One beautiful summer night when I was a child, I sat with family members in my aunt’s back yard and marveled as my uncle projected reel after reel of home movies on a hastily set-up screen. My uncle provided hilarious running commentary, speaking over the steady whir of the projector.
I hadn’t thought about that night in years, but an event last week at the Chicago Cultural Center dedicated to the decaying art form of home movies brought it all back. About 50 people took up a public invitation to bring in remnants of their personal histories to be screened on Chicago’s second annual Home Movie Day.
The group behind this amateur Olympics of celluloid, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA), organized similar events on the same day worldwide; there were 40 such festivals in countries from Australia to Sweden. AMIA is a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving amateur “small gauge” films.
Small gauge refers to the size of the sprocket holes on the edges of the film–in this case anything smaller than 35mm, which is the standard for feature films. The 8mm, Super 8mm and 16mm sizes were the type that most amateur cameras used–and the formats that were screened at the event.
Michelle Puetz, the local volunteer coordinator, and her colleagues did their best to re-create the retro feel of the traditional home movie experience, which had its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s. Guests signed up at a table while exotic lounge music played on an orange and white record player, adding to the tongue-in-cheek feel.
Playing it safe
Charles Tepperman, a film archivist, checked in people and answered the obvious question: Why not just transfer the home movies to video or DVD?
“People think those formats will be around for a hundred years, but archivists are skeptical about that,” Tepperman said. “If you take care of your original film, they’re going to outlive the DVDs and the videotape.”
Indeed, one enthusiast brought in a sample of a film shot in the late 1930s or early ’40s of her father as a child.
“It was in great shape for its age. It had been well preserved,” said Carolyn Faber, another volunteer archivist. She checked the film artifacts and advised folks on how to maintain their treasures. Faber looked for scratching, brittleness, dirt, broken sprocket holes, bad splices and film shrinking. Hmmm–more problems. Is film really worth it?
Quality over quantity seemed to be the overwhelming answer. “Even the transfer of the films to DVD means there’s a generation lost that’s going to degrade the quality,” Tepperman said. “And the color is much more vivid.”
Faber added: “People who shoot video just shoot and shoot and shoot–but people who shoot film compose and light their shots very deliberately. It’s a very different aesthetic because there’s no retakes with film. It’s too expensive to process.”
She’s not kidding. Buying and processing about three minutes of film costs about $25. Showing your film isn’t so easy, either, because new projectors are difficult to find. Best to try eBay or other auction houses, flea markets or antique malls, and expect to pay anywhere from $20 to more than $200.
But the expense and the time don’t deter home movie enthusiasts Joel Wiersema of Milledgeville, Ill., and Adrienne Henze of Pearl City, Ill., both towns west of Freeport.
“I film everyday things that you don’t normally see–like the kitchen and the bathroom–not just Christmas time opening presents,” Wiersema said. “I know that in 10 years we’re going to forget these things, and this way we won’t.”
“Film is real and it’s true,” Henze added. “You catch things on film because you watch it more carefully–like the way your grandma handled your dad when he was little. These are little pieces of history.”
Protests and the pope
Nick Osborn of Chicago brought some of the pieces of history he has collected–everything from the traditional family celebrations to protest marches in Grant Park during the 1960s and glimpses of Maxwell Street back in its prime.
On this night he had a film of the pope’s 1978 Chicago visit.
“Nobody seems particularly happy to be there,” Osborn laughed. “Everybody’s just kind of dour and looking down waiting for the pope to arrive, but he never shows up.”
At the screening, one young woman lay down on the pillows and blankets set up in front of the chairs, which seemed to be a subliminal signal for the lights to go down. With the familiar whir of the projector, the screening began. Shots of barnyard animals cut to what looked like a county fair during the 1950s. There was a tractor pull and horse racing and an act where a pig pulled a wagon. Music from the record player drowned out the projector noise and filled in the silence of the sans-soundtrack footage. Everyone laughed.
Nancy Waltrous, who oversees the newly formed Chicago Film Archives (the group is cataloging and preserving the almost 6,000 16mm films of the Chicago Public Library), said of the event, which her group helped to sponsor: “In 50 years this stuff is going to be very important to historical culture as well as just personal memories. People forget about that. It’s a very important path to look at who we are and were in the Midwest.”
