Movies

‘Watching Boston Grow’ Treasures The City’s Past

Watching Boston Grow
By  · Published on October 27th, 2017

It’s like a timelapse met Ken Burns in an old library, but fun.

Harrison Jeffs and Sebastian Crank’s tribute to the history of Boston takes photos of the 387-year-old city from the 1930s, when things resembled modernity, and found the exact angle and location each was shot. Fading into the present, Watching Boston Grow is a poignant glimpse at progress, change, and futurism in a way that sci-fi writers couldn’t have imagined and historians could only reconstruct.

More than mere colorization, this is time travel – if only in form. Experimental film can be a lot of things, but a time capsule juxtaposed with the another time, creating yet another fragile moment along the timestream, is a rarity.

Architecture and history buffs will find a lot to love here, especially if they recently saw this year’s Columbus which similarly meditated on buildings as art and landmark.

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Jacob Oller writes everywhere (Vanity Fair, The Guardian, Playboy, FSR, Paste, etc.) about everything that matters (film, TV, video games, memes, life).