A Trove of Old Film Footage, Now Online
In days of yore – or at any rate, from the dawn of cinema into the 1960s or so – going to the movies was more than just settling into a plush seat with nearly a gallon of soda and a truckload of popcorn, and then getting blasted against the wall with insanely overamplified sound.
You’d get a cartoon or a short feature, and a few decades back you’d also get a newsreel. Sometimes it was actual news, although the growth of television rendered such films beside the point. Often it was a soft feature – footage of a celebrity wedding, a daredevil stunt, an exotic sports event or perhaps an interview with a music or film star. In Britain, the newsreel persisted into the mid-1970s, and the champion producer of these films, British Pathé, has been uploading its newsreels to its own YouTube channel for several years. Now the company has announced that its uploading is complete: it has posted about 85,000 film clips, from the 1890s through 1976, that cover events of all sorts from all over the world.
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Source: NY Times
