I love finding old footage. I found this footage of Berlin from 1900.. I can't help but watch and think, "If these people only knew what was coming."

In any event, pick the version you like better.

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I keep thinking... "One of you people needs to kill 11 year old Hitler."

I would like a gif of the guys drinking at 2:28. Could any of my Imwan friends help me with that?

I didn't even know they had color back then. I see everything prior to the Korean War as gray.

Can someone please edit in the theme to Cheers and superimpose our faces over the Germans.

There were a number of short-lived color film processes in the silent era. None of them could reproduce a full spectrum of colors, because they only used two of the three primary colors. Color film of that era is often reproduced in black and white to avoid the additional trouble of restoring the color. In recent years there have been efforts to restore the old color footage. I'm amazed at how much detail they were able to recapture in this restoration. It looks sharper than most footage you see from decades later.

Any information on where this color footage came from? Or who did the restoration? It looks to me like it's early 1910s, not 1900. But that still makes it about 100 years old!

There is something very poignant about seeing this, knowing that the entire city would be destroyed only 30 years or so later. Most of those soldiers you see probably died in World War I, since they would have been in battle right from the start. Most of the young boys it shows playing probably served as middle-aged men in World War II.

It's colorised. There are some scenes where a bunch of people are completely grey, and I don't think they're aliens.

This is what youtube says about it.



So, I don't have an answer to if it is colorized.

But, if I was to re-edit it, I would like this song playing.

And I just noticed that one of postcards, of the "Auto Omnibus" is taken from the color film.

I read that at 2:50 Munich is shown, not Berlin. And at 3:08 cars are driving on the left hand side which means it is not Berlin.

I read this as well: "Munich: at 2:22 you can easily recognize Bavarian Masskrüge, 2:52 - 2:59 is at Marienplatz, 3:00 - 3:05 is Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz."

Most people agree it is colorized.

And, now that I was looking, I can tell Marienplatz from Munich at around the 3:00 mark. People also question the aerial shot at the beginning. I don't know if the fact that the guys are drinking from "Masskrüge" means Southern Germany, but that is what Germans seem to think.

There is a really interesting website with pictures of WWI in color (not video, just photos). It really makes things come to life and seem more real to me somehow.
http://www.greatwar.nl/frames/default-color.html

I didn't link to the main page directly because it has a very disturbing image on it this week.

Black and white does have a kind of distancing effect in historic photos and archival films. Seeing those rare early color images can be jarring in the way it reminds us that these were real people in a real world, with all the color and texture of our own present.

If that footage has been colorized, whoever did it did a remarkable job of simulating very early color footage. If it is authentic early color footage it would have needed such extensive restoration work that there would have been a fine line between "restoration" and "colorization." At any rate it's probably the liveliest photographic record of that period we're ever going to see until somebody develops working time travel. In a sense that's what this footage is already.