Film info

Creator / Collector

Description
We're watching the maps and the guides that the filmmaker will use to explore Vancouver.
Driving downtown Vancouver, views of its underpopulated suburb with cottages that are surrounded by small gardens. The landscape is changing to more urban with big streets and low buildings.
Crossing the bridges that are joining the peninsula. Glass skyscrapers are seen from a distance into the heart of Canada's third-largest city center as a background.

We are now in the heart of the big city.
Views from downtown Vancouver with the skyscrapers being on our left side and on our right.

"To Layton Park", a sign on the road notifies us, and just after that, a seaplane on a flight at a dock. The lens follows the seaplane and records the anchored ships and the skyscrapers. On the way to the Layton Park Aquarium we see a Totem.
We are in the aquarium and penguins are posing in the lens. Otters dive and we watch these awesome swimmers in the water, and orcas perform in one of the aquarium pools.

The name of Vancouver comes from the British explorer George Vancouver who traveled into the area. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit's annual survey, Vancouver was awarded for the fifth consecutive year, with the title of leading city in the quality of life.

Stanley Park is a public park, and most of the structures that were housed there were built between in 1911 and in 1937, apart from the aquarium that it was built in 1956 and an extension was added in 1967.

Coordinates

People

Film Information

Holder
Bonar, Andrew Graham

Quality
HD (1440x1080)

Sound
Yes

Color
Yes

Duration (seconds)
131

Format
Super 8mm

Creator's description


Sunday 10th July 1977. In England it is bedtime, but here in Vancouver it is about two o’clock in the afternoon. Today Vancouver is large and prosperous -it’s a bit difficult to imagine that only a century ago it was a small and isolated town with seemingly poor prospects. Of course the future of the whole of Canada was in the balance at that time, mainly owing to its vast size and the lack of communications. Someone wrote in a newspaper: “We Canadians don’t know each other, we have no trade with each other, we have no facilities or resources or incentives to mingle with each other. We are shut off from each other by a wilderness, geographically, commercially, politically and socially. We always cross into the United States to shake hands”.
In 1871 they joined the Confederation, which had come into existence four years earlier, but it was not until 1885 that the first railway reached Vancouver. After that event, of course, things began to change and develop rapidly. Today Vancouver has a cosmopolitan population of well over one million, a university, a planetarium, several skyscrapers, a parking problem, Chinese restaurants, Japanese restaurants, nightclubs, street walkers, plenty of high life, plenty of low life –in a word everything you’d expect to find in a modern Western city.
Bonar, Andrew Graham