Any time spent browsing around Youtube will generally turn up several videos made by some kid with too much free time and very little sense of self-preservation. People throwing themselves off roofs, small buildings and ramps are very common; skateboarders and inline skaters upload videos too, apparently in an attempt to show the world that they, too, can suffer grievous injury while on wheels.
This is by no means a new phenomenon. If I were to tell you that I'd found a video online that showed people skating on top of a 16-storey building, jumping from motorbikes to cars, strapping themselves to windmills and doing all sorts of other incredibly dangerous things, you would probably assume that I was talking about something like Jackass, or one of its many imitators.
However, this being part of my Public Domain Theatre series, that's not quite the case. Instead, all the stunts that I'm talking about were carried out in 1918. And, fortunately, the news organisations of the time were around to film it in glorious, grainy, black and white silent footage.
Quite apart from the frankly jaw-dropping nature of some of the things being done in this film (are those people actually standing on the wing of a biplane in flight without any kind of harness?), I love spotting the things that are the same in modern culture. I'm particularly interested to see that Fox News was entirely capable of being self-righteous and pompous even 90 years ago (see the title card at 00:35), and that the "transfer from motorbike to car" stunt really hasn't changed at all since its invention. In some ways, people were doing much more impressive things back then — how many modern stunt performers would agree to be dragged down a road by a plane while they hung on for dear life?
The dedication of the cameramen themselves is very impressive. In an era when film cameras were unwieldy and temperamental — and, more to the point, required their handle to be constantly turned manually — filming from a plane, or from a moving car, was more difficult by orders of magnitude. No-one involved in making these films is alive today, and yet this work that they made is still impressive today. I think that's a pretty awesome legacy.
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