On August 18th and 19th, 1941, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Salzburg, Austia, to discuss the progress of the war which the US had yet to officially enter. Hitler’s personal pilot, one Hans Baur, was also an amateur movie photography buff and shot color footage of that Monday
Welcome back to Fascism Week on this blog. Today we present a short reel of color footage of Berlin in the 1930s and 1940s. The city looks beautiful but the preponderance of Nazi flags of course reminds us that things were what they were. The big takeaway here is that
Yesterday I posted a Fox Movietone newsreel depicting Hitlers inaugural event in 1932. Is it possible to continue the theme of Fascist takeovers (which for some reason seems to be on a least a few people’s minds) but on a less somber note? The answer is yes–sort of. Behold the
If the timing of my posting of this fascinating Fox Movietone newsreel seems heavy-handed, well, we live in awfully heavy-handed times. Watch as Adolf Hitler comes to power, addresses his crowds, cordially greets his new fellow government wonks and listen as the assumption is made that he seems willing ‘to
There are certain movie sets of the past that I yearn to be a visitor on. ‘Kane’, of course. ‘Casablanca’, most definitely. But if I were to choose a silent film to watch being filmed it would without a doubt be ‘Big Business’. The film is probably L&H’s most famous
“Hats Off”, a silent 1927 Laurel and Hardy comedy, is a lost film. It was last seen in Germany in 1930, where it presumably retired itself to the countryside and hopefully didn’t wind up a victim of the coming war. Why the film vanished is a mystery–there are no other
Yesterday I posted five hours of radio programming of a local Washington DC station in 1939. I find these non-dramatic radio broadcasts particularly evocative of the era and the above is no exception. It’s a broadcast from 1943 that aired on Christmas Eve as a Christmas special for those home
This is a pretty nutty find. It’s close to six hours of a normal broadcast day on a local Washington D.C. radio station, WJSV, on September 21, 1939. In other words, if you were a housewife sitting around your house and put your radio on in the background and left
Here is one of the most delightful time-travel videos provided by YouTube artist and film-restoration expert NASS, who finds black and white documentary footage of old urban areas, colorizes them, adds a period sound bed of traffic and pedestrian noises and slows the frame rate down slightly, thus giving it
When the Singer Sewing Machine factory decided to build their own office tower in 1907, they chose to do so with a bang. It was the tallest office building ever constructed and the technology involved in running the place was state-of-the-art early 20th century stuff. Alas, it’s life span was