I’d seen this amazing film shot from a streetcar on Market Street one year before the fire (you can download it at archive.org), but it seems even more hypnotic (not surprisingly) with the Air soundtrack.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINOxRxze9k

No traffic lights, stop signs, or traffic cops… and lots of lucky cars and pedestrians. Probably smelled pretty bad, too.

Here’s the text that accompanies it on Youtube:

The first track from Airs’ Moon Safari album, accompanied by scenes from a video shot from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1905.

Before the earthquake/fire of 1906 destroyed the area. Remarkable footage of the turn of the century lifestyles
in California.

Made by cleaverb! The video is CC no rights reserved.

You can download video from the www.archive.org . Search for ” trip down 1905 ” without quotes. I used the big 330MB(145MB mpeg) version,but you can download other formats.

My question is: is every piece of motion picture created, regardless of the media it was shot on, going to be called “video” in the future? Will we be referring to Buster Keaton’s “short videos,” or to the “videos Edison shot in the Black Maria”?

Avatar is commonly referred to as a “film,” so is it ridiculous to say of the above that it was a “video shot in 1905”?

Tangentially, will every instance of trickery, special effect or just sheer bravado — these crazy scenes from Intolerance, Harold Lloyd’s hanging from a clock at the top of a building — eventually be understood by all as attributable to CGI?

Oh well. I guess I’m pretty incapable of appreciating the Raft of the Medusa as a the miracle of technology. I just don’t know why he didn’t just take a picture.