AV Geeks 16mm Lunch 8-3-2023

thank you hi everybody I'm skip Alzheimer welcome to the AV Geeks lunchtime streaming show where I'm going to mute the other computer that I'm monitoring the stream on um wow yesterday was a big deal our 900th show so today is our 900th and first and uh it's guaranteed to be anti-climactic compared to what we did yesterday but um that's fun because we're getting back to what we do and that's not celebrating the fact that we're doing so many of these episodes It's that we are watching so many films and we have watched quite a few films uh this is was our according to my notes our 4250 third film it's that number is we're just kind of making that number up a little bit because not everything got logged correctly some things got shown twice Etc et cetera but um what we do is we collect old 16 millimeter films we have in our collection we have over 36 000. uh so that means we have roughly 32 000 films that we need to watch um before my eyeballs fall out uh or before the Earth crashes into the sun um here is one such film we have seen uh this before but this is a little bit different this is our family works together enjoy [Music] [Music] able it is say more important foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign [Music] foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign foreign the shows foreign Amazon is not available foreign please no Bianca city is foreign foreign Hawaii foreign [Music] [Music] effect s of foreign [Music] a lot quicker than I thought um yeah well there you go so that film could have two uses uh uh one is it could have been used in uh French language class in elementary or High School two uh cornet was branching out and distributing films to other countries so this could have been in Canada this could have been in France this could have been in other French um speaking countries and we've run across a couple so we I think we should one that we found that was Arabic it was a film about uh physical education and it was pretty great uh I love running across those because I think it had I don't know if it had Arabic subtitles I can't remember um what it was we watched a lot of films over here all right speaking of which behind me I have a film scanner and we are going to watch age of ballyhoo enjoy [Music] [Music] crowds began gathering in mid-afternoon by evening 10 000 people jammed the intersection at 7th Avenue and 50th Street in New York three thousand were already inside admiring crystal chandeliers five-story Columns of green marble and the largest oval rug in the world my name is Gloria Swanson I was there too it was the opening of the Roxas the Cathedral of a motion picture Charlie Chaplin came and even Texas gynin was there impresaria Roxy renounced himself quite satisfied take a look at this stupendous theater he said I'd rather be Roxy than John D Rockefeller or Henry Ford and these Good Old Days movie palaces were our public temples and our Wagers citizens young and old went to the Middle East two or three times a week the motion picture which opened the boxy was mine the loves of Sonya I had produced it myself and I was all of 27 years old you know we never thought of these movies as time capsules but in a way they were no matter what the stories the film seemed to document the years the 20s were an age of Ballyhoo the Jazz Age [Music] [Applause] thank you [Music] the decade was all that but it was more this is a look at the 20s through authentic documents songs words and films and not just Motion Pictures but newsreels too the camera's eye seemed everywhere [Music] it's a great time to be alive November 1918 the war was over after a year in France the troops were coming home President Wilson called it a great crusade to make the world safe for democracy for these men the war was something else trenches boredom very little Glory a hundred thousand Doughboys died but all that seemed forgotten now as wives and sweethearts mothers and sons waited to welcome the boys back they expected to find their world much as they had left it parades and celebrations in small towns and villages [Music] Church socials picnics and county fairs the first luxury was guess what an automobile you could buy a brand new model T for less than three hundred dollars it would go 45 miles an hour and as Henry Ford said it was available in any color so long as it was black 15 million families bought them by 1927. one Farm lady was asked why her family bought a car when they had no bathtub well she explained you can't go to town in a bathtub people gave up walking and cars replaced horses as a principal mode of transportation Sunday afternoon Drive became a family ritual of course dive Hearts maintained the horse could never be replaced but some drivers are ready to accept any challenge [Applause] as primitive as these cars seem today people literally fell in love with them they call them slivers and Tin Lizzies they made jokes about them wrote songs about them thought they could go anywhere [Music] because provided a new Mobility that motorists were often frustrated for the paved Road usually ended just beyond the city limits Travelers Crossing Iowa in early spring sometimes had to wait for days so we paved the old roads and built new highways more than 300 000 miles of them in the 20s [Music] by 1928 Motors could drive all the way from New York to Kansas on paved roads further west car travel was still Moon Great Adventure in the rainy season wires followed the roads bringing electric lights radios electric irons and vacuum cleaners into homes and villages in distant Farms more and more the telephone 2 tied the country together you could call and Clara at Christmas find out what time it was if it was raining in Chicago and what your neighbors were doing simply by picking up the telephone in the 20s we spent more money on roads and buildings than on anything else The Filling Station became an American Institution and when we all drove downtown we invented the parking problem the city changed the country so did the machine mechanization and efficient management revolutionized American industry without increasing the labor force factories double production in the 20s workers made more money for shorter hours profits mounted business was booming Machinery was a new Messiah Henry Ford proclaimed lots of people agreed with new technology cane standardization brexit came in boxes [Music] for the first time many consumers became conscious of brand names post Toasties went from corn stock to table Untouched by human hands belonging to Mexico Americans brushed their teeth with sozadone kill germs with Listerine that Moxie bought their groceries at the AMT but not me [Music] to most people technology meant the moving assembly line which Henry Ford introduced in 1914. it took the Ford Motor Company seven years to make one million cars by 1924 they could do it in a hundred and thirty two days a year later a Model T rolled off the assembly line every 10 seconds Detroit became a modern Mecca businessmen came from around the world to study its techniques good luck Mr Ford clipped humor as well Rogers we won't know for years if you hurt us or you helped us but you certainly didn't leave us as you found us Ford himself said I will build a motor car for the great multitude so low in price every man will be able to own one and enjoy with his family hours of pleasure in God's grace Open Spaces the car made the country accessible it was a way for average citizens to return to the woods visit national parks and ReDiscover the joy of Sunday picnics [Music] we grew up founding our dreams on infinite Promises of American advertising said Zelda Fitzgerald [Music] and people agreed with Neil Cooley every day and every way things were getting better and better [Music] we invested not just in Necessities but in the promises of comfort convenience and efficiency the California Gold Rush dwindled by contrast to the Florida land boom of 1925 finding the Fountain of Youth could not have made John D Rockefeller more enthusiastic day after day for months William Jenning Brian preached the gospel of sunshine and salt water Miami was the Wonder City the only place said Brian where the lie you tell at breakfast can come true by evening within a year 20 million building Lots were staked out and sold buying and selling land was a principal industry organized on mass production lines but many who flock to Florida discovered they had purchased inaccessible swamps then in September 1926 the Hurricanes came leaving 50 000 homeless promoters insisted the damage could be repaired but the tropical winds at burst the bubble in the Sun rum running was another boom business in the 20s Bootleggers religiously observed the law of supply and demand but broke some of the others essayist EB white suggested that the government nationalized speakeasies assuring citizens liquor of uniformly high quality that way he said the enormous cost of dry enforcement could be met by profits from the sale of drinks federal agents would occasionally Raiders still or seizes spectacular cargo of scotch but two thousand treasury men were no match but 18 000 miles of Coastline and the Underworld the noble experiment failed and was repealed in 1933. prohibition spawned its own celebrities waxy Gordon Legs Diamond and Scarface Al Capone organized crime was synonymous with big cities fearful the country organized its own groups to uphold the Constitution the Bible and the flag the Ku Klux Klan with 5 million members proclaimed that self-guardian of native values defending White against black Gentile against Jews Protestant against Catholic on August 8 1925 40 000 klansmen carrying Bibles marched down Pennsylvania Avenue singing the national anthem of screen Rudolph Valentina was charming and modest in his films he was a sheep bringing Latin love to millions of American women they dreamed of being carried across a desert in his arms struggling virtuously but not too violently when at the age of 31 Rudy died suddenly thirty thousand people among them Cola Negra came to pay their last respects to the symbol of a perfect lover it was the Golden Age of sports the flying thin pavonomy became a public hero soon it seemed everyone was running and writing the paved streets of cities seemed an invitation to a hundred kids on bikes [Music] thirty thousand bowling alleys were built in the 1920s and women too found time to play Tilden Johnson Helen Wills Drew crowds through Courts at Forest Hills Bobby Jones inspired two million Americans to buy woods and irons keep your eye on the ball and in the 20s everybody did it became an age of watching sports as well as taking part in them people paid four and a half million dollars to watch Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in 1926 and 27. red grains joined the Chicago Bears the Myers nominated him for Congress Newt Rockne and The Four Horsemen made college football big business Yale University sold a million dollars worth of football tickets one season alone on Saturday afternoon thousands packed the stadiums to watch the Cowboys meet the Indians or the Giants Battle of bears as Graham McNamee gave play-by-play descriptions to minions at home by their radios in 1923 New Yorkers built Yankee Stadium as a monument to baseball [Music] on opening day 74 000 people packed the place to cheer the babe few sports figures of any era achieved the fame and fortune of George Hermann roof [Music] fan bought Eskimo pies tons of Cracker Jack and hot dogs Al Smith threw out the first ball in their adulation enthusiastic sport writers could not over praise Babu during the 1927 season alone he hit more than 60 home runs setting a record to The Unbroken for a generation Abu and the New York Yankees were real heroes to us then but the hero of Heroes was Charles Lindbergh who with the spirit of Saint Louis formed the team he called we at curtisfield on Long Island the 25 year old Lindbergh Commander Richard E Byrd and Veteran pilot Clarence Chamberlain were among aviators from all over the world competing for a 25 000 prize offered the first who would fly the Atlantic Non-Stop anxious after a week of rain Lindbergh made his move early in the morning he had his plane towed to Roosevelt Field the weather was breaking over the ocean and just after Dawn on the 20th of May 1927 Charles A Lindbergh carrying a few sandwiches and some letters of introduction climbed into his plane and took off for France [Applause] the New York Herald Tribune reported that Lindbergh seemed to lift the overloaded plane into the Sky by his indomitable will alone [Applause] in 33 hours and 30 minutes efo into Legend [Music] when the stars were gone in a mighty airplane flew a boy in the dolphin far across the bounding pain like the birds on the high out to do or die on his journey over there many million Hearts before him and the whole world said afraid foreign [Music] [Music] our bars may make the trip across the sea upon some future day but take your hands off you'll fluffy lucky Lindbergh see Gonna offer USA when asked if he intended to fly back to New York then brick said I don't think I shall try that so President Coolidge sent the cruiser Memphis and brought the hero home we thought he was more important than the end of World War One the New York Times devoted more space to his return than it did to the armistice technology had transformed our lives and we wondered if Machinery really was the new Messiahs Henry Ford had told us Lindbergh seemed proof that machines could in Noble rather than confine you fellas have not said enough about that wonderful motor he told reporters he never let us forget that man and machines that we had made the flight together in an age of soul of a poetry and so much uncertainty Lindbergh seemed a modern Galahad and we shouted ourselves horse and celebration not because he had flown the Atlantic not even because he was an American but because of his bravery his dignity and his modesty Lindbergh reminded us of all we fought best in ourselves and uncommon man in an age of Ballyhoo all alone through the cold and Fleet you carried on without a buddy or word of fear you Brave the danger alone great is a ride of Paul Revere your name goes down in history Lindberg a hero to do and there Fearless Victorious and while you were Flying high in the sky you flew into the heart of the world while we were playing now the flag of your victories the spirit of you carried you on and a mother's prayer did it start with God on his throne leading you across the home like an angel [Music] this Photograph holds a precious Place among my memories because this great American gentleman has never lowered his standards something for youngsters to look up to that decade did change us but American leaders left our Mark all over the world it can still be seen by those who look around and understand the years when we were young and the world held promise ten thousand Bright Tomorrow [Applause] [Music] [Music] away from me [Music] wow lots of uh archival footage there and I don't know if you noticed the director was David Shepard who was the guy who ran Blackhawk films and we've shown many Blackhawk films in the past and I actually met him once very kind elderly General gentlemen when I talked to him but he was an early film collector so a lot of this material uh either came from his collection or national archives or Library of Congress or other places um and that wow that was Gloria Swanson near it so interesting stuff there definitely now uh we're looking from the past and now we're going to look to the Future kinda from the past um this is a part of a series uh that we digitized from the Coronet collection but it's not a cornet film but it features our pal Arthur C Clarke sitting with a speaking spell I love it all right here we go this is two thousand years and one generation enjoy [Music] [Applause] foreign why do we love cities there's a fascinating mixture of the old and the new what we know and what we don't much as we love the familiar however it's the new information that makes the city so important as producer David Kennard describes here to San Antonio like to any great City people come to find out what's new what's the latest thing in architecture what's the latest place to have a drink what's the latest movie cities of places where people come to get new information and of course for a good libraries here and good colleges you can get good business advice and I'm sure you can get some good political hints too you see cities are like kind of giant information exchanges they're more than just cultural or social or economic centers their communication centers that's why cities exist and that's why cities have always existed [Music] this is the ancient city of anaradapura on the island of Sri Lanka this was once the capital of the kingdom of Serendip 2500 years ago this was the latest thing in architecture one of the wonders of the world [Music] Merchants Scholars holy men and princes came from as far away as China and Arabia they brought more than business to this city they brought new ideas libraries were set up at the temples the culture grew and flourished [Music] today much of anaradapura is a ruin we can only get a vague idea of the complex and bustling City at once was but the ideas live on through sculpture music religion law science in the city's human beings found ways to store their information so that future Generations could use it thank you it's the desire to communicate even across time that makes human beings unique Arthur Clark explains it this way yes I mean man is primarily the communicating animals and this is the most important distinction between man and the other animals they can all communicate to some extent but we are the only ones that are ready for the real good lifestyle of communications and because the technology of communication is what has enabled us to do this on such a scale over such distances so communication is the central The Cutting Edge of civilization [Music] in Sri Lanka where Clark now lives is a culture that existed 2 000 years before America was discovered but to this day many of the people still can't read or write religion helps provide them with an education they travel long distances to learn from Buddhist monks who live far away from the villages in simple caves across the ages religion itself has been a major expression of our human need to communicate every society has developed rituals like these symbols of a human desire to transmit hopes and wishes to a Divine being in helping to serve our needs priests developed and promoted the use of spoken and written language holy books and ceremonies help to maintain traditions and pass on knowledge to new generations [Music] for centuries people here have been satisfied with communication on a local scale face-to-face Village to Village but now suddenly new technology has arrived what should be done with it civilization is impossible without technology unfortunately one can have technology of that Civilization and the most important of all Technologies is that of communication beginning of course with speech you might say the kind of Technology writing printing the book and now in our age electronic communications of which you have a splendid example here in the Earth satellite station in the middle of Sri Lanka now people often wonder what this kind of advanced technology in Communications has to do with the developing world with the people in the jungle villages and I have no patience for those who say we should leave much of the world to a happy ignorance Just One telephone could bring most of this planet out of the Stone Age than a generation in The Villages all over the third world here in Sri Lanka in Africa South America everywhere people die in thousands because there's no telephone to which they can call the doctor [Music] in many villages in Sri Lanka life has hardly changed in the last two thousand years in an emergency all you can do is cry for help all those who hear your cry will gather around in this case a man had been bitten by a snake everyone in earshot ran to the scene everyone except a doctor there is no doctor in this Village [Music] this man's life depends on what treatment he gets right now does he know what kind of snake bit him do they know the right herbal antidote they'd better because there are no other medicines available and no telephone in the village to call in the paramedics or get expert advice foreign [Music] expanding the flow of information can transform communities like this [Music] for example in this in this Village they still believe in the magical powers of holy men someone has lost a cow and this man's job will be to find it by having a vision so he dances himself into a trap [Music] [Music] all is now ready The Village Chief tells the onlookers the Visionary is in a trance the man who lost the cow has given him a leaf from the field where the cow normally grazed all they can do is wait till the spirits speak through the Visionary and about him the cow is not lost he says it wandered off to a different water hole down the road it may seem like Hocus Pocus to us but the villagers are well pleased with the results but aren't there better ways of finding lost cows in the late 20th century much of the world suffers from information starvation as bad as it does from the other more familiar kind of starvation you see the sort of blank eyes of the people who already have very few sources of information sources they have are polluted by superstition so I get very angry with people who say we should not bring information through these simple unspoiled creatures of nature this is just nonsense [Music] there is one link between the village and the outside world for the few who can write two miles away is a post office this is it and that's the postman leaving with a letter for the capital city Colombo [Music] it may take weeks to get a response but eventually Vital Information will arrive in this case a government representative who could read and write came to the Village to explain what should be done about planting seeds in the drought and to gather information on the local conditions foreign the villagers are getting solid information presented face to face in a way they can understand in turn they are able to present their point of view [Applause] it's not unlike a town meeting in Vermont there's plenty of room for debate and discussion however this kind of democratic procedure Demands a well-informed public that's why education is the most crucial priority once people have enough to eat [Music] it's the children from these Villages who are really in touch with the 20th century however every day they walk up to five miles to school out of one world into another they face an incredible challenge of stepping forward 2 000 years in one generation from a pre-literate era to the computer age [Music] their parents can't read or write and turn to holy men to solve their problems they have to work out the value of pi to three decimal places learn the history of Asia and write papers on Health Sciences foreign [Music] their teachers are opening the door on a world of information undreamed of by their parents it's hard for us to realize what a huge leap forward they're making in one generation they speak and write not only their native sinhalese but Tamil and English as well [Music] but this is only the start sooner or later the microchip will be coming to their classroom speak and spell machines perhaps it's rainy the Prototype of the whole new class of devices the sort of educational equivalent in a way of the calculators you might call I call them pocket educators because they could teach you all the basic literature you know skills of literacy and then they could contain whole libraries as well they could read books back to you you could have encyclopedias dictionaries anything could be incorporated this sort of device with a screen that you have a visual display and these things can be made quite cheaply and steadily and if they were sun powered you wouldn't have to worry about batteries and this could trigger an educational revolution in the whole world because they could be made so cheap to be mass produced you could always give them away it's software would be the expensive side I remember when I was a child or I remember now the teachers I had who took care of me the human beings who recommended that I should try harder and so on and do you think people today will remember with great compassion and Nostalgia or a piece of plastic that used to speak to there's no question of that I mean the best educational system is a log where the teacher at one end and the student at the other but we'll never have enough teachers logs back and another remark somebody made which I've quoted quite often is that any teacher who can be replaced by a machine should be so the two complement each other the machines can remove the drudgery from education and also the other important point is the machine enables you to go at the rate you want to go the machine can personalize education the teacher's job should be to provide inspiration machines should deal with the creating the routine of Education Sri Lankan children may not have computers yet but they're fortunate to have dedicated teachers this means that the cultural gap between parents and children gets wider and wider the government believes it has found one way to inform and educate the parents however the people in this room are selecting the information that will be sent out to millions of their fellow citizens they work for Sri Lanka's first television network set up in 1980. every night they have to decide what goes in the news simple villagers will be asked to understand the implications of anti-nuclear demonstrations in England and the strength of the Dollar on the Tokyo Exchange [Applause] yeah this editorial conference is like a town meeting held on behalf of the whole country what stories to put in what to leave out whether to favor International items rather than stress internal politics intentions anybody who makes a mistake at any point when the news comes on it'll provide people with information they never chose to receive it'll reveal a world they might prefer not to know about they'll suddenly have to confront issues that yesterday they never knew existed it's impossible for us to realize the impact of these everyday images on a villager who has never seen television before it's important to understand the responsibility that television has to explain life honestly and clearly all information is education in one way or another and Arthur Clark believes that nothing is more important I'm very fond of quoting HD Wells who once said that the future will be erased between education and catastrophe well the use of satellites for Education particularly in developing countries is something which has been written a great deal about and is already starting in a small way and will be even more important in the future [Music] all societies are a mixture of the modern and the old-fashioned nowhere more so than in a developing country like Sri Lanka these children are literate they are familiar with three languages science and math are problems they deal with every day but they're growing up in a society with social and religious Customs that haven't changed much in 2000 years [Applause] [Music] these children know what the communications Revolution is all about they're living it it's an exciting time but for them as for us the challenge is the same will they be able to keep up with the pace of change the pace of the revolution will we [Music] partial funding for this program was provided by GTE a world leader in telecommunications lighting and precision materials it was kind of fascinating I have some others in that series that I I think are really interesting in 1985. um that's uh before the internet really um certainly before smartphones and uh you know the repercussions of information uh too much information uh information that has not been vetted uh the signal to noise ratio all that stuff is stuff that we are dealing with right now and um this is one of the reasons that I am sharing what I'm sharing is because there is so much noise I want to be able to offer something that is from another time that allows us to kind of use hindsight to say like wow huh that's interesting that's how this common social problem is being adjusted or being uh you know Society is dealing with it um did we do a good job of dealing with it back then are we doing a good job of dealing it with dealing with it now have we forgotten what we're doing you know who knows uh well we know again hindsight tells us a lot uh but thanks for joining us today uh I mean the other part of this of course is it's fun to watch these films and laugh at them and recording this and see things that you hadn't seen before and I gave you Arthur C Clarke holding a speaking spell um a little version of how uh so um yeah that's what it that's what we do anyways uh thanks for tuning in thanks for your comments we would love a thumbs up I would love a like a subscribe I would love for you to tell other people about what we're doing you can also support us with a little bit of Moolah a little bit of cash so we can buy um forever stamps to mail out things like stickers uh uh anyways we'll be back again tomorrow what is tomorrow Friday I don't even know what today is yes yesterday was a border so tomorrow's Friday I believe that's right uh yeah come on come on back and uh we'll watch some stuff uh if you wanted to donate some moolah to us you could go to KO Dash fi.com Geeks you can go to patreon.com Geeks or you can use the super things button in the YouTube chat regardless thanks for tuning in and we'll be back again tomorrow everybody take care bye