Remastered Film Footage of 1890s Paris

The Lumière brothers were among the first filmmakers in history and from 1896 to 1900, they shot several scenes around Paris. Guy Jones remastered the Lumière’s Paris footage, stabilized it, slowed it down to a natural rate, and added some Foley sound effects. As Paris today looks very similar to how it did then, it’s easy to pick out many of the locations seen in this short compilation: the Tuileries, the Notre-Dame, Place de la Concorde, and of course the Eiffel Tower, which was completed only 8 years before filming. Here’s the full location listing:

0:08 - Notre-Dame Cathedral (1896)
0:58 - Alma Bridge (1900)
1:37 - Avenue des Champs-Élysées (1899)
2:33 - Place de la Concorde (1897)
3:24 - Passing of a fire brigade (1897)
3:58 - Tuileries Garden (1896)
4:48 - Moving walkway at the Paris Exposition (1900)
5:24 - The Eiffel Tower from the Rives de la Seine à Paris (1897)

See also A Bunch of Early Color Photos of Paris, Peter Jackson’s documentary film featuring remastered film footage from World War I, and lots more film that Jones has remastered and uploaded. (via open culture)

Update: Just as he did with the NYC footage from 1911, Denis Shiryaev has used machine learning algorithms to restore the Lumières film of Paris — it’s been upsampled to 4K & 60 fps, sharpened, and colorized.

Again, there are some obvious artifacts and the colorization is distracting, but the result is impressive for push-button. (via open culture)

• artificial intelligence
• Denis Shiryaev
• Guy Jones
• Paris
• video