Music composed and recorded by Agatha Kasprzyk and Rafaël Leloup, 2010.
A Trip Down Market Street (Before the Fire) (Miles Bros., 1906) 11.5 min.
Camera: Harry J. Miles. Recorded April 14.
Originally A Trip Through Market Street from 8th Street to the Ferry (Length: 830 feet)
Prelinger Archives (scanned at 16 frames per second; every other frame doubled for a playback frame rate of 24 fps)
For the initial collaboration between the Orphan Film Symposium and NYU’s Screen Scoring Program, we chose a piece of early cinema that has become more storied in the decades — and indeed the century — after its creation. A Trip Down Market Street now usually bears the qualifier Before the Fire, because this beautiful recording of San Francisco’s major thoroughfare was made only days before the notorious earthquake hit the city on April 18, followed by three days of destructive fires. Subsequent films and photographs documenting the terrible destruction left indelible impressions of that San Francisco. The rediscovery of this Miles Bros. footage set a striking contrast. Our knowledge of the devastation that awaited Market Street rhymes with this haunting score of 2010.
Also viewable here.
This high-resolution copy of the best print of A Trip Down Market Street only became available in 2018. Prelinger Archives made a 4K scan of its 35mm print, which likely dates from 1906. Rick Prelinger made the footage available for free use. (Downloadable here; no audio.) So we married the music by Kasprzyk and Leloup to the best moving images, retaining the sprocket holes, which remind us of the materiality of the film and reveal parts of the images usually masked from viewing.
In this panoramic photograph by California poet Harry Sterling Hooper, the wide avenue in the center of the image is Market Street. The landmark Ferry Building that is the destination of A Trip Down Market Street, is visible through the smoke at the end of the strip. The building is part of the wide waterfront Embarcadero by the bay.
Here’s a precise account of the film by historian and film preservationist David Kiehn, who was the first to correctly date the film (long speculated to have been shot in 1905). The San Francisco Silent Film Festival marked the 100th anniversary of the earthquake in 2006, screening this and other early silent movies related to the “great” quake.
The same video as displayed by the Internet Archive. (archive.org/details/trip-score)