Wednesday, February 04, 2009

It's not like the great storm of '63...

I was fascinated by the YouTube video embedded below for a couple of reasons. First, it is just a great bit of documentary film making and it is good to see such brilliant resources being made available, for free, by the British Film Institute on YouTube. (The BFI have their own BFI YouTube Channel.) Second, as I was watching it, I suddenly thought how like a music video it was. The rapid cuts and the way those cuts hit the beat, the juxtaposition of passengers in the buffet car with the workers in the snow, the pace of the film... It would not look out of place on a music video channel. I guess there's nothing new under the sun... or in this case, nothing new under the snow.



Thank you to Theo Kuechel for drawing this to my attention. (He posted the link on Twitter where his Twitter name is theok.)

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi David,

I started school (yes, primary school!) in the August leading up to this snow storm. I have some very clear memories of that winter:

- of walking to school (about a mile away) and spending most of the walk at least 10 feet off the ground (3 metres in old money) - only sliding down from the huge drifts whenever we had to cross a road.

- of waiting at a bus stop, a double-decker stops, and being able to look straight into the top deck of the buss from atop the drift

- and while waiting at the stop, being able to sit on top of the bus-stop sign itself.

John

Anonymous said...

...and yes, bus was spelt 'buss' until the mid-sixties...everyone over a certain age knows that !

Anonymous said...

And...(i'm on a roll)...I also remember the great storm of january 1967, when I can recall having to walk past some poor soul's garden shed lying upside down in the middle of the road as I walked to school.

This is the last bulletin from the great storm meme, from me at least :-)