

[Paisley]

The men's hats would have blown off on the rooftop!

 

[LizzieMaine]

People are often surpised to see how much Kodachrome footage from the pre-war era survives. Home movies were a hobby for people with extra money to spend in the 1930s -- the bottom-line 8mm cameras of the day sold in the $25 range, which was a week's pay for a lot of people. The kind of people who could afford to buy the cameras weren't the type to skimp on film, and were usually willing to pay the extra cost for Kodachrome. After about 1937 or so, when you find caches of home movie films, they're more likely to be color than black and white. And because Kodachrome was a stable process, the color in these films is usually more vivid than the cheaper, fadey color processes popular in the 1960s and 1970s.

I've got a couple reels of 16mm shot in the early 1930s by a wealthy family in my home town, using the earlier "Kodacolor" system. This process used a special lenticular film intended to be shot thru a three-strip color filter mounted on the camera lens, and projected thru a projector mounted with a similar filter. I've never come across a projector filter in usable condition, so all I get from the film is a black and white image that looks like it was shot thru a fine-mesh window screen. That mesh is the color information, waiting to be retrieved. It won't be as vivid as Kodachrome, but it can be very impressive.

 

[2jakes]

This is a photograph of Faro and Doris Caudill, farmers in Pietown, New Mexico.
They lived in a dugout and struggled to survive on Resettlement Administration land.

As the 1930s came to a close, Kodak came out with Kodachrome film - the first commercially viable color film available to the general public. In 1937 and 1938, the colors were still not stable and accurate, but by 1939 Kodachrome was producing color images of remarkable precision.
(USS John Paul Association)

 

[2jakes]

Saturdays were the day that everybody went to town in Cascade, Idaho.

New York Lower East Side.

Young field hands.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Here's a rare example of the original lenticular Kodacolor process, as used by President Herbert Hoover in his own home-movie hobby. Note the subtle lines in the image -- those are actually raised facets in the film stock which reflect the recorded color information back thru the filter mounted on the projector. It's far from a perfect process, but it has the advantage of being photographed using black and white stock requiring no special chemistry for processing -- and because it uses no dyes, the colors can't fade. The main drawback is that the lenticular structure of the film absorbs a lot of light from the projector lamp, as does the color filter on the lens, so the images tend to be dim on the screen.

Scenes here include a game of the President's favorite sport, "Hooverball," a sort of full-contact volleyball, played with a six-pound medicine ball.

 

[Fading Fast]

⇧ fantastic info and film. Not easy to back into the rules of that game from just the film.

And as you note - fuzzy is the problem.

 

[ChiTownScion]

8mm home movie footage shot by a tourist -- scenes of midtown, Chinatown, Harlem, and then back to Rockefeller Plaza. So many men without hats or ties! And pullover t-shirt-like sportswear! Bunch of slobs, don't they read Esquire?

I really geeked out on the last few frames that showed ocean liners lined up on the river. Wish we still had regularly scheduled transatlantic ship crossings as a transportation option.

 

[LizzieMaine]

An interesting footnote about the original Kodacolor process is that it was adapted and revived in the mid-1950s by Kodak and RCA, to develop a system for making color kinescope records of NBC's early color programming. Quite a few of these were made around 1955 and 1956 before the project was abandoned due to the arrival of videotape, but nobody has gotten around to rigging up a system for extracting the color information and reconstructing the color images. Among the programs recorded using this system were several featuring Jerry Lewis, who is known to have owned 35mm lenticular prints of these shows. Whether they will emerge from his estate and be restored remains for the future, and technology, to determine.

 

[2jakes]

Almost 100 years.

 

[LizzieMaine]

More lenticular Kodacolor, starting off with scenes from the Chicago Century of Progress Exhibition in 1934, followed by general family home-movie stuff. The projection filter doesn't seem to be adjusted quite right, hence the rainbow banding in the image. The robot dinosaurs are part of the Sinclair Oil Company exhibit, and were one of the most popular exhibits at the fair.

 

[2jakes]

Enjoyed the images, although had to turn the “music” down just a tad.

Nevertheless...
You always manage to hit one out of the ball park.

 

[HanauMan]

Those dinosaurs were real neat. I wonder whether they influenced the painter who created the Age of Reptiles mural in the Yale Peabody museum, though I think it was painted in the 1940s. I had a poster of the mural on my wall as a teenager.