If you see some of the earliest films, one characteristic is almost always obvious: they often appear to be in stop-motion. But footage in “The Flying Train” from 1902 is as impressive as the feat of engineering it captures. Depicting a ride on a suspended railway in Germany in 1902, it gives the contemporary viewer a sense of 21st-century drone footage. Throughout the two-minute film, riders see residents of Wuppertal (Wupper Valley), Germany walking across pedestrian bridges and down dirt roadways beneath the city’s schwebebahn – a style of hanging railway that’s unique to Germany and first appeared in 1901.
The Museum of Modern Art recently pulled the film from its vaults and – upon closer examination – were surprised to learn it had been shot in 70mm, instead of 68mm. While the difference may seem small, it’s considerable in the technology of film formatting. It’s also a unique footnote in cinematic history, since 35mm has been the standard for decades. But many of those early films by studios such as Biograph were recorded on either 68 or 70mm and displayed on then-state-of-the-art devices like a Kinetoscope or a Mutoscope. These larger formats provide a larger image area affords stunning visual clarity and quality, especially compared to the more standard 35mm or 16mm.
Chief Writing Wolf 