British Guiana - The Country And Its Industries Reel 1 (1924) 

Nice to see the country back in time .

Africans, Indians, Chinese, Portuguese, Amerindians all living together in one South American country which speaks English as its first language

Living in this very country, its kinda hard to recognize places since there has been so many changes since in the 90's.. I think the country was far better then than it is now...

Amazing 👏 it's like a time travel to when things were so much simpler and better. Great.

Evey single frame of any documentary filmed almost a century ago is so rare and precious. Bravo to those who filmed it, & to those who put it on RU-vid. But how accurate is it? Imagine that in 1924 a British Pathé film crew is sent out on a long ocean voyage to an obscure colony almost unknown to cinema goers in the English-speaking world. There may not be a script. But, if they want to keep their jobs, they need to make the destination look civilized, interesting and modern. This they do admirably. What I like is that the quality of the celluloid film, and very few close ups of faces, makes it difficult to tell that people are of different races. Consequently, it looks like one big happy family. In reality, then and now, Wikipedia tells us that the population is mainly made up of four distinct races, and they don't always get along. The only clue that there might be a class system based on race is when we see a close-up of the laborers digging beside the tram line. Five, almost identical men of African descent. Modernity is conveyed by showing the tram, lots of cars concentrated at the Golf Club/County Club and, especially, by showing the women of European descent. At a picnic in one scene, one of them is shown lighting up a cigarette, which up to then was a taboo for women. It actually may have been staged, as she doesn't look very adept at it. Sadly, it would be 40 years before medical experts made the connection between smoking nicotine and lung cancer. The changing hemlines also show us that this colony is 'up to date', as the captions say. My grandmother, in that era was a tailoress by profession. She told me there were several distinct changes in the length of women's hemlines in the 1920s. Both up and down. Just as today, a popular style from the fashion capitals would somehow spread around the world in a matter of months. At 10:00 is a scene of a family strolling in the botanic gardens. In the background is a childminder, a high-status job for a woman of color because it is a position of trust. Also, a middle-aged woman wears an age-appropriate, calf-length day dress, which would have been scandalous 10 years earlier ..... too short! But, the daring younger women exposes her legs to just below the knee, (though they had to be stockinged, even in the Tropics). Just two or three years earlier, had she dressed like this in public she would have been arrested as a jezebel, anywhere in the world. It was among upper crust women that smoking and shorter hemlines first went from taboo to fashionable. So, in many ways the film conveys the concept that British Guiana is a good place to be a white woman, and even to improve one's status. How's that changed in a hundred years? As I watch this, I imagine a middle-class couple in Canada the US or the UK at the movie theater in 1924. Gladys says to George,"Darling, let's move to British Guyana and buy a plantation. I could have a maid and a housekeeper, a nanny for the kids, and we could have a chauffeur and gardeners.". Not to say that this is good or bad, but it's how things were and to that extent the documentary is accurate. Between the wars, many Europeans moved to South Africa for the same reasons. Notice also that the women aren't shown playing golf or tennis. That degree of liberation was just around the corner. In 1924, they are still carrying parasols to keep from getting too tanned in the tropical sun. In other words, for a white woman to have a suntan meant she was of the working class. Within 10 years it would be the exact opposite, and that has not changed since.

9:03 the camera ☠

Try driving here today, they think the roads were built solely for high speed and reckless behavior, there are collisions, single vehicle crashes due to drunk driving, some are killed, some are crippled , some are left to die by hit and run speed demons. In some cases it's nothing short of vehicular homicide, but they are all lumped together and are simply labeled "accidents".