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Fantastic Footage.

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In the event that this fantastic voyage should turn to erosion.

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  3. Great find – thanks for posting. Hypnotically full of wonder yet deeply sad in its way; all that civic flourishing thrown away within a generation by the poisonous legacies of imperialism. There’s a strong waft of nostalgic rose-tinted cyberpunk about it.

    • The steel girders remind me of the ribs of a whale overlaying the street. It’s incredibly evocative footage, a real meeting of the old and the new. Echoes of Metropolis. The incidental details – the horse and carts, the chicken scratching around in the middle of the street, the lack of people, the open spaces. Looks quite appealing.

  5. Space age. Wonderful stuff. There was still an overhead railway in Wüppertal in the mid 70’s which I’ve been on though alas I don’t recall it. Hope it’s still there. Great find Bri, great post Foxy.

  9. There are trains passing through at right angles to the station in one of the mainline termini in Berlin. It looks like a busy Richard Scarry illustration.

  10. Good Lord, this is wonderful. I do love it when old films are restored and corrected to the right speed – suddenly the people are real and you wonder about them….what happened to those young children in the years ahead? It’s the little peripheral details that fascinate me. Thanks!

    • I remember when I was at art school and researching old silent movies, and I read this book or article once which was a diatribe by some guy who was incensed that so often old movie footage is allowed to just be shown at the wrong frame rate without speed correction. It’s funny we just accept that normally without thinking about it, isn’t it? “Oh it’s an old silent film so they all walk about fast and are in black and white”. His thing was that actually old silent footage is actually quite sharp and detailed and is not “too fast” at all, it’s just that no one ever takes the time to restore it properly and show it at the right speed.

  11. Astounding stuff, more Steampunk than any Steampunk images I’ve ever seen.
    Reflective of such amazing civic confidence that such a thing could even be proposed, let alone actually built.
    Also somehow bittersweet in that all those in the incredibly ‘immediate’ footage are long gone & us folks in 2020 are unanimously wowed by it.

    • This is astonishing. Watched it all the way through (well done, me!).

      Very few womenfolk about. Noticed one boarding a moving tram, and 4 or 5 at the terminus.

      And the ending … ooff ..

    • Wow!
      I hadn’t seen the title but saw ‘Castro’ on a trolley bus destination & figured SF- & then had an inkling of foreboding.
      I wonder if the driver of ‘4867’ who pops up again & again & seems oblivious to everyone else on the road survived OK? Probably made it without a scratch – his kind always do!

      • He must have survived – his descendants moved to our village, where they routinely career about the place in their cars while texting each other, picking their teeth clean in the rear view mirror and doing a wordsearch on the Puzzle website.

    • I think, because it’s Germany, it’s more poignant and powerful to see, given what was to happen and the kinship with England.

      I’d also like to add that the the foresight of whomever filmed this is a testament to insight.

  16. It reminded me of Myst – the interactive game from the nineties – same steampunk feel, the vacant clarity of the graphics and the empty ambience of the incidental music. I was half expecting it to pause, churn, then turn to a big leather book opening on some diagrams of cogwheels.

    I think it’s the absence of litter and the streets not polluted or grimey or filled with hoardings and billboards. And then the ironware everywhere, that you can probably still see, but now overwhelmed by decades of infill.

    We pass Wuppertal when we take the train from Bonn to Hannover – and the railway is a source of fascination. It’s a town built in a valley, so it appears quite claustrophobic, but the hanging train is obviously a good solution to local travel needs.

    I’ve been on the skytrain at Dusseldorf airport – but it doesn’t seem quite so much fun

  18. As a resident of Wuppertal for over 40 years, I can confirm that the Schwebebahn (=floating rail/ suspension railway/ overhead railway/ skytrain) is still in operation and is the preferred mode of transport for all discerning commuters and a major tourist draw. As the footage shows, it runs above the river except in the west end of town where it’s over the street. A very good mode of transport and still basically unique, although I gather Seattle and Bangkok have similar ideas in operation.

    However, the introduction of the new generation of carriages has been dogged by technical difficulties so the system is now at a standstill for a whole year (weekends excepted). What a blow for a city famous for little else (apart from being the hometown of Friedrich Engels)! Good luck to the local Corporation getting everything sorted.

    • I noticed on that long recently-made clip that on a few tight curves the carriages sway rather alarmingly. Wouldn’t want to be trying to drink a cup of coffee when it was doing that.

  19. On the Top Ten Films thread I forgot completely to add 1966’s “Fahrenheit 451” – part of what helped it look slightly futuristic (and junior me found the most interesting) was using the SAFEGE monorail test track in Châteauneuf sur Loire in France. The track, built in 1959, was 1.4 km long, and eventually demolished in 1969.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poQ25pFXIRg

    I always wondered if the concrete look of the track pylons were built on specially for the film, as one can see onscreen where the track is more distant (at 3:09) that the support pylons appear to be a bit more industrial-looking.

    (Also, since there wasn’t a station, characters are boarding/disembarking using the carriage’s emergency exit, though in the context of the film it’s not seen as such)

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