Vancouver
York Membery visits Canada’s westernmost city.
A grainy black-and-white film was discovered a few years ago in the basement of a soon-to-be-demolished building in Australia. The six-minute silent movie, taken from a camera that had been placed on the front of a streetcar, was originally thought to be of Hobart in Tasmania – but on closer examination it was somewhere in North America, but where?
The remarkable footage was actually shot in Vancouver by William Harbeck, a pioneering filmmaker hired by the the Canadian Pacific Railway's Department of Colonization ‘to put Western Canada on the motion picture screen’. And while few buildings from the time remain, there were enough to enable archivists to date it to 1907. It’s a timely reminder that, despite being a young city, Vancouver has changed beyond recognition in the 100-odd years since the film was shot.
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