As a collector of material related to photography and film I have gathered a lot of very early movies on my hard drives. I love this material, but I do often find it tiring to watch very long silent movies, because I am used to today’s editing techniques. Somehow the rhythm of the scenes, especially in early 1900s movies is a bit too slow for me.
Just yesterday, while mining Usenet for old material, I stumbled upon an old short entitled A Winter Straw Ride, made in 1906 and I was surprised to see scenes following up on each other in a rhythm that is almost modern. Maybe one could even describe it as ‘action packed’. The photography is brilliant too. It is hard to work in the snow, using black & white material. Either the whites start to lose detail, or the darker shapes lose most of their grays.
I could not find any information on the director or the camera crew, just that the film was produced by the Edison company.
By the time I was finished building the new Amea Vintage Movies site, I had seen so many Burlesque Queens of the 1950s that I could recognize Virginia Bell just by the shape of her pubic hair and I only needed one close up of a nipple to see that the breast belonged to 1950s Playmate Elaine Reynolds.
I was also amazed how large my collection of vintage movies had become over the years. It made me wonder where it all started. Somewhere around age 10, I guess, when I fell madly in love with Betty Boop.
The other day I received a call from my old editor in chief. He wanted me to burn a DVD with the documentary The Origin of Aids, as posted on Google Video, before it was removed once again as the result of legal actions. I figured this would be easy, since Google offers a download link. Apparently they stopped doing so. It is a good thing our friendship goes back to the late Seventies, because I ended up spending most of my Saturday trying different video ripping techniques without success, until I ran into this little tools called Google Video Grabber 4.3.2.
Somewhere around midnight I had compiled a DVD. Unsatisfied with the results I did some extra data mining in order to come up with a video file of a larger resolution. No luck at p2p sites unless I could accept the fact that this particular download takes ages, so I returned to using search engine techniques.
In the meantime I had seen the documentary and I was horrified by the facts presented. Although the video delivers no definitive proof for the theory that polio vaccines used in Africa indirectly transported the virus from apes to humans, there are enough facts and contradicting statements made by the scientists involved to seriously consider the option that other more common theories could very well be inaccurate.
When I saw the documentary listed on AOL.com as a Conspiracy Theory, I was annoyed. Why is it, I asked myself, that the last few journalists who actually take the time and the effort to do some old fashioned research, are always labeled as conspirators? I mean, I have as much faith in journalists as I have in politicians, but I would certainly give representatives of either group the benefit of the doubt above scientists working for the Pharmaceutical industry. This may very well be a personal hang up, but I decided to post this documentary anyway, hoping that others would have a look at it to judge for themselves.