Vintage film, TV, documents, and photographic footage from down the years

[Kryztian]

Although I've been in Penn Station, the train station under Madison Square hundreds and hundreds of times, I think I've only been once in Madison Square Garden and that was to see the circus when I was a child. When I went out and saw the building from the outside, I was perplexed by it's shape and asked "Why is Madison Square Garden round? Why isn't it 'Madison Round Garden'?" Well, I guess this thread finally helped me to answer one of life's great mysteries (for me at least)

Here is the current and fourth incarnation (since 1968) of Madison Square Garden, built over the train Station.



It is no marvel of architectural beauty. Because of the plans for the train station modernization, there are plans to close down this location. But there are no plans to open up a new one either. There is no place where you have two adjacent city blocks that are near transportation in and our of the city. If there were no Madison Square Garden, there would be no New York Knick's Basketball games and no New York Ranger's Hockey games, no WWF Wrestling, no rock concerts, no political conventions. After the "O2" in London, it is the busiest arena in the world by ticket sales. Right now Madison Square Garden's managers have no plans for an alternate location, however, they only have an agreement to continue operating there for another 5 years.

Here are two more photos of previous locations:

The third location, the entrance that one see's on the film Tintin posted:



And here is the first location, which was not well built structurally, and didn't last long at all.

[Tintin]

This is a titanic effort from this young (looking) man (Christopher someone). I also think a modified version of this may already have been shared here, but, this is the original untampered with video which also includes audio overdubs from Churchill, Hitler et al in key moments. It's an incredible piece of work and took over a year to put together.

If any of you have a spare near quarter of an hour it's highly recommended as a piece of historical research. And look at the number of views too. Extraordinary effort here

World War II Every Day with Army Sizes - made in 2022

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1CqGeAmVu1I

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Description from Christopher:

40,363,533 views 14 Mar 2022
Hi everyone, I'm sorry for the very long wait in uploads, however, hopefully you will understand why, as it has taken me almost a year to research and produce this video.

On September 1st, 1939, Germany declares war on Poland and throws the world into the largest conflict humanity has ever seen. I have done my best to do accurate borders, encirclements and army sizes.

If you see any mistakes or inaccuraices, or if you simply just have suggestions, then let me kno in the comments and I will include them in my next video!

Besides, sit back and relax, I hope that you enjoy the video!

[Brigantia]

This is a lovely remastered and colourised video of Edinburgh in the 1930s, just under 9 minutes and has a rendition of Scotland the Brave accompanying the pipe band towards the end. For anyone who knows the city, the main streets still look quite familiar.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=L-nITiS8IqQ

[Tintin]

A fabulous scenic self-portrait by Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky taken before colour-sensitive film was invented, and a charming shot of three young women somewhere in Russia.

He took individual black and white photos, each with a filter (red, blue, and green) and these images believed to be around 113 years old which would place their capture somewhere close to 1911. He apparently had been given special permission from the Tsar, and was able to travel to the furthermost corners of the Russian Empire and capture images never seen before.

Wonderful quality

[Ewan]

Posted by Tintin (here)
A fabulous scenic self-portrait by Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky taken before colour-sensitive film was invented, and a charming shot of three young women somewhere in Russia.

He took individual black and white photos, each with a filter (red, blue, and green) and these images believed to be around 113 years old which would place their capture somewhere close to 1911. He apparently had been given special permission from the Tsar, and was able to travel to the furthermost corners of the Russian Empire and capture images never seen before.

Wonderful quality

That guy was a genius, the real art lay in blending the three filtered images into one and producing such vivid colours. (I think).

[Bill Ryan]

Posted by Ewan (here)
That guy was a genius, the real art lay in blending the three filtered images into one and producing such vivid colours. (I think).

Yes, that's right — I was so interested I looked him up. Here's his Wiki page, which is fascinating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky

Here's the intro:

Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky August 30 1863 – September 27, 1944) was a Russian chemist and photographer. He is best known for his pioneering work in colour photography and his effort to document early 20th-century Russia.

Using a railway-car darkroom provided by Emperor Nicholas II, Prokudin-Gorsky travelled the Russian Empire from around 1909 to 1915 using his three-image colour photography to record its many aspects.

While some of his negatives were lost, the majority ended up in the US Library of Congress after his death. Starting in 2000, the negatives were digitised and the colour triples for each subject digitally combined to produce hundreds of high-quality colour images of Russia and its neighbours from over a century ago.

A few more pf his photos.These are so very wonderful to see. My immediate response was OMG, look at how much we have lost.



Leo Tolstoy:



A Sunni Muslim man wearing traditional dress and headgear:



A Group of workers harvesting tea in Chakva Prokudin-Gorsky:



Jewish Children with their Teacher in Samarkand:



An Armenian woman in national costume:

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/PicturesUssr/status/1886881162540540336

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/PicturesUssr/status/1881282325486645453

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/ArchiveUSSR/status/1886807179061031305

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/ArchiveUSSR/status/1885599204535410801

[Ravenlocke]

https://x.com/elman_murad/status/1664544844096720896

https://x.com/ArchiveUSSR/status/1877022710414397453

[Kryztian]

https://www.vox.com/2015/3/19/825876...ave-convention



In 1916, these four women — Annie Param, Anna Angales, Elizabeth Berkeley, and Sadie Thompson — were in Washington, DC, for the annual Former Slave Convention. Each claimed to be more than 100 years old.

Though we can’t be certain about their ages (Berkeley said she was 125, which seems unlikely), we do know they came together to reflect on the past and act on the future.

The convention — then in its 54th year — opened at the Cosmopolitan Baptist Church in Washington, with many centenarian attendees. One speaker was a preacher named Robert E. Lee — a former slave who had been owned by the Confederate general of the same name, and who said he was 103 at the time of the convention.

John Jackson, a former slave owned by Stonewall Jackson, preached, as well. The picture below shows another group: Lewis Martin, 100; Martha Banks, 104; Amy Ware, 103; and Reverend S.P. Drew, born free.



It wasn’t just a chance for former slaves to connect — it was also a platform for activist goals. The convention attendees requested a universal pardon for married convicts, which followed earlier calls for pensions for former slaves.

That issue was actively debated at the time. In 1899, about 21 percent of all blacks in America had been born into slavery, and the legal future of pensions or reparations was uncertain. In 1915’s Johnson vs. McAdoo, an ex-slave pension association sued the government for $68 million for cotton produced while the members were slaves. However, the DC Court of Appeals denied the claim, and the US Supreme Court upheld the decision.

[Tintin]

I wasn't living in England at the time, and I was just way way too young to perhaps even know what money was ( ).

With thanks to archivetvmusings for this

On this day in 1971 the United Kingdom and Ireland adopted the decimal system.

[Brigantia]

Posted by Tintin (here)
I wasn't living in England at the time, and I was just way way too young to perhaps even know what money was ( ).

With thanks to archivetvmusings for this

On this day in 1971 the United Kingdom and Ireland adopted the decimal system.

I was still a child but do remember thruppeny bits, sixpences and 10-bob notes... I remember the ice cream van (always eagerly anticipated in our road by the kids!) and all the shops had price signs like 10 n.p. (meaning 'new pence' instead of the old decimal).

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

My granddad continued to say 'shilling' up to the day he died (in 2002 aged 92).

Can't teach an old dog new tricks, as they say.

[Ewan]

My Nana (Mum's mum) would always ask, "What's that in old money?". She really never got to grips with decimalisation.

Prices were written like this 3/- 6d . I never understood why it was a 'd' for pennies myself.

I remember all these except for the farthing.

[Tintin]

Posted by Tintin (here)
Map of Europe as she was in 1444: the first thing one notices are the very densely packed clusters of former 'Houses' and kingdoms in and around modern day France and Germany: nothing of course called 'Ukraine', or 'Spain', or 'Turkey', or 'Italy'. One wonders if a time traveller from that period would really know where on Earth they'd now be - fabulous stuff.

Here's a perhaps easier to view map that allows the labelling of duchies, principalities, margraviates, kingdoms etc. to be more easily viewed.

Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...d/1444_Map.jpg

[Tintin]

A wonderful post on the Internet Archive from Rick Prelinger which speaks directly to the theme of this thread and my work here as the librarian

Vanishing Culture: No Film Left Unscanned
By Rick Prelinger
Date: March 5th, 2025
Source: The Internet Archive

Soon after the cinema was born in the 1890s, a few visionaries realized that film could become one of the most vivid and engaging means of recording history. But when they proposed creating archives to collect and preserve moving images, no one seemed to respond. Most movie studios treated films as expendable objects to be discarded after their theatrical runs, and most collections that actually survived were hidden in specialized spaces: newsreel archives, stock footage libraries, universities, and collectors’ basements.

In the 1930s, a handful of courageous archivists in Europe and America inaugurated the modern film archives movement. Asserting that cinema should be seen not only as valuable documentation but as an art in its own right, they collected as best they could. But they encountered great resistance. They fought pushback from copyright holders who saw archives as a violation of their ownership, aesthetes and government bureaucrats who considered movies to be vulgar commercialism and unworthy of preservation, and fire inspectors who treated film as explosive hazmat. Ultimately, film’s immense popularity won out. In half a century, the first four film archives expanded to hundreds, and today it’s impossible to count how many thousands of archives collect film, video, and digital materials.

But film has always been hard to collect and preserve. Until the 1970s, film was generally made from organic gelatin bonded to various forms of plastic that inevitably decomposed. Much but not all pre-1951 35mm film was doubly vulnerable, made from cellulose nitrate stock that if heated or exposed to flame could burn rapidly or explode. Film, therefore, was and still is a deeply inconvenient object, requiring very cool and very dry storage in order to survive. Archives fires throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have destroyed large collections, and almost every film is still at risk from decay and decomposition.

For many years the gold standard of film preservation was film-to-film copying coupled with restoration—aiming to preserve films as their makers intended, and trying to preserve the theatrical film experience. This process is difficult and expensive. The turn toward digital technologies came in the 1990s, and now almost all film preservation is digitally-based, even if the product is a long-lasting film print for storage projection.

To think about film preservation is to think about much more than what we call movies. While to most people film and cinema describe the stories we see in theaters or on television, feature films are really a special case. The majority of films are “useful cinema”—films produced to do a job, to sell, train, teach, promote, document, convince. Almost none of these films have been preserved. And the supermajority of films, totalling in the billions, are home movies.



From the Prelinger Archives, “Home Movie: 11758: Midwestern Family Scenes, Wedding, IA Trip,” preserved and available to view at the Internet Archive.

Home movies—8mm, Super 8, 9.5mm 16mm and even 35mm—are ancestors of the videos we shot on camcorders and now capture on cell phones. We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence. While there are large collections of home movies, most still live with the families that made them, often in damp basements or hot attics, all vulnerable to deterioration and the vagaries of a changing climate. Of all films, home movies are the closest to our hearts, the most charismatic, the most fascinating—and they are in the greatest jeopardy.



From the Prelinger Archives, “Home Movie: 97396: Unidentified,” preserved and available to view at the Internet Archive.

Fortunately, we now have digital tools and workflows to extend the life of film. While scanning film to produce digital files demands considerable skill, technology, and resources, it is more achievable than ever before. It’s possible to digitize most films that have not completely decayed and turn these inconvenient reels into digital files that can be viewed, shared, studied, edited, and woven together with other images and sounds. It’s now easy to take a film that may exist in only a single copy and share it around the world via the internet.

Beginning in 2000, Prelinger Archives collaborated with Internet Archive to digitize and offer thousands of useful films online, and since then our films have been seen and downloaded over 200 million times on the Internet Archive and arguably billions of times elsewhere. Our three-year collaboration with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, now in progress, is allowing us to scan thousands of films (especially home movies) every year and make them available in a safer, decentralized environment where we hope they will survive for many years. While this is not classic film-to-film preservation creating restored film copies that sit on archival shelves, digital scans of films are likely to exist in many places, avoiding the vulnerability of unique copies in individual repositories. And the quality of digital scanning now exceeds the quality of film-to-film copying.

Perhaps most importantly, digital scans are easy to share. While film preservation should enable universal access to the sum of cinematic creativity, much film is enclosed by copyright or business restrictions. Most films held in archives are still not visible and even fewer are available for reuse. By scanning films that are out of copyright or have no surviving rightsholder, we can open up an immense reservoir of images, sounds and ideas for the makers of the present and the future. Scanning has made film preservation practical, and it’s also enabled preservation of “smaller” films like home movies and useful films, which reveal evidence and truths absent from feature films and television.

No film left unscanned: this is our dream. We have the opportunity to preserve deteriorating films in digital form and make them available for viewing, reuse, and computation as never before. As thoughtful archivists have said for many years, “preservation without access is pointless.” Digital scanning can and should enable both as it helps us to build moving and permanent memories.

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About the author

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, filmmaker, writer and educator. He began collecting “ephemeral films” (films made for specific purposes at specific times, such as advertising, educational and industrial films; more recently called “useful cinema“) in 1983. His collection of 60,000 films was acquired by Library of Congress in 2002, and since that time Prelinger Archives has again grown to include some 40,000 home movies and 7,000 other film items. Beginning in 2000, he partnered with Internet Archive to make a subset of the Prelinger Collection (now over 9,700 items) available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. Prelinger Archives currently collaborates with Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web to scan historical films and make them available online. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world, and his feature project No More Road Trips? received a Creative Capital grant in 2012. His 30 Lost Landscapes participatory urban history projects have played to many thousands of viewers in San Francisco, Detroit, Oakland, Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere. He is a board member of Internet Archive and frequently writes and speaks on the future of archives. With Megan Prelinger, he co-founded Prelinger Library in 2004, which continues to serve the needs of researchers, artists, activists and readers in downtown San Francisco. He is currently Emerit Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz.

[Ravenlocke]

Text:
The youngest boy on this picture is little Boris, the Germans will hang him on a scarf but his relatives will be able to save him at the very last moment. After the war, he will work at a radio lamp factory.

The two elders (on the right and on the left) will be driven away by the Nazis to Germany, but they will be able to escape along the road and join the Red Army units. Valentin will become a carpenter, and the girl Zoya will finish nursing courses and work in a children's hospital.

As for the boy sitting on the chair, one morning on April 12, 1961 he will say “Let's go!” and write himself into history as the first person in world history to fly into outer space. Forever.

📸 1938. Valentin, Boris, Zoya and Yuri Gagarin.
🚀🚀🚀
- FRWL

https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1898663521786744953

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

A random picture but quite an eye-opener (or eye-closer if you have a fear of heights!)



Safety standards in the 1970s:




*