Scenes of San Sebastian in Documentaries from 1913 and 1920-1930

Back in 2014, we brought you an amateur film from the 1960s showing scenes of Bilbao, the bay, and Ondarroa.  A year later, we brought you another film showing scenes from the Northern Basque Country from that same time period.

Today, we’re bringing you two films from the first third of the twentieth century, shot in San Sebastian.  They therefore join our blog’s collection of aerial photos of 1921 San Sebastian that can be found on the website Britain from Above.

Today’s first film, found at the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam, which we found thanks to Guy Jones‘ YouTube account, shows San Sebastian in 1913.

The second comes to us from the Roaring Twenties, showing us the streets, the hippodrome, the Lasarte race track, the Ulía Clay Pigeon Shooting Range, and more, with music by Juan Carlos Irizar.  The four parts that make up the film can be found on TxuriUrdintxo‘s YouTube account.

The filmmaker is not certain, but, according to a comment by JoxemariLCM, it could be José María Martiarena Lascurain, from a local San Sebastian family that moved to Zumaia, where he was born in February 1886.  He moved to San Sebastian in 1900 and got married on September 26, 1916 in Lezo, settling down at nº 8 Plaza de Guipúzcoa in San Sebastian, dying there in 1931.  His brother was artist Acenslo Martiarena Lascurain, who painted the mural at the Victoria Eugenia Theater).  He was an optician, photographer, and small businessman, with a shop, Óptica Martiarena, at nº 6 Hernani St, San Sebastian.  He made short films and reports about important events in the 1920s and the beginnings of the 1930s in Gipuzkoa, along with several features.  His archives eventually ended up in the EITB archives in the 1980s.

Last Updated on Dec 20, 2020 by About Basque Country