Post by ethel on Nov 1, 2010 4:18:10 GMT -5
tinyurl.com/2cb8m95
Odd story about how a potential time-traveller may have brought late 20th Century technology back to the Roaring 20s.
From the Caledonian Mercury Online.
It’s unlikely to ever become the most famous movie mystery – the hanging Munchkin (or is a bird?) in The Wizard of Oz looks set to retain that status, despite occasionally coming under threat from rivals such as the ghost in Three Men and a Baby.
But the recent discovery by Irish film-maker George Clarke of what looks like a person talking into a mobile phone in an add-on extra included with the DVD boxed set of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 silent film The Circus is one of the more entertainingly odd news stories for some time. (The first part of the YouTube video is Clarke describing what he found. The actual 1928 footage starts at about 2 minutes 35 seconds.)
It’s bizarre at the very least, and – as Clarke himself suggests – lends itself to speculation that this is the first captured-on-film proof of the real-life existence of that old movie staple, time travel.
The black-and-white clip of the Hollywood premier of The Circus shows a couple of people walking from right to left in front of the cinema behind a prop of a stuffed or wooden zebra. The first figure is an ordinary 1920s chap in suit and hat, walking briskly. The second is the focus of all the attention. It could be a woman dressed in heavy clothes, or it could be a man – close study tends to suggest the face of a man but the shoes and hat of a woman. We’re in the world of actors here, however, so it could be a man dressed as a woman.
Whatever: the wo/man has her/his left hand up alongside her/his face and appears to be holding a mobile phone. S/he is ambling along in that slightly distracted way that modern phone-strollers have, and at the end of the clip stops and half-turns towards the camera. At this point s/he can be seen to be speaking, which – given the absence of anyone immediately alongside – further reinforces the impression that they’re in mid-call.
Goodness knows quite what to make of this – whether to take it seriously or to simply sit back and lap up the fun – but assessment really has to start from two basic premises:
1 – that the film has not been doctored (as we are assured is the case, but hey);
2 – the person captured on the 82-year-old celluloid isn’t a real time-traveller.
With those two points nailed down, the issue reduces to one simple question: What the hell is the supposed ur-Nokia user actually doing?
Opinions vary. S/he is holding up a hand to assuage a raging earache or toothache. S/he is holding some form of ear-trumpet. S/he is holding a banana in a comedy fashion. Er, that’s about it. Nothing else (apart from an impossible phone) appears to fit.
It’s decidedly odd, because we’re so accustomed to seeing people walk along in exactly that style as they blether into their digital box of tricks. This modern familiarity makes the clip hard to assess objectively – it’s like one of those optical-illusion puzzles where the mind is conditioned to see something one way when a perfectly reasonable (but ignored) alternative is also on offer.
What is really needed, analysis-wise, is someone who has never in all their puff come across anyone nattering into a mobile. A naïf in such matters might see through the mystery very easily. Trouble is, there’s hardly anyone downstream of the Amazon headwaters who has not now encountered this most commonplace of comms devices.
If one didn’t know it was filmed in 1928 – and thought it was a 1920s costume drama filmed in, say, 2005 and made to look the part courtesy of cinematographic tricks – then the easy assumption would be that it’s one of those set-glitches that see Zulus wearing wristwatches, crisp packets being visible among leaves in The Last of the Mohicans, TV aerials popping up on supposedly Victorian rooftops and so on. But it’s effectively the reverse of such things: the time-line is the wrong way round.
There is something almost spooky about it, and this adds to the interest. Films and TV are good at uncertainty and eeriness, of course – any number of horror movies, those fine BBC adaptions of M R James ghost stories, even that creepy living-man-in-the-comatose-stadium CCTV moment at the end of the first episode of the generally rubbishy FlashForward.
One final thought. If the person in the film is indeed holding something in their left hand – and this is by no means certain, as the shape of whatever it might be is shadowy – then the wide finger-spacing tends to suggest it’s a fairly large or at least quite long object. If we are talking mobiles it’s not a modern easy-to-lose small model, but one of those now-laughable-to-look-at chunky prototypes to be seen in cop movies from the 1980s.
So if it was a time-traveller, they appear to have gone back to 1928 from 1985 or thereabouts. Or then again, perhaps they’re from well into the future even as we know it, and the phone they’re clutching is chunky because it doesn’t just have camera, video and general internet capability, but is also equipped with an unavoidably bulky time travel app…
Odd story about how a potential time-traveller may have brought late 20th Century technology back to the Roaring 20s.
From the Caledonian Mercury Online.
It’s unlikely to ever become the most famous movie mystery – the hanging Munchkin (or is a bird?) in The Wizard of Oz looks set to retain that status, despite occasionally coming under threat from rivals such as the ghost in Three Men and a Baby.
But the recent discovery by Irish film-maker George Clarke of what looks like a person talking into a mobile phone in an add-on extra included with the DVD boxed set of Charlie Chaplin’s 1928 silent film The Circus is one of the more entertainingly odd news stories for some time. (The first part of the YouTube video is Clarke describing what he found. The actual 1928 footage starts at about 2 minutes 35 seconds.)
It’s bizarre at the very least, and – as Clarke himself suggests – lends itself to speculation that this is the first captured-on-film proof of the real-life existence of that old movie staple, time travel.
The black-and-white clip of the Hollywood premier of The Circus shows a couple of people walking from right to left in front of the cinema behind a prop of a stuffed or wooden zebra. The first figure is an ordinary 1920s chap in suit and hat, walking briskly. The second is the focus of all the attention. It could be a woman dressed in heavy clothes, or it could be a man – close study tends to suggest the face of a man but the shoes and hat of a woman. We’re in the world of actors here, however, so it could be a man dressed as a woman.
Whatever: the wo/man has her/his left hand up alongside her/his face and appears to be holding a mobile phone. S/he is ambling along in that slightly distracted way that modern phone-strollers have, and at the end of the clip stops and half-turns towards the camera. At this point s/he can be seen to be speaking, which – given the absence of anyone immediately alongside – further reinforces the impression that they’re in mid-call.
Goodness knows quite what to make of this – whether to take it seriously or to simply sit back and lap up the fun – but assessment really has to start from two basic premises:
1 – that the film has not been doctored (as we are assured is the case, but hey);
2 – the person captured on the 82-year-old celluloid isn’t a real time-traveller.
With those two points nailed down, the issue reduces to one simple question: What the hell is the supposed ur-Nokia user actually doing?
Opinions vary. S/he is holding up a hand to assuage a raging earache or toothache. S/he is holding some form of ear-trumpet. S/he is holding a banana in a comedy fashion. Er, that’s about it. Nothing else (apart from an impossible phone) appears to fit.
It’s decidedly odd, because we’re so accustomed to seeing people walk along in exactly that style as they blether into their digital box of tricks. This modern familiarity makes the clip hard to assess objectively – it’s like one of those optical-illusion puzzles where the mind is conditioned to see something one way when a perfectly reasonable (but ignored) alternative is also on offer.
What is really needed, analysis-wise, is someone who has never in all their puff come across anyone nattering into a mobile. A naïf in such matters might see through the mystery very easily. Trouble is, there’s hardly anyone downstream of the Amazon headwaters who has not now encountered this most commonplace of comms devices.
If one didn’t know it was filmed in 1928 – and thought it was a 1920s costume drama filmed in, say, 2005 and made to look the part courtesy of cinematographic tricks – then the easy assumption would be that it’s one of those set-glitches that see Zulus wearing wristwatches, crisp packets being visible among leaves in The Last of the Mohicans, TV aerials popping up on supposedly Victorian rooftops and so on. But it’s effectively the reverse of such things: the time-line is the wrong way round.
There is something almost spooky about it, and this adds to the interest. Films and TV are good at uncertainty and eeriness, of course – any number of horror movies, those fine BBC adaptions of M R James ghost stories, even that creepy living-man-in-the-comatose-stadium CCTV moment at the end of the first episode of the generally rubbishy FlashForward.
One final thought. If the person in the film is indeed holding something in their left hand – and this is by no means certain, as the shape of whatever it might be is shadowy – then the wide finger-spacing tends to suggest it’s a fairly large or at least quite long object. If we are talking mobiles it’s not a modern easy-to-lose small model, but one of those now-laughable-to-look-at chunky prototypes to be seen in cop movies from the 1980s.
So if it was a time-traveller, they appear to have gone back to 1928 from 1985 or thereabouts. Or then again, perhaps they’re from well into the future even as we know it, and the phone they’re clutching is chunky because it doesn’t just have camera, video and general internet capability, but is also equipped with an unavoidably bulky time travel app…
