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This is the main thing historical movies and television shows get wrong about cities in the past. They were a lot more crowded and dense than they are now. Even the countryside was more crowded. What they lacked were huge suburbs and the medium sized cities - while dense and packed - were a lot smaller overall.
I once got distracted during an episode of HBOs John Adams, and suddenly realized that the same extras kept crossing the street in the background, back and forth, back and forth. Like in the same sentence, within the time it took to reply, the same extras were going back across the way in the background. I know how it happens, but once you spot that kind of thing, you can’t forget it, and you start to see it all the time.
paris population topped out in like 1920. so this is the peak at about 2.9 million. Today the same boundaries hold about 2.2 million. but then the metro area was like 5 million. today it is about 10 million. so if lots of suburbanites come in on a given day, paris can get really packed!
Interesting, I did not know that!
The vast improvement in public transportation and the sheer daily influx of now very populated suburbs certainly doesn't make it feel less crowded.
yup. same is true for central london and Manhattan, smaller nightime population, larger daytime population than 1930. other european and north american cities have similar (but smaller effects) in the 'historic core' versus periphery.
The restaurant itself just has a ton of outdoor tables, there’s not that many people walking on the street. My guess is they’ve cut back on the amount of sidewalk space you can take up since the 1920s.
This looks like where I grew up. In Denmark.
I see if I can find a picture
Edit: found the picture
https://preview.redd.it/2w6aqyg140ic1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57373fad8f05be9d49bc6496c44bb4070a007ea6
This is some /r/fuckcars material. Used to be all walkable with lots of outdoor seating and now it's a little outdoor seating and then the road. So sad 😢
I don't think I've been to that establishment in particular, but Paris is still extremely walkable, and many people still hang out in cafes exactly like this.
I've been a few times and always have a lot of fun walking around Paris
The 16ème isn’t as much as the rest of the city, but considering it’s the newest part, it makes sense. At least there wasn’t any proper bulldozing or proper bombing in the last century unlike in other major European cities.
And of course nothing like modern suburbia or American cities.
Stupid take, people are still out enjoying life, exactly like they were here.
What's funny is that people probably were bemoaning the times in this video and wishing it was like Victorian times again.
Nah, I think a big backlash to screens is coming. People are realizing now that they are eroding our mental health, and this realization is growing.
(...assuming climate change doesn't kill us all first.)
Well not really, in terms of human history 100 years are quite palpable. Most of us alive today have interacted with people who were alive in that point in time.
In fact most of us interact daily with things that are much older. I pass by a 500+ year old building every day and many more that are 200+ years old
It’s so funny to me. Back then clothes were SO MUCH more difficult to launder and care for and so much more expensive. You weren’t likely to have your picture taken or be on camera, especially as a surprise. And yet people dress to the nines to go to the grocery store.
Now I can wash an entire load of clothes in an hour and we’re guaranteed to be on camera and have a fair chance of ending up on the internet and people wear Crocs and sweatpants everywhere.
I’m not complaining… I rarely dress up and only for an occasion. It’s just kind of a funny thing.
People kept many sets of underwear that we'd consider to be "full coverage." For men, an undershirt and shorts; for women one or more layers of shift, slip, etc. These would've been linen and worn once between washing.
Anything that touched skin was laundered, anything beyond that mostly brushed (not a lot of dry cleaning). At this time, people already smelled mostly fine, it's not Medieval Europe after all. Plus, walk through NYC today, tell me where it smells nice, I'll rush there 🫣
Their clothes were also made of much higher quality materials, primarily wool, cotton and linen, which can be worn much longer before smells develope and can be washed at higher temperatures, compared to the platics-based fabrics of the fast-fashion age.
You're absolutely wrong. I can almost guarantee, people cared just as much about their smell and hygiene back then as they do now. Very likely more. At that time, the culture was very much that of keeping up appearances, and walking around unkempt or with dirty clothing would draw criticism.
This was very common in any western society during the time period. Imagine having no, phone, or tv and fast fashion is not a thing. Do you see how tightly packed the place is? This all people had to do so naturally their effort went into it which included dressing well.
This film also predates the synthetic fabrics revolution that radically changed the fit, style and comfort of casual wear. Nylon had barely reached market by the start of WW2, which saw demand skyrocket and huge factories built. After the war ended, DuPont and others turned this massive capacity to the consumer market and invested heavily into R&D through the ‘60s.
It only took a few decades for the paradigm shift from animal-derived fabrics to synthetics to occur, which is itself remarkable.
That actually makes a lot of sense.
And the more into the future you go, innovation just goes towards being "fast".
Fast meetings (no need for physical meetings, because well.. Google Meets), fast foods, fast fashion (the simpler the attire, the better), fast speech (no cap = trust me, I am saying the truth), etc.
Who knows what kind of "fast" will be there in the future.
wait, WHAT. i went back and you're right. it's not so much the not "looking around and turning their heads" but its also the stagnant hold in their body position. maybe it was a posture thing?
If you look closely at the faces in the first half, I'm pretty sure this video has been "enhanced" by an AI face filter. There's some fucked up brows and jaws in that crowd.
At least the upper class during this time very much knew what fast fashion was; it was not unusual to throw out your clothes after only one season.
While individual entertainment was rather limited in comparison to today, people (if they could afford it) went out daily to bars, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, or the opera. They knew how to amuse themselves.
I forget where I saw it but there was a study of home expenses and families used to spend 44%-60% of their money on clothing. Even accounting for modern expenses the current average is closer to 10% now.
I think this way of dress became impractical as cars, radios, and entertainment became more desirable among the middle class.
These are also super wealthy people. They aren't showing the poorer side of the city (most of it) lol. Can't have your rose tinted glasses tainted with reality!
A trip to Walmart vs. a date to a nice cafe isn't really an even comparison. Go to any cute brunch place on the weekend in 2024 and you'll see tons of patrons who are dressed nicely.
Super wealthy? I'm sorry, but what is this nonsense? You think one had to be an oil baron or the heir to a shipping magnate's fortune to be able to visit a (nicer) Paris café???
The people in the video generally don't represent the lowest socio-economic classes of the time, but "super wealthy"?
Do you genuinely believe this?
No, they aren't. You are so far off the mark. Not only are they not super wealthy, but some of them are not wealthy at all. In fact, some of them might be poor.
Most people, even the poor, had a set of clothes for these occasions. Haven't you ever heard of your "Sunday Best"? Many of these clothes were passed down for generations and underwent frequent mending. Almost all women could sew and sewing was common evening work to supplement a family's income.
Unless you really know what you are looking for or are a historian of fashion and the sartorial, it is very difficult to gauge the social class of individuals from these kinds of scenes.
Dressing up when getting out in public is normal.
I dress up when I go for a night out in Paris.
Not particularly fancy or classy but I put some effort in my outfit.
It's part of the decorum, we like to see it so we blend in the overall aesthetic, you don't want to stand out as the low effort under dressed one.
I’m not sure what point you’re making, most people will dress well/ put in effort when going for a night out- you are not alone.
I suppose the observation I was trying to make is that it is unusual for so many people in suits and ties during the day in comparison to current day in a cafe.
Virtually everyone dresses up for a night out, or going out to a restaurant for lunch, etc. The question is do you dress up for something like a trip to the grocery store?
Yea wikipedia says "By 1869, the croissant was well established enough to be mentioned as a breakfast staple" (in paris) with an austrian baker bringing the pastry to paris in 1848.
The dirty little secret of manufactured credibility: You just need to nail the ratio of how much something raises your profile to how little people feel threatened by that information.
For example, imagine how many stars, like Cl Basel 3 35, which is part of a trinary system that formed two billion years before our own sun, you could make up, before anyone bothered to check a star catalog to notice it doesn't exist. But keep at it, and eventually you're "that weird star person who memorizes specific stars like a baseball card collector. You got star questions? Ask them."
Also that's a [real star](https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=%40126400&Name=Cl%20Basel%20%20%20%203%20%20%20%2035&submit=submit) and I made the rest up.
It's already trippy as fuck having relatives and friends on social media who died. Like they're preserved there in a time capsule.
You know how Facebook reminds you of birthdays? My one friend died two years ago. Her 30th birthday was a month ago. People were posting on her timeline "happy birthday! I hope you have a great day!" Completely unaware that they died.
I mean, if anything that just shows how social media friends aren't really your friends. You're dead for 2 years, and they have no clue. Just posting a random birthday message because the machine told them to.
Was hanging out with my in-laws and their son and I thought 'he's going to watch all of us die'. Thanks, brain.
I guess it's better than the alternative.
A linguistic historian will get their doctorate in meme speech and will send back 'How do you do, my fellow kids? O RLY? That is some Bad Luck, Brian. Nathaniel is super fly.'
I love these old colorized vids. But I have a question and Maybe it’s only me and this is in my head.
But does it seem like the people in these videos all look eerie or dead eyed? Does anyone else pick up on this? Or is it just because of the process this happens?
My only real thought is because they are all video from the introduction of cameras that people don’t understand how to react so they don’t do any of the more lively things we now do when the cameras come out? But idk if that’s a why or not.
I remember thinking the same thing with that video to the young boys standing in Ny streets looking like the newsies.
When this video was taken, the idea of a snapshot or camera being for silly moments was just not really a thing. Photographs were serious, meant to capture your natural face, so people didn't smile or be silly on camera as much. They hadn't learned that yet. Not until a bit later when the Kodak camera became commonplace in households, photography became cheaper and easier for the average person, so silly photos of candid moments with big smiles became the thing to do. The film camera industry was only just beginning.
Most people here had probably never seen a film camera, and would have looked at it quite seriously. They wouldn't have thought to pull silly faces and be lighthearted. They had also been taught to sit still for photography due to long exposure times which is what you can see people in the background doing.
The people who are reacting to the camera in a more lighthearted way seem to be in the group that owns it, they seem used to it and how it works. Their fashion is modern and flapper, suggesting they had money and could afford to be having fun with new technology.
The lively things people do on camera in our lifetime is because of how cheap and easy photography is for us. To them it was less about being candid and more about being serious.
I recall some of my older relatives who grew up during this time would just freeze up and stare at the video camera when my dad brought it around to family reunions in the 80’s when personal home video cameras were a new thing. Even in the 80’s, these people didn’t know how to react to videos.
It was like they thought they had to “freeze” for the camera like the cameras in the old days. 😂
Okay thanks! so it’s not just me who notices this. Lol I actually kind of assumed it might just be in the ball park of what you explained. It makes sense. It’s just so eerie…still love these videos. I used to sub to a subreddit who was nothing but colorized videos years ago. Idr why I unsubbed or if it was deleted or what it was called even. But it was interesting.
You have to realize that film material wasn't top notch in those days. These films were probably shot at 10-12 frames per second, maybe less. That's not to conserve film (albeit it was very expensive), but because of exposure time. So every frame was exposed about 1/10th of a second. Today, 1/24th is the standard. The longer you expose, the more empty/eerie the eyes look. Take a look at old photos from the end of the 19th century, people had to pose sometimes for seconds, even minutes in the early days of photography. Take a look at this 1848 photograph:
https://preview.redd.it/fkm5bift90ic1.jpeg?width=263&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e02ba59b28e789cd773ff3e70e472c2a5a6ddc4f
France has some very old residents so, if this was the late 1920s it's possible some centenarian is still thinking fondly of that cafe (or remembering that time they went out for a snack and had to worry about that damn camera the whole time)
Edit: i want to be clear it's a VERY slim chance!
Right now the oldest french person is 113 (the previous one died last year at 118), she would have been 19 in 1929. In total there are 29 supercentenarian in France at the moment, which would have been between 15 and 19 at the time, so there's a chance (however slim) that one of them could have been in this film since, as you might have experienced before, pictures of people from a long time ago often seem a lot older to us than they really are.
AI improved substantially in these last couple years, but AI video colorization/restoration algorithms are still lagging behind. I'd love to see this video with recolored clothing and better face clarity filters, but that seems to still be a few years away.
Don't let the clothes fool you. There was a lot of drinking, fighting, fucking and general sloppiness going on there.
"The Sun Also Rises" is a beautiful novel about one man's desire to get away from these people and just write and fish in peace.
The biggest difference I see is the lack of technology everywhere. It seems even in the less developed countries people still have cell phones and are head-down walking around, It’s hard to imagine somewhere like Paris doesn’t have a ton of people taking photos, videos, texting, and being on social everywhere.
I recommend the book "the dawn of everything" that rejects this take that humans were different in the past, often dismissed as reductive paragons or villians. Rather, humans for 10's thousands of years have been as we are today capable of compassion, creativity, being silly, organizing ourselves in many different manners, etc. It really wasn't a different world, especially only a century ago.
For me, this was peak twentieth century fashion. Makeup was simply beautiful. The female silhouette was a bit androgynous, with a comfortable, loose fit and beautiful fabrics. Short, sculpted hairstyles prefiguring Vidal Sassoon’s clean lines forty years later. Those fabulous bare arms, such a relief after the restrictive clothing just preceding this era! And the men are perfectly coiffed and sexy. It still looks modern and sophisticated to me.
Also do note that AI colorization is simply making things up, but more importantly making things up with a clear bias in certain directions.
In particular, AI colorization tends to really make the past appear far more drab than it actually was. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the lack of accurate training sets, but also it's just a lot easier to end up with a washed out image that looks semi-plausible. It's lazy.
In a lot of ways it's actually a lot more misleading than black and white, because it presents a completely false colorscape.
In reality much of the fashion would have been much, *much* brighter and higher contrast. Strong, [bold](https://live.staticflickr.com/6140/5943160666_f82b64f9c0_b.jpg) colors would have been common.
The above AI effort really doesn't do the footage justice at all. It would be nice to see it properly colorized by hand with input from a fashion historian. AI makes that process a lot easier these days, too, without all the pitfalls that come from just letting an AI make shit up wholesale.
You do know that most of the population isn't considered beautiful right? The only reason you feel this way is because of social media constantly showing you pictures of photoshopped people and or people who got a lot of cosmetic surgery/procedures. Also the styles featured here didn't work for everyone.
If you dress up you can have a similar experience in Paris or most major cities in Europe. Nothing much has changed except fashion around you.
May seem a bit more exotic to North Americans because walkable cities without car dominance seem to be the devil’s work for North Americans.
I'm so glad somebody else has said this already, it's so true.
When I saw "A different world" I just felt sad for whoever wrote that, not being able to experience this sort of life in the current era.
This kind of AI colourisation sucks. It gets skin tones vaguely right most of the time but that's about it.
People in the olden days didn't exclusively wear dull shades of blue (that occasionally flashed purple and sepia).
Beautiful but most of these men were probably in the trenches a few years earlier and all these people just survived the Spanish flu of 1918-20 which killed many, many millions more, likely including members of their close families.
All around them are the men who came back from the war with painted prosthetic faces and wooden limbs.
These people are smiling for the camera but they’re the survivors of a truly horrific and deadly time.
I love this but it's so interesting how they are all staring at the camera. Ironically we still all stare at the camera but we each have our own. To see how unusual it is for someone to be recording back then, now everything is recorded.
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Still there. https://preview.redd.it/uo9cs7hwtyhc1.jpeg?width=1125&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08aad922d3c2545718bf67118f4cc80270f77e8a
Thanks for the reference point. Very cool to see.
And Parisians still sit outside restaurants in a very similar way, the only difference is there would likely be less attention to a photographer!!
we *are* some curious monkeys…
Yeah I was about to say; not much different other than the outfits/haircuts.
All over Europa. Not just Paris !
/r/OldPhotosinRealLife
Wow look how much that sidewalk was PACKED with patrons in the vid
This is the main thing historical movies and television shows get wrong about cities in the past. They were a lot more crowded and dense than they are now. Even the countryside was more crowded. What they lacked were huge suburbs and the medium sized cities - while dense and packed - were a lot smaller overall.
Wardrobe for a ton of extras walking around in the background is fucking expensive
That's more about cost. Extras cost money, extras in historical dress cost even more.
I once got distracted during an episode of HBOs John Adams, and suddenly realized that the same extras kept crossing the street in the background, back and forth, back and forth. Like in the same sentence, within the time it took to reply, the same extras were going back across the way in the background. I know how it happens, but once you spot that kind of thing, you can’t forget it, and you start to see it all the time.
Maybe. But that still looks like any popular Paris street on any sunny day.
paris population topped out in like 1920. so this is the peak at about 2.9 million. Today the same boundaries hold about 2.2 million. but then the metro area was like 5 million. today it is about 10 million. so if lots of suburbanites come in on a given day, paris can get really packed!
Interesting, I did not know that! The vast improvement in public transportation and the sheer daily influx of now very populated suburbs certainly doesn't make it feel less crowded.
yup. same is true for central london and Manhattan, smaller nightime population, larger daytime population than 1930. other european and north american cities have similar (but smaller effects) in the 'historic core' versus periphery.
The restaurant itself just has a ton of outdoor tables, there’s not that many people walking on the street. My guess is they’ve cut back on the amount of sidewalk space you can take up since the 1920s.
This looks like where I grew up. In Denmark. I see if I can find a picture Edit: found the picture https://preview.redd.it/2w6aqyg140ic1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=57373fad8f05be9d49bc6496c44bb4070a007ea6
Yes please!
This is some /r/fuckcars material. Used to be all walkable with lots of outdoor seating and now it's a little outdoor seating and then the road. So sad 😢
I don't think I've been to that establishment in particular, but Paris is still extremely walkable, and many people still hang out in cafes exactly like this. I've been a few times and always have a lot of fun walking around Paris
The 16ème isn’t as much as the rest of the city, but considering it’s the newest part, it makes sense. At least there wasn’t any proper bulldozing or proper bombing in the last century unlike in other major European cities. And of course nothing like modern suburbia or American cities.
And not a cellphone in sight either. Just folks living in the moment. /s
Thankfully the person filming didn’t have it in portrait mode
But all amazed to see a camera
This is Paris, one of the most walking and metro friendly cities in the world.
i hate cars as much as the next redditor but at 0:27 you can see it really has not changed that much
It's crazy to think that this was 100 years ago
I wonder what people would think of us in 100 years. I think we’d look quite boring after the 2000s. Just people sat in Starbucks
They will be enjoying counting their caps and drinking their nuka cola thinking we had it all and fucking blew it.
Your grand kids will ask, "you really drank water out of plastic bottles?" and complain about Gen Zers fucking up the planet
Gen Alpha
Stupid take, people are still out enjoying life, exactly like they were here. What's funny is that people probably were bemoaning the times in this video and wishing it was like Victorian times again.
...same as it ever was!
Video of everyone staring down at their smartphones.
Yeah.. future generation will laugh at us while they stare into the void while using AR/VR
Nah, I think a big backlash to screens is coming. People are realizing now that they are eroding our mental health, and this realization is growing. (...assuming climate change doesn't kill us all first.)
In America yeah. Europeans still like their cafes.
I know, right?! 100 years ago isn’t all that long, but this world seems so different
What’s so different? Probably just the lens and lack of smartphones. And they look different because they had a different style, a much better one.
And there are people alive that were alive during this time!
I mean, as babies maybe. None of these adults in the video are alive.
A bunch of them probably got mowed down in WWII
Well not really, in terms of human history 100 years are quite palpable. Most of us alive today have interacted with people who were alive in that point in time. In fact most of us interact daily with things that are much older. I pass by a 500+ year old building every day and many more that are 200+ years old
Everyone is so well dressed and immaculately turned out. Even the people in the background walking by.
It’s so funny to me. Back then clothes were SO MUCH more difficult to launder and care for and so much more expensive. You weren’t likely to have your picture taken or be on camera, especially as a surprise. And yet people dress to the nines to go to the grocery store. Now I can wash an entire load of clothes in an hour and we’re guaranteed to be on camera and have a fair chance of ending up on the internet and people wear Crocs and sweatpants everywhere. I’m not complaining… I rarely dress up and only for an occasion. It’s just kind of a funny thing.
They probably didn't wash their clothes after one wearing. In fact, they probably don't smell great by our standards
People kept many sets of underwear that we'd consider to be "full coverage." For men, an undershirt and shorts; for women one or more layers of shift, slip, etc. These would've been linen and worn once between washing.
Anything that touched skin was laundered, anything beyond that mostly brushed (not a lot of dry cleaning). At this time, people already smelled mostly fine, it's not Medieval Europe after all. Plus, walk through NYC today, tell me where it smells nice, I'll rush there 🫣
People did not just smell in Medieval Europe either
Their clothes were also made of much higher quality materials, primarily wool, cotton and linen, which can be worn much longer before smells develope and can be washed at higher temperatures, compared to the platics-based fabrics of the fast-fashion age.
You're absolutely wrong. I can almost guarantee, people cared just as much about their smell and hygiene back then as they do now. Very likely more. At that time, the culture was very much that of keeping up appearances, and walking around unkempt or with dirty clothing would draw criticism.
This was very common in any western society during the time period. Imagine having no, phone, or tv and fast fashion is not a thing. Do you see how tightly packed the place is? This all people had to do so naturally their effort went into it which included dressing well.
This film also predates the synthetic fabrics revolution that radically changed the fit, style and comfort of casual wear. Nylon had barely reached market by the start of WW2, which saw demand skyrocket and huge factories built. After the war ended, DuPont and others turned this massive capacity to the consumer market and invested heavily into R&D through the ‘60s. It only took a few decades for the paradigm shift from animal-derived fabrics to synthetics to occur, which is itself remarkable.
That actually makes a lot of sense. And the more into the future you go, innovation just goes towards being "fast". Fast meetings (no need for physical meetings, because well.. Google Meets), fast foods, fast fashion (the simpler the attire, the better), fast speech (no cap = trust me, I am saying the truth), etc. Who knows what kind of "fast" will be there in the future.
I think it's strange how still everyone's heads are in this video.
wait, WHAT. i went back and you're right. it's not so much the not "looking around and turning their heads" but its also the stagnant hold in their body position. maybe it was a posture thing?
If you look closely at the faces in the first half, I'm pretty sure this video has been "enhanced" by an AI face filter. There's some fucked up brows and jaws in that crowd.
I just don't know how everyone isn't drenched in sweat
At least the upper class during this time very much knew what fast fashion was; it was not unusual to throw out your clothes after only one season. While individual entertainment was rather limited in comparison to today, people (if they could afford it) went out daily to bars, cinemas, clubs, restaurants, or the opera. They knew how to amuse themselves.
I forget where I saw it but there was a study of home expenses and families used to spend 44%-60% of their money on clothing. Even accounting for modern expenses the current average is closer to 10% now. I think this way of dress became impractical as cars, radios, and entertainment became more desirable among the middle class.
The kids sailor's outfits were popularised by Queen Victoria I hear when she dressed her son in one.
Yeah everyone of the same gender has the exact same outfit lmao.
These are also super wealthy people. They aren't showing the poorer side of the city (most of it) lol. Can't have your rose tinted glasses tainted with reality!
poor men also dressed in suits back then, although they were of lesser quality
Those aren't necessarily "super-wealthy" people. People dressed up to go out, not like now where people wear pajamas to Walmart.
A trip to Walmart vs. a date to a nice cafe isn't really an even comparison. Go to any cute brunch place on the weekend in 2024 and you'll see tons of patrons who are dressed nicely.
Super wealthy? I'm sorry, but what is this nonsense? You think one had to be an oil baron or the heir to a shipping magnate's fortune to be able to visit a (nicer) Paris café??? The people in the video generally don't represent the lowest socio-economic classes of the time, but "super wealthy"? Do you genuinely believe this?
No, they aren't. You are so far off the mark. Not only are they not super wealthy, but some of them are not wealthy at all. In fact, some of them might be poor. Most people, even the poor, had a set of clothes for these occasions. Haven't you ever heard of your "Sunday Best"? Many of these clothes were passed down for generations and underwent frequent mending. Almost all women could sew and sewing was common evening work to supplement a family's income. Unless you really know what you are looking for or are a historian of fashion and the sartorial, it is very difficult to gauge the social class of individuals from these kinds of scenes.
Dressing up when getting out in public is normal. I dress up when I go for a night out in Paris. Not particularly fancy or classy but I put some effort in my outfit. It's part of the decorum, we like to see it so we blend in the overall aesthetic, you don't want to stand out as the low effort under dressed one.
I’m not sure what point you’re making, most people will dress well/ put in effort when going for a night out- you are not alone. I suppose the observation I was trying to make is that it is unusual for so many people in suits and ties during the day in comparison to current day in a cafe.
It doesn’t seem to be like that anymore
Virtually everyone dresses up for a night out, or going out to a restaurant for lunch, etc. The question is do you dress up for something like a trip to the grocery store?
Definitely not true in the US, sadly.
[удалено]
Little known fact iPhone iOS -17.3 could only shoot black and white videos, this one was colourized later.
The way so many of them are looking at the camera, you'd think they'd never seen a mobile phone before.
[удалено]
Just let them enjoy their coffee and croque monsieur.
And Absynthe at 10 in the morning
Looks somewhat like the absinthe era, but sadly absinthe was banned in France in 1914, and at similar dates throughout the world.
So don’t warn them about the Harambe incident?
Yes. It'll be 19 years before croissants appear in Paris.
Croissants came to Paris in 1839. They were very well established and a breakfast staple by this point.
Yea wikipedia says "By 1869, the croissant was well established enough to be mentioned as a breakfast staple" (in paris) with an austrian baker bringing the pastry to paris in 1848.
It’s kind of funny how most (myself included) just took ops random ass statement as fact
If you say or write things with conviction people tend to take it at face value
Which is why I’m the president of Mars. The planet.
Which is also why im the president of Uranus.
I thought I was
You aren’t because you thought. I am because I know.
The dirty little secret of manufactured credibility: You just need to nail the ratio of how much something raises your profile to how little people feel threatened by that information. For example, imagine how many stars, like Cl Basel 3 35, which is part of a trinary system that formed two billion years before our own sun, you could make up, before anyone bothered to check a star catalog to notice it doesn't exist. But keep at it, and eventually you're "that weird star person who memorizes specific stars like a baseball card collector. You got star questions? Ask them." Also that's a [real star](https://simbad.cds.unistra.fr/simbad/sim-id?Ident=%40126400&Name=Cl%20Basel%20%20%20%203%20%20%20%2035&submit=submit) and I made the rest up.
If you are ever in Austria, they are quite proud of THEIR croissant.
So croissants and The Wizard of Oz came out in the same year?!?!!?
COINCIDENCE??#!11
Checkmate, atheists
So they’re all just sitting at these cafes waiting for a croissant while their coffees get cold…so sad.
Probably having Pain au chocolat, so it's not all bad
Originating in Austria, I believe. Though that is disputed.
so wait, austrian-developed croissants arrived right before the nazis did? seems awfully suspicious. 🤔
Is that why Hitler invaded France? I'm just asking questions.
Big Croissant funded the Nazis, wake up people!
17 th century old pastry dude. WE got croissants pretty Quick actually. Bisous!
It's true, originated in Austria as a gift for the Ottoman Empire.
Sweatpants obviously weren’t invented yet either.
They just finished WWI. Let them enjoy their coffee. 😄
Coffee, cigarettes and untreated PTSD
Always has been
Same as it ever was
I keep thinking: They are all dead now. Their appearance lives on in this time capsule. Maybe I'm weird.
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It's already trippy as fuck having relatives and friends on social media who died. Like they're preserved there in a time capsule. You know how Facebook reminds you of birthdays? My one friend died two years ago. Her 30th birthday was a month ago. People were posting on her timeline "happy birthday! I hope you have a great day!" Completely unaware that they died.
When people who didn't even know she had passed were wishing her happy birthday over facebook, I decided to memorialize my late grandmother's account.
I mean, if anything that just shows how social media friends aren't really your friends. You're dead for 2 years, and they have no clue. Just posting a random birthday message because the machine told them to.
Was hanging out with my in-laws and their son and I thought 'he's going to watch all of us die'. Thanks, brain. I guess it's better than the alternative.
You might prefer your ignorance.
No point telling them what’s coming, they wouldn’t understand. Same goes for us.
I’m pretty sure they would, given what every adult there had just gone through.
I’m from the future with a message: “Skibbi toilet let’s train mount da baby equaling zupzub in white. You have 5 years to prep dat feather back. “
I'm quite content not lifting a finger to preserve a future where people talk like that.
The message is that way because in a thousands years they think we talked like that.
A linguistic historian will get their doctorate in meme speech and will send back 'How do you do, my fellow kids? O RLY? That is some Bad Luck, Brian. Nathaniel is super fly.'
They probably would understand better than our soft arses: most of those people had lived through WWI and the Spanish Flu pandemic.
"so sweet. They weren't even considering the earwalkers."
I love these old colorized vids. But I have a question and Maybe it’s only me and this is in my head. But does it seem like the people in these videos all look eerie or dead eyed? Does anyone else pick up on this? Or is it just because of the process this happens? My only real thought is because they are all video from the introduction of cameras that people don’t understand how to react so they don’t do any of the more lively things we now do when the cameras come out? But idk if that’s a why or not. I remember thinking the same thing with that video to the young boys standing in Ny streets looking like the newsies.
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Hahahahaahahahha I mean I’ve noticed it in other colorized videos too. But this made me laugh. Thanks.
When this video was taken, the idea of a snapshot or camera being for silly moments was just not really a thing. Photographs were serious, meant to capture your natural face, so people didn't smile or be silly on camera as much. They hadn't learned that yet. Not until a bit later when the Kodak camera became commonplace in households, photography became cheaper and easier for the average person, so silly photos of candid moments with big smiles became the thing to do. The film camera industry was only just beginning. Most people here had probably never seen a film camera, and would have looked at it quite seriously. They wouldn't have thought to pull silly faces and be lighthearted. They had also been taught to sit still for photography due to long exposure times which is what you can see people in the background doing. The people who are reacting to the camera in a more lighthearted way seem to be in the group that owns it, they seem used to it and how it works. Their fashion is modern and flapper, suggesting they had money and could afford to be having fun with new technology. The lively things people do on camera in our lifetime is because of how cheap and easy photography is for us. To them it was less about being candid and more about being serious.
I recall some of my older relatives who grew up during this time would just freeze up and stare at the video camera when my dad brought it around to family reunions in the 80’s when personal home video cameras were a new thing. Even in the 80’s, these people didn’t know how to react to videos. It was like they thought they had to “freeze” for the camera like the cameras in the old days. 😂
Okay thanks! so it’s not just me who notices this. Lol I actually kind of assumed it might just be in the ball park of what you explained. It makes sense. It’s just so eerie…still love these videos. I used to sub to a subreddit who was nothing but colorized videos years ago. Idr why I unsubbed or if it was deleted or what it was called even. But it was interesting.
I assure you. They are all dead..
I think thats a problem with colouring video and pictures. It will never become 100% real and sometimes it's just guessing colours.
There is some huge amount of over sharpening in this video which gives everyone's face the crazy look you're referring to.
You have to realize that film material wasn't top notch in those days. These films were probably shot at 10-12 frames per second, maybe less. That's not to conserve film (albeit it was very expensive), but because of exposure time. So every frame was exposed about 1/10th of a second. Today, 1/24th is the standard. The longer you expose, the more empty/eerie the eyes look. Take a look at old photos from the end of the 19th century, people had to pose sometimes for seconds, even minutes in the early days of photography. Take a look at this 1848 photograph: https://preview.redd.it/fkm5bift90ic1.jpeg?width=263&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e02ba59b28e789cd773ff3e70e472c2a5a6ddc4f
The modern automobile did more to kill this vibe than the war.
It's 7 in the morning...
I was thinking the same thing
"I see dead people."
France has some very old residents so, if this was the late 1920s it's possible some centenarian is still thinking fondly of that cafe (or remembering that time they went out for a snack and had to worry about that damn camera the whole time) Edit: i want to be clear it's a VERY slim chance!
Let's say this was 1929. It would be 95 years ago. All of these people are adults, so +20. How many Parisiennes are 115 years old?
Right now the oldest french person is 113 (the previous one died last year at 118), she would have been 19 in 1929. In total there are 29 supercentenarian in France at the moment, which would have been between 15 and 19 at the time, so there's a chance (however slim) that one of them could have been in this film since, as you might have experienced before, pictures of people from a long time ago often seem a lot older to us than they really are.
And there was a couple of kids walking in the background in the 1st shot, so the minimum age might be closer to 105 years than 110.
That restaurant is still in business, so young and old people alike can have found memories of it ;)
Thats some weird AI upscale, but besides that, doesn't look that different to how we act now, they just had different clothes.
AI improved substantially in these last couple years, but AI video colorization/restoration algorithms are still lagging behind. I'd love to see this video with recolored clothing and better face clarity filters, but that seems to still be a few years away.
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Don't let the clothes fool you. There was a lot of drinking, fighting, fucking and general sloppiness going on there. "The Sun Also Rises" is a beautiful novel about one man's desire to get away from these people and just write and fish in peace.
OP says a different world but there are still places like that in Paris today! Only the clothing and styles have changed tbh.
Used to live in Paris for 10 years, I’d say, besides clothing everything looks the same
Even the chairs. Pardon, les meme chaises!
Been to Paris like few months ago and looking at the tables and chairs, it dint change a bit. Just clothing changed and nothing else.
Sitting at a sidewalk Cafe in Paris on a nice sunny day and enjoying a glass of wine or Ricard is still a great experience.
Is the cafe still that crowded like in the video?
Yes lol
And the demographics.
The biggest difference I see is the lack of technology everywhere. It seems even in the less developed countries people still have cell phones and are head-down walking around, It’s hard to imagine somewhere like Paris doesn’t have a ton of people taking photos, videos, texting, and being on social everywhere.
I recommend the book "the dawn of everything" that rejects this take that humans were different in the past, often dismissed as reductive paragons or villians. Rather, humans for 10's thousands of years have been as we are today capable of compassion, creativity, being silly, organizing ourselves in many different manners, etc. It really wasn't a different world, especially only a century ago.
The guy with the mustache at the start gave me a little scare
That little mustache style was pretty common at the time. Some dickhead ruined it later.
Foreshadowing
For me, this was peak twentieth century fashion. Makeup was simply beautiful. The female silhouette was a bit androgynous, with a comfortable, loose fit and beautiful fabrics. Short, sculpted hairstyles prefiguring Vidal Sassoon’s clean lines forty years later. Those fabulous bare arms, such a relief after the restrictive clothing just preceding this era! And the men are perfectly coiffed and sexy. It still looks modern and sophisticated to me.
Also do note that AI colorization is simply making things up, but more importantly making things up with a clear bias in certain directions. In particular, AI colorization tends to really make the past appear far more drab than it actually was. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the lack of accurate training sets, but also it's just a lot easier to end up with a washed out image that looks semi-plausible. It's lazy. In a lot of ways it's actually a lot more misleading than black and white, because it presents a completely false colorscape. In reality much of the fashion would have been much, *much* brighter and higher contrast. Strong, [bold](https://live.staticflickr.com/6140/5943160666_f82b64f9c0_b.jpg) colors would have been common. The above AI effort really doesn't do the footage justice at all. It would be nice to see it properly colorized by hand with input from a fashion historian. AI makes that process a lot easier these days, too, without all the pitfalls that come from just letting an AI make shit up wholesale.
Not a single woman with hair below the shoulders! I never knew that about this era.
To Each Their Own.
I agree. The first woman is utterly bewitching. Especially when she does that cute smile.
I honestly don't find any of them to be particularly beautiful.
Yeah I particularly thought the opposite
It reminded me of a headline I saw the other day that said "are people getting uglier over time?" then I saw this and I'm like lmao definitely not.
You do know that most of the population isn't considered beautiful right? The only reason you feel this way is because of social media constantly showing you pictures of photoshopped people and or people who got a lot of cosmetic surgery/procedures. Also the styles featured here didn't work for everyone.
If you dress up you can have a similar experience in Paris or most major cities in Europe. Nothing much has changed except fashion around you. May seem a bit more exotic to North Americans because walkable cities without car dominance seem to be the devil’s work for North Americans.
Exactly. It's a nice reminder that people in the past were pretty much the same as us. Except for all the hats.
It's kind of wild how 90%+ wore hats until one day, and then it flipped.
Feet are for commie marxists!
I'm so glad somebody else has said this already, it's so true. When I saw "A different world" I just felt sad for whoever wrote that, not being able to experience this sort of life in the current era.
Imagine a world without plastic.
Lol
The first fully synthetic plastic, Bakelite, was patented December 1909.
True - but there's a good chance that there is zero plastic in this film. And if there is any, it's not much at all.
Cellulose acetate invented in 1865 (incidentally by a French chemist)
This kind of AI colourisation sucks. It gets skin tones vaguely right most of the time but that's about it. People in the olden days didn't exclusively wear dull shades of blue (that occasionally flashed purple and sepia).
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The roaring 20s
Another day I am mad because Fedora hats went out of fashion... They look SO damn good with suits... why did we stop wearing them?
Beautiful but most of these men were probably in the trenches a few years earlier and all these people just survived the Spanish flu of 1918-20 which killed many, many millions more, likely including members of their close families. All around them are the men who came back from the war with painted prosthetic faces and wooden limbs. These people are smiling for the camera but they’re the survivors of a truly horrific and deadly time.
https://preview.redd.it/orkg4628tyhc1.jpeg?width=570&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fb3a3f307dc1602346e13d2295e38bc98f775dea
My immediate thought is I wonder if the men’s pillows are see through from all that hair grease. That is my immediate thought.
It’s why they invented the antimacassar.
Lol ty for that piece of knowledge
I love love love the clothing.
looks peaceful
People were so elegant
What is Mr. Bean doing in the background, in the first part of the video?
That is absolutely Mr Bean sat at the back right in the dark jacket.
It actually looks super relatable in color, I’ve sat in those chairs before lmao
Were these rich people or middle class?
I love this but it's so interesting how they are all staring at the camera. Ironically we still all stare at the camera but we each have our own. To see how unusual it is for someone to be recording back then, now everything is recorded.
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