I am completely fascinated by the efforts of the Polish firm Neural Love to to restore old, choppy grainy movies from the 1890s-1910’s using neural network technology. The end results are just amazing, especially those that are taken in some of our major cities, such as the one below from Paris. It is especially poignant when you compare it to Claude Lelouch’s “Rendezvous” and to the fact that Notre Dame went up in flames about a year ago.
Another restored video that I find interesting is the one below of miners and laborers from the United Kingdom. This video, originally filmed around 1901, was originally part of an 2013 exhibit at London’s Tate Britain museum about L.S. Lowry’s art. The connection is that the video below as taken at Pendlebury, just outside of Manchester, and Lowry’s had moved there in 1912.
As I’ve said before, the quality of the restored videos bring out so much rich detail and they feel like they could have been taken last week with a bunch of actors playing the parts. Just a wonderfully restored lens into life 120+ years ago that make you wonder who the people in the video were and what became of their lives.