Temporal en Barcelona (atribuido) - 1910
ABOUT THE FILM : Temporal en Barcelona (atribuido)
Filmoteca EspañolaStorm over Barcelona [attributed]
Year: 1910
The paseo is teeming with people. The children are delighted by the breaker splashing the front wall of the Barcelonetta.
This probable excerpt from a newsreel reports on the “damage caused by the storm”. It gives a good idea of the extreme conditions that a camera was able to withstand, even at that time. Here, the cameraman certainly has his sea legs.
Nationality: Spanish
Length: 3' 24"
Genre: documentary
Sound: silent with soundtrack
Original elements: tinted
Composer: Antonio Coppola (2008)
Original language: Spanish
A BRIEF HISTORY : Temporal en Barcelona (atribuido)
This very short film was probably shot with a Pathé newsreel camera. It was not until the interwar period in fact that amateur filmmaking saw the light of day. The reasons were mainly technical.
Between 1900 and 1914, Pathé Frères was by far the most innovative company. Charles Pathé (1863-1957) really launched the film industry through his investments in numerous European countries. In Spain, the first film studios opened in 1909 in Madrid and Barcelona. Pathé set up a subsidiary in Catalonia. The cameras, which had ventured rarely outside the studios, susceptible as they were to changes in temperature and bad weather, became lighter and easier to handle from 1910 on.
The Pathé Professional camera was developed in 1908, but it used highly inflammable nitrate films. It was quickly dethroned by its small sibling, the Pathé-Kok camera, which used the first non-inflammable support medium, the so-called safety film. Amateur films did not appear until the early 1920s, when the Pathé-Baby system (known as Pathex outside of France) was developed and marketed. It consisted of a lightweight camera and a projector, less expensive than its predecessors.
The nitrate copy of the original film has been restored by the Spanish Film Library in Madrid.
The original music for this film was composed by Antonio Coppola in 2008.
