This is a lovely little film that I saw on TreeHugger this afternoon, but which comes from a site called “YouTube” (which seems to be a repository for many and disparate short movies.)
The seven minutes of footage were shot from a Barcelona streetcar in 1908. Cyclists ride playfully, weaving in front of the trolley. Pedestrians boldly assert themselves. It is a city poignantly alive with people who are now all dead — the effect is simultaneously uplifting and haunting.
Oh, and one YouTube commenter thinks he sees Adolf Hitler standing along the right side of the road at 5:39. (What do you think, gentle reader?)
Anyway, it’s a marvelous and addictive short film. I just watched it three times straight through.
Click below for another of these YouTube flicks–this one in vibrant Technicolor. It traces the same route in present day Barcelona.
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April 1st, 2009 at 1:50 pm
Charming stuff. Credit is due to these bowler-hatted pedestrians and cyclists for being so boldly assertive, as you put it, though bold assertion is a lot easier when the cars and trams around you seem incapable of exceeding the speed of a brisk jog.
April 3rd, 2009 at 9:30 am
Beautiful film. Priceless. I certainly illustrates the principal of “tout a la rue,” meaning everything into the street. Cyclists, cars, pedestrians, streetcars, kids. Seems to work.
Interesting how bold the cyclists are. I wonder why they don’t seem to fear being tipped over by the streetcar tracks? They ride right across them, often at only a slight angle, and don’t get channeled into them. Were tracks built somehow with less of a gap between track and street? Were the tires of the bicycles fatter?
This is a marvelous film because it also captures an era where all these transportation modes are either beginning, ending or right in their heyday. Modern cycling as we know it developed in the 1880s roughly, and was really at its height in 1907. Streetcars, electric ones, were relatively new then but completely dominant. Cars were just beginning. Walking of course, had always been around.
Could we get back to some modern version of that? What I think of when I watch this are these incredibly expensive light rail systems, and which seem to be built with so little subtlety. They are typically separated from the street, and an intrusion into it. Even modern streetcar systems usually do not blend so seamlessly as this Barcelona one did. Could we get back to that?
April 6th, 2009 at 1:28 am
[...] taken on the streets of Barcelona 100 years ago with video taken on those same streets today. The infrastructure blog that brought this to my attention is more focused on how the people used the streets a century ago [...]
June 9th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
[...] will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 11:08 am
[...] will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
[...] will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with [...]
June 19th, 2009 at 8:33 am
This short movies are stunning! Thanks for publishing!