The YouTube genius NASS (I’ve posted his/her/their videos before) has once again worked his/her/their magic on some old footage of a city from the past, in this case Los Angeles in the 1940s. Much of it appears to me to be stock footage most likely shot by a studio crew for use as background plates for commercial movies. How else do we explain the man who examines bales of Hay in Haywagons while waiting for the train to arrive and the passengers to dismount? There’s a terrific interior of a drugstore which displays a Rexall sign (Rexall was on the corner of Beverly Blvd. and La Cienega for decades). But are they really in Rexall or is it a set? The techniques that NASS uses to make this footage come alive include slowing down the frame rate from 24 to 60 frames per second with the result that the people move more slowly which somehow increases the reality of what we’re seeing, and adding a sound bed of naturalistic effects to create an ambient audio accompaniment. Still, I’m puzzling over that drugstore…it’s so immaculate, the customers are so well dressed, that it feels staged to me. Or was that just the civility of the times?