Keeping up with America’s geopolitical entanglements is never easy, even for Americans. More than a century ago, just months after their homeland was embroiled in what is now known as World War I, word reached them that the military of a faraway country – China, which seemed opaque and terrifyingly vast – had joined their side. Ten years ago they had never even heard of it. Pearl S. BuckWhat impressions they had of the country from scattered sources such as missionary publications after the Opium War and newspaper reports about complex events like the war. Boxer Rebellion The fall of the Qing Dynasty, the stereotypes of the silent film genre. (Perhaps the rare reader picked up John Thomson’s book. Traveling around China with a camera.) Most people can go their whole lives without ever getting a glimpse of the “real China.”
However, by the end of 1917, “there were at least ten documentaries satisfying curiosity about America’s new allies in the Far East.” According to the National Film Preservation Foundation. Most of them were short stories that ran parallel to the full-length ones, but A trip around China It was different. At least five years in the making, “the documentary is the brainchild of Benjamin Brodsky, a Russian-born businessman who claims to speak 11 languages ​​and travels frequently.” moving picture world According to his profile, the young entrepreneur moved from San Francisco to China after the 1906 earthquake and set up shop as a movie exhibitor. He soon became involved in distribution as the American representative for the Variety Film Exchange, and by 1909 had expanded into film production in Shanghai and Hong Kong. While juggling his business interests, he photographed his travels,” all of which took place not only during the rise of China’s economy but also before the communist revolution.
Brodsky took the 20,000-foot negative back to San Francisco and eventually cut it down to 10 reels, which should have taken about an hour and 50 minutes. Only some sections of this feature-length travelogue film remain and can be seen enhanced and colored by artificial intelligence. Video at the top of the post. (Some Uncorrected black and white print ) Keep in mind that the colors you see are of course not the colors Brodsky would have seen. There’s also the argument that the AI ​​may have rendered certain skin tones unrealistically dark in the regions where these scenes were filmed. This is because China is a very diverse place, not only in its local landscape, climate, and culture, but also in the expressions of its people. That is something that many Westerners could not have imagined in 1919, and for that matter, a significant number of them still do not realize it today.
Related content:
See photos by John Thomson, the first Western photographer to travel widely in China (1870s)
A trip around the world in 1900: See restored footage showing life in New York, London, India, Japan, China and more
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Life on the streets of Tokyo seen in footage recorded in 1913: caught between tradition and modernity
A trip to New York City in 1911: Vintage New York video brought back to life with artificial intelligence colorization
The photo that triggered China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966)
Based in Seoul, Colin Mbemust write and broadcastIt’s about cities, languages ​​and cultures. he is the author of the newsletter books about cities books as well Home page (I won’t summarize Korea) and korean newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter. @Colinbemust.
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
