Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 7:00 am Eastern (and perhaps sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads.
Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream.
Can you help solve a WWII mystery?
Good morning, everyone. I have something different for you today: a mystery from World War II that you might be able to help solve.
Levi Bettweiser's mission is to find and rescue old and undeveloped rolls of film from all over the world. From his website:
The Rescued Film Project is an online archive gallery of images that were captured on film between the 1930's and late 1990's. Each image in our archive was rescued from found film from locations all over the world, and came to us in the form of undeveloped rolls of film…
Every image in The Rescued Film Project at some point, was special for someone. Each frame captured, reflects a moment that was intended to be remembered. The picture was taken, the roll was finished, wound up, and for reasons we can only speculate, was never developed. These moments never made it into photo albums, or framed neatly on walls. We believe that these images deserve to be seen, so that the photographer's personal experiences can be shared.
Bettweiser recently obtained 31 rolls of undeveloped rolls of film at an auction in Ohio. The film was shot by a soldier during World War II, and some of the rolls had location names - Boston Harbor, Lucky Strike Beach, and LaHavre Harbor. But Bettweiser knows nothing about the photographer.
The following video gives more of the story of The Rescued Film Project and these 31 rolls of film, along with some of the images developed from that film. Particularly intriguing to me are five pictures of a funeral. Pay attention at 0:54 for mention of a “roll of French funeral” followed by “1947.” (The funeral was in 1947? Or the next roll was labeled 1947?) Images of a funeral, perhaps the one mentioned, are at 8:27 and 9:08.
.
.
Most of the pictures Bettweiser rescued from the WWII film are in a gallery at his website. Five images of a funeral start at #18 in the deck. The challenge for you, dear friends:
• Where and when were the pictures of the funeral taken?
• Whose funeral is depicted here, and why was there an honor guard?
• Super-duper bonus question: Who is the tall man in the overcoat standing at the end of the casket in image #19?
~ ❦ ~
Sources:
“Undeveloped World War II Film Discovered,” Rescued Film Project, Facebook, PetaPixel