[78-L] Was it staged? - 1906 film of a cable car ride

[Ken "Silver Showcase"]

David Breneman wrote:
> --- On Thu, 3/24/11, Andrew Homzy <homzy at vax2.concordia.ca> wrote:
>
>   
>> My biggest question, because you weren't clear on the
>> point, is - If there is no editing, how were they able to
>> load almost 10 minutes of film into one camera in 1906 - a
>> special system devised for that shot?
>>     
>
> Seven minutes at 16 fps is a little more than 400' of
> film.  That's not an awful lot (equivalent of 170' of
> 16mm).  And some cameras did have external magazines
> by the mid-1900s.
>   

David is correct.  The size of the reel of film in professional 35mm 
motion picture cameras has been standard going way back to the earliest 
part of the 20th century.  There is nothing unusual about the length of 
the shot in the film we are discussing.

I must also agree strongly with the earlier comment that Wikipedia is a 
lousy source for information.

And I will add that there was NO standard speed for silent films, (just 
as there was no standard speed for what we now call 78s.)  As noted in 
an earlier message, most silent film cameras were hand cranked - 
although motorized cameras did exist and were used in the silent era.  
Earlier films tended to be cranked well below the now standard sound 
speed of 24 frames per second.  But the cranking speed tended to 
increase as time went on and most late silent era films were shot closer 
to 24 fps, some even faster than that.  Running most late silent era 
films at 16fps is like watching the film after taking NyQuil.

Early projectors were usually hand cranked but when motorized projectors 
came along they had variable speed motors simply because there was no 
standard projection speed.  Some films came to the theater with 
instructions on how many feet per minute to run it, but often the 
projectionist would run films at the speed they thought looked best no 
matter what the instructions said.  Or the theater manager would tell 
them to run it faster so they could squeeze in an extra show that day.  
There was an ongoing debate between the filmmakers and theatres about 
this sort of thing.  The filmmakers were not pleased because they would 
often make different shots in a film at different speeds for various 
reasons and running it faster than intended would change how they 
intended a film to look. 

The idea that the "proper" silent film speed is16 fps, (sometimes 18fps) 
comes from when 16mm sound projectors were introduced in the 30s.  16mm, 
(introduced by Kodak in 1923), was meant to be the amateur format - used 
for home movies, and in classrooms, lodge halls, etc.  Sound film speed 
was standardized at 24 fps.  But many people had old family movies, or 
simply older Hollywood movies that had been transferred to 16mm stock, 
and those often didn't look good at 24 fps.  There are some 16mm 
projectors with variable speed motors, but its cheaper to build motors 
that can be switched between two standard speeds so most 16mm projectors 
with sound capability were made with two speeds, one at 24fps labeled 
"sound," and the other at around 18fps labeled "silent."  The 16mm 
projectionist had only those two choices for silent films and because 
most of those speed switches were labeled as "sound" and "silent" 
instead of the actual speed of projection people got the idea that there 
was a standard silent speed.

-- Ken, who learns a lot about the 78 era of recorded sound from this list.