In these times, we need to keep at some kind of rou­tine. And so I’d like to doff my cloth worker’s cap to Denis Shiryaev, who once again has returned from the ear­ly days of cin­e­ma with anoth­er AI-restored clip of film from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry.

Ah, but there’s some­thing amiss this time, a glitch in the matrix of expec­ta­tions. Not all sources can be saved by tech­nol­o­gy. Fans of Shiryaev’s crys­tal clear jour­neys back in time (find them in the Relat­eds below) might find the footage rough. It doesn’t make this film any less fas­ci­nat­ing.

Sagar Mitchell and James Keny­on start­ed their film busi­ness to try to copy the suc­cess of sim­i­lar, ear­li­er film­mak­ers like the Lumiere Broth­ers in Paris. Audi­ences would pay to see short films of how peo­ple lived, worked, walked about, and just exist­ed. It was a win­dow into anoth­er real­i­ty, and by pure chance a hun­dred of Mitchell & Keny­on’s films were found pre­served in a Black­burn, UK base­ment near­ly a cen­tu­ry lat­er. This is a com­pi­la­tion of three of them, scored by Guy Jones with mild atmos­pher­ics.

More than any of the oth­er films that Shiryaev has “restored,” Mitchell & Keny­on don’t try to hide their cam­era or pre­tend it’s not there. Instead, these three films make a point of invit­ing their sub­jects to look direct­ly at us, and because of Shiryaev’s work these dozens and dozens of eyes real­ly seem to be watch­ing us from across time. The young boys are cheeky, the young girls shy, the old­er adults bemused or slight­ly irri­tat­ed. There is no par­tic­u­lar focus here–we can choose who we want to fol­low, which indeed was one of the rea­sons for these films pop­u­lar­i­ty. They were designed for repeat vis­its.

There are two par­tic­u­lar points of inter­est that hap­pen very quick­ly. One is at 1:09–the appear­ance of an Afro-Caribbean man as part of the work­force. Peo­ple of African descent had lived in Britain since the 12th cen­tu­ry, but this might be one of the ear­li­est films of such a per­son. The oth­er is lat­er at 4:24, which might be the first film of a bloke giv­ing the cam­era the rude two-fin­gered salute. This moment is why the British Film Insti­tute dubbed Mitchell & Keny­on “the acci­den­tal anthro­pol­o­gists.”

(You might also watch for the fight that breaks out near the end of the film. Real or not? You be the judge.)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Watch Scenes from Czarist Moscow Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (May 1896)

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

The “piv­ot-to-video” moment of a few years back dev­as­tat­ed writ­ers every­where with mass lay­offs as com­pa­nies scram­bled to attract pro­ject­ed mil­lions of nonex­is­tent view­ers. It’s a sto­ry about preda­to­ry media monop­o­lies and the pro­lif­er­a­tion of news, doc­u­men­tary, and opin­ion video con­tent online. While the sheer amount of video can feel over­whelm­ing, we might remem­ber that peo­ple have been get­ting their news from screens for well over a hun­dred years.

First came the news­reels. Thou­sands were pro­duced from the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry into the 1960s, when TV became the dom­i­nant screen of choice. These were ephemer­al, often frag­men­tary films, not usu­al­ly pre­served in the way of great cin­e­ma.

But while “the news­reel may be his­to­ry,” notes the Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties, “vast col­lec­tions of it remain, much of it unseen.” One such col­lec­tion resides at the archives of British Pathé, “a trea­sure trove of 85,000 films unri­valed in their his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance.”

British Pathé has dig­i­tized their col­lec­tion and made all of it—including more than 136,000 items from the Reuters his­tor­i­cal collection—freely avail­able online at their web­site and on YouTube. You’ll find there exact­ly the kind of vari­ety Richard Eder described in The New York Times in 1977, a year when peo­ple also felt “flood­ed” by news:

Most of the time [news­reels] were patchy views of a rather scat­ter­brained real­i­ty. Sneez­ing con­tests would alter­nate with politi­cians cut­ting rib­bons and South Amer­i­cans rioting.But once in a while there was some­thing unfor­get­table: the Hin­den­burg float­ed lofti­ly into sight and sud­den­ly set­tled on the ground like burn­ing tin­sel; a mid­dle-aged French­man wept at Toulon when the fleet was scut­tled. The news­reel cam­eras and the big screen pro­vid­ed an author­i­ty to these things that tele­vi­sion equip­ment could­n’t man­age. Also there was the effect of wait­ing a day or two to see a dis­as­ter you had read of. World events were dis­crete, indi­vid­ual, weighty. They did not flood us.

British Pathé pro­duced short doc­u­men­tary films on every pos­si­ble sub­ject around the world from 1910 to 2008 and might lay claim to cap­tur­ing more unfor­get­table his­tor­i­cal moments than most any oth­er news­reel ser­vice of the era. A tiny sam­pling of news­reels in their mas­sive dig­i­tal archive includes the Beat­nik makeover from 1963 at the top; a very brief film on Tol­stoy; a longer fea­turette on the Titan­ic, with inter­views from sur­vivors; and a short on the psy­che­del­ic Mel­lotron.

Among the many “British Pathé Unis­sued” videos, we find the filmed inter­view clip below with H.G. Wells in the 1930s, in which he pro­pos­es dis­ar­ma­ment, inter­na­tion­al coop­er­a­tion, full pub­lic employ­ment, and the nation­al­iza­tion of indus­try as anti­dotes to the ris­ing tides of World War and dev­as­tat­ing social inequal­i­ty. The inter­view was “unused by Pathé edi­tors and not screened in cin­e­mas,” explains a title added at the begin­ning. One sig­nif­i­cant shift from the news­reel to the dig­i­tal age is the unprece­dent­ed abil­i­ty to bypass the cen­sors.

“Before tele­vi­sion” and the inter­net, as the archive descrip­tion points out, “peo­ple came to movie the­atres to watch the news. British Pathé was at the fore­front of cin­e­mat­ic jour­nal­ism, blend­ing infor­ma­tion with enter­tain­ment to pop­u­lar effect.” If this blend sounds some­what akin to the mass media world we inhab­it today—one filled with pro­lif­er­at­ing video explain­ers, short doc­u­men­taries, talk­ing head con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists and every oth­er pos­si­ble use of the form—perhaps it’s use­ful to remem­ber that we’ve been liv­ing in that world a very long time. It has pro­duced many thou­sands of arti­facts that can tell us where we’ve been over the past 120 years or so, if not quite how we got to where we are now.

Enter the British Pathé col­lec­tion on YouTube or their web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,000,000 Min­utes of News­reel Footage by AP & British Movi­etone Released on YouTube

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

In May of 1896, Charles Mois­son and Fran­cis Dou­bli­er trav­eled to Moscow on behalf of the Lumière Broth­ers com­pa­ny, bear­ing with them the new­ly devel­oped Lumière Ciné­mato­gaphe cam­era. Their pur­pose: to doc­u­ment the coro­na­tion of Tsar Nicholas II—the last Emper­or of Rus­sia, though no one would have known that at the time. The coro­na­tion was an extra­or­di­nary event, soon to be over­shad­owed by even more extra­or­di­nary events in the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary years to come. An enor­mous cel­e­bra­tion fol­lowed, with gifts, bread, sausage, pret­zels, beer, and a com­mem­o­ra­tive cup to rev­el­ers. The promise of these gifts led to what was lat­er called the Kho­dyn­ka Tragedy.

Hun­dreds of thou­sands descend­ed on the city. Rumors that food was run­ning short—and that the cups con­tained a gold coin—sent crowds rush­ing for the Kho­dyn­ka Field. Over­com­ing 1,800 police offi­cers, they caused a stam­pede that killed 1,389. That evening, Nicholas and the Empress Alexan­dra attend­ed a ball, then vis­it­ed wound­ed in the hos­pi­tal the fol­low­ing day. One of the Tsar’s valets, Alex­ei Volkov, who sur­vived the Rev­o­lu­tion and lived to write his mem­oirs, described walk­ing “along the Khondin­ka” and meet­ing “many groups of peo­ple com­ing back from that site and car­ry­ing the Tsar’s gifts. The strange thing, though, was that not one per­son men­tioned the cat­a­stro­phe, and I did not hear about it until the next morn­ing.”

The stam­pede seems a tes­ta­ment to the pover­ty and des­per­a­tion among ordi­nary Rus­sians at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry. That his­to­ry does not enter the frame in the minute of footage shot by Mois­son and Dou­bli­er, which you can see recre­at­ed above in stun­ning detail—with both col­or added and in orig­i­nal black and white—by Denis Shiryaev. The footage is sim­ply dat­ed May 1896 and might have been shot either before or after the coro­na­tion. As Peter Jack­son has done with footage from WWI in the fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary They Shall Not Grow Old, Shiryaev makes the grainy, blur­ry past come alive with the help of an “ensem­ble of neur­al net­works,” as he writes on the video’s YouTube page.

The enhance­ments to the video trans­fer of the orig­i­nal film include:

1) FPS boost­ing – to 60 frames per sec­ond

2) Image res­o­lu­tion boost­ed up a bit with ESRGAN (gen­er­al dataset)

3) Resort­ed video sharp­ness, removed blur, removed com­pres­sion “arte­facts”

4) Col­orized (option­al) – due to high request I have decid­ed to include both ver­sions of the processed video: col­orized and black and white.

Boost­ing the frame rate to 60 fps espe­cial­ly gives these bustling and/or saun­ter­ing Moscow denizens of Tver­skaya Street a life­like appear­ance. (See here for a com­par­i­son of var­i­ous frame rates). Whether you pre­fer col­or or black and white, it may be easy to imag­ine strolling down this cob­ble­stone avenue your­self, dodg­ing the dozens of horse drawn car­riages pass­ing by.

It may be hard­er to imag­ine that per­haps days or hours before or after this slice of Moscow city life, the last tsar of Rus­sia was crowned, and a crowd of some­where around half a mil­lion peo­ple rushed through the streets for a glass of beer and a free bite to eat. See more of Shiryaev’s AI-assist­ed film restora­tions at the links below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vin­tage Video of NYC Gets Col­orized & Revived with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

How Peter Jack­son Made His State-of-the-Art World War I Doc­u­men­tary, They Shall Not Grow Old: An Inside Look

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Denis Shi­rayev is at it again! The man who only a few weeks ago put one of the most famous pieces of film his­to­ry–the Lumiere Bros. footage of a train arriv­ing at La Cio­tat sta­tion–through a neur­al net­work to bring it “to life,” so to speak, has turned to anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing slice of his­to­ry.

For his next install­ment, he has tak­en footage of New York City dai­ly life in 1911, eight min­utes of tram rides, horse-drawn wag­ons, the ele­vat­ed train, and the rush of crowd­ed streets, and applied the same deep learn­ing algo­rithms to make it all look like it was shot yes­ter­day. This time he had a bit of help from anoth­er YouTube historian/technician Guy Jones, who had already speed cor­rect­ed and tweaked the footage, as well as adding envi­ron­men­tal sounds. Shi­rayev has used AI to upscale the footage to 4K and to 60p.

The orig­i­nal footage was shot by Sven­s­ka Biografteatern, a Swedish news­reel com­pa­ny, and begins with a shot of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty as if seen through a spy­glass. The film con­tin­ues as trav­el­ogue and as an intro­duc­tion to the immi­grant expe­ri­ence, as the cam­era shows boats dock­ing, pas­sen­gers dis­em­bark­ing, and then the over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence of New York City.

The footage is clear enough to take in store­fronts and adver­tis­ing on trams and the sides of build­ings. But the atmos­phere is too clogged with dai­ly smoke to get a real clear vista of the sky­line from the Brook­lyn Bridge.

At the time, Man­hat­tan had a pop­u­la­tion about 2 mil­lion. Inter­est­ing­ly, that was its height. Over a hun­dred years lat­er, that has declined to 1.6 mil­lion, with a sig­nif­i­cant decrease in pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty. This Observ­er arti­cle ascribes that to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, and a change of res­i­den­tial areas to com­mer­cial ones.

And let’s repeat what we said about Shirayev’s pre­vi­ous 4K footage: this is not a “remas­ter”. This is not a “restora­tion.” This is using the pow­er of com­put­ing to inter­pret frames of film and cre­ate in between frames, as well as cre­ate detail from blur­ry footage. (I’m not too sure about the colorization–it doesn’t real­ly work as well as all the oth­er software…yet).

Now we know that Shi­rayev is mak­ing this a thing, please note his pinned mes­sage in the YouTube com­ments: he’s tak­ing requests.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.