Pristine Restoration of a 9-Minute Silent Film of NYC Street Life from 1911

Last year, MoMA presented a nine-minute short film of locales around NYC that was shot in 1911.

This documentary travelogue of New York City was made by a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, who were sent around the world to make pictures of well-known places. (They also filmed at Niagara Falls and in Paris, Monte Carlo, and Venice, although New York 1911 is the only selection in the Museum’s collection.) Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue.

The film was only on the MoMA’s site for a brief time¹ but lately some copies have popped up on YouTube, including the one embedded above. Note: this particular copy of the film has audio added and has been slowed down to a “natural rate”. I’d turn the sound off…the added foley effects are poorly done. If you want to see the original video, watch this one.

Update: This is a restoration of the film done by machine learning algorithms — it’s been upsampled to 4K & 60 fps, sharpened, and colorized.

The colorization doesn’t do it for me and there are some areas where the algorithms don’t do a very good job (halos around vignetted figures on the boat right at the beginning for example), but otherwise this is pretty impressive. It’s not as good as Peter Jackson’s team did with old WWI footage for They Shall Not Grow Old, but you can’t beat the price of this push-button approach.

1. No idea why they took the video down. Are there licensing issues? Or are they just trying to force an artificial scarcity? Why not just leave it up as a permanent exhibit? If you’re an art museum, you should share the art you have access to as much and as widely as possible.↩

• MoMA
• museums
• NYC
• video