Home Movie Day News

In an article in the Sunday edition of the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard, reporter Mark Baker interviewed Tom Robinson. The article, titled "The reel deal: Here's your chance to learn how to preserve precious old home movies," gives background on the importance of home movies as well as a call to Oregonians to bring theirs out to the Knight Library on the University of Oregon campus this Sunday.

In today’s Monday Platform on SF360.com, Stephen Parr of Oddball Films talks about HMD in general and home movies in particular.

Home movies, or amateur films, were made without any interest in remuneration. People made these films to document their family’s history, vacations — their lives, basically. There is always an element of camp in anything that’s dated, because we’re so fashion-oriented. But there are a lot of other issues that are important and often get overlooked: Who shot the film? It has to do with gender roles. Generally, men would shoot the films. Who gets camera time? Who doesn’t? Oftentimes the favorite child gets shot. Sometimes the patriarch will get a lot of time. That’s a metaphor for the family unit.

Snowden Becker and Rhonda Vigeant are quoted in a August 6 story in the LA Daily News titled History made reel in home movies. Rhonda gives background information on the Newhall, California event, while Snowden describes the greater significance of home movies and talks about some of the films in the collection of the Academy FIlm Archive.

Today’s issue of the Fredericksburg, Virginia Free Lance-Star provides readers with a preview of the Culpeper Home Movie Day. In an article titled Memories at stake: Preserve those precious home movies let’s get reel, reporter Kim Baer talks about the event in conjunction with the opening of the National Audio-Visual Convervation Center in Culpeper next year, while also using yet another reel/real pun in the title of the article.

The celebration of Home Movie Day at Duke University is previewed in a August 7 article posted to the website of the Duke Office of News & Communication. The article, titled “Get Out Your Old Films,” features comments from host Karen Glynn and volunteer Arani Roy

“Strangers comment on each others’ films, ask questions in the dark, and ooh and ahh over the visual record of family and community life flickering across the screen,” Glynn said. “The act of viewing home movies for four hours on a hot August afternoon once a year generates community.”

The previews keep rolling in: TheState.com, “South Carolina’s Home Page,” features an article in today’s edition titled “Reel life,” a preview of Home Movie Day 2006, with comments from volunteers Kelly Cornwell and Joshua Mabe.

A Home Movie Day favorite for Mabe is of Blue Ridge Mountain landscapes that someone filmed during a Tweetsie Railroad ride.

Mabe also learned that bears show up with some regularity in home movies. “I don’t know why,” he added.

Home Movie Day in the Upper Connecticut Valley is getting its fair share of press coverage on the eve of the event. First, a story called “Historical treasures to be discovered on Home Movie Day” in the Connecticut Valley Spectator, and then an audio interview on New Hampshire Public Radio with organizer Bruce Posner, which you can listen to here. Well done to John and Bruce for getting the word out!

The New York Home Movie Day got a nice write-up in The New York Sun today. Katie Trainor, Dan Streible, and Andrew Lampert are all quoted in the piece.

Other film scenes that afternoon were of a cat being petted; a dog being washed; a baby in a crib watching an overhead moving mobile; footage (some underexposed) of a recent wedding near Buffalo, N.Y.; film of Central Park that had been found in a projector being thrown out; and scenes of Nantucket. All the while, Mr. Lampert interjected various observations and comments, such as, “Tricycles are a very popular subject” in home movies.

Jean P. Fisher of the News and Observer wrote an article titled “Home movie buffs revere the reel thing” (there it is again…) covering this year’s events at the North Carolina State University. Organizer Martha Orgeron is interviewed, and the piece also features a number of photos of Skip Elsheimer, Devin Orgeron, and others.

Film archivists at each gathering inspected the movies to determine their condition and projected those that were in good enough shape. The idea is to remind people of the historic and sentimental value of such films and give families the chance to view movies many have not seen in decades.

One man attending the Raleigh event brought in film shot at Yankee Stadium in the 1930s. He said Lou Gehrig played that day. A younger man, born in Taiwan, shared a film of his third birthday in 1979, showing his extended family sitting down to a meal of sushi and Chinese hot pot, a kind of fondue.

Following last week’s HMD Boston event, tireless home movie champion Liz Coffey took the show on the road yesterday for a second event in Providence, Rhode Island. The Providence Journal joined her at the Rhode Island Historical Society to cover the state’s first ever Home Movie Day.

“These films can tell us so much that’s important about the people and daily life of our state,” Bernard P. Fishman, the historical society’s executive director, said before the screening in the group’s Aldrich House headquarters, on Benevolent Street.

Two dozen people sat under a chandelier inside a high-ceilinged room in the Federal-style house to watch silent films on everything from U.S. fighter planes flying in formation during World War II to a group of Rhode Island Red chickens pecking around on a farm in North Attleboro. In the background during part of the screening, a Peggy Lee LP played on a gramophone.

The oldest film was from 1927 and captured a family visiting the Lincoln Park Zoo, in Chicago, and ice-skating on a frozen pond nearby. The most recent was shot last year by Liz Coffey, the society’s film archivist, during her vacation in Spain.

Read the complete article here.

Home movies aren’t just for the family

Sunday, August 6, 2006

By Michael Drakulich Staff writer

Home movies aren’t just memories put on celluloid. Film archivists say they’re history.

Orland Park will take part in the annual Home Movie Day next weekend, in which film archivists and amateur moviemakers worldwide celebrate the value of home movies from decades gone by. The movies were shot with 8 or 16 mm film.

The event will be hosted locally by film archivists Larry Urbanski and his wife, Nancy, of Moviecraft/Urbanski Film.

The Urbanskis have cataloged more than 150,000 films, including home movies, television shows, educational films and movie outtakes.

The couple also help agencies properly store and preserve their own films. Larry Urbanski said Home Movie Day was initiated in 2002 by a group of film archivists who were concerned about what was happening to home movies shot on film during the 20th century.

Many feared they were being discarded because people no longer had projectors or thought they eventually would become too fragile to view.

So archivists created the day, which is celebrated every Aug. 12, to convince people there is still value to those old home movies.

Home Movie Day encourages people to get out their home movies shot on 8 mm, Super 8 and 16 mm film and make them available for viewing.

“Archivists have been surprised by the success and participation,” Urbanski said. “It’s grown in numbers each year and has even caught on in Japan and the United Kingdom.”

The day isn’t just about viewing home movies, he said. It’s a chance for people to learn more about preserving them and perhaps transferring them to other common forms of media such as DVD.

“Everyone has that stash of movies in the attic or a shoebox,” Urbanski said. “If you have something historically relevant to your family and actually to history in general, they should be preserved.”

Urbanski says anyone interested in dusting off their movies can bring them to the Orland Park Public Library at 11 a.m. Saturday.

Archivists can check the films for damage and make them ready to beshown in a projector.

Or, people can arrive just to learn about transferring to other media and preservation.

Film screenings will run from 12:30 to 4 p.m.

Home movies transport viewers back in time

Sunday, August 13, 2006

By Kristen Schorsch Staff writer

During a beauty pageant in the 1950s, red sashes and white underwear were the only items covering a handful of Diane Aalders’ 12 siblings.

One by one they posed for the video camera, hoping to be crowned the next beauty queen or king — at least of their Chicago home.

When out on the town, her sisters donned dresses, hats and white gloves, a staple of that era. Her brothers sported suits.

The silent 16 mm film that captured these memories and more brought a smile to Aalders’ face. She hadn’t seen her family’s home movies since she was a child.

“It’s just pretty neat,” said Aalders, 43, of Evergreen Park.

People worldwide gathered Saturday to celebrate Home Movie Day, a tradition that began in 2003 to save the countless amount of reels of home video shot during the 20th century, film archivist Larry Urbanski said.

At the Orland Park Public Library, about 10 people transported back in time to watch the silent stories of their families and friends. The scene was like a movie theater, with plenty of popcorn and Milk Duds to go around as the crowd watched their memories on the big screen.

Before the viewings, Urbanski offered tips on how to preserve films, such as storing them in canisters with holes to allow air to flow through.

An 8 mm film helped Stan and Teresa Barnat, of Summit, retrace the steps of their wedding day — the snowy morning of Nov. 26, 1949.

“There’s my old Nash, wow!” said Stan Barnat, 85, referring to his 1949 green car.

The couple drove the vehicle to Key West for their honeymoon. Teresa Barnat, 78, remembered the backseat converted to a bed.

Clip after clip, the Barnat’s relatives and friends came to life as the projector gargled in the background.

“My mother and father, oh boy,” Stan Barnat said.

“My sister,” his wife said.

Moments later, a small child popped up.

“That little girl is a grandmother herself now,” Teresa Barnat said.

As the group watched several films, they asked questions about particularly scenes or made comments about how times have changed.

The event was a first for the Southland, said Urbanski, of Orland Park-based Moviecraft and Urbanski Film.

“It’s funny how everybody gets into each other’s movies,” he said. “It’s like it becomes a community event.”

Kristen Schorsch may be reached at kschorsch@dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5992.

Check out Stephen Bissette’s in-depth report on Home Movie Day NH/VT on his blog.

Everyone — myself included! — was really there to see movies. Movies that had most likely not been screened for decades; movies never seen by most of us in the room.

It was magic.

Guy Edmonds’ report from London:

We’re still collecting ourselves after a bumper attendance of 79 stampeded through our door on Saturday, more than doubling our 2004 tally. Many thanks to Andreas Busche for cranking up the publicity machine to such a pitch. We benefited mostly from features, not just listings, in The Guardian Guide and Time Out but the newly-tapped resource of local area internet newsgroups also played a part. Both Andreas and I also did radio spots

The sheer weight of numbers meant I saw far less films than I did two years ago and our set up here with a number of small spaces rather than one large one (a makeshift corridor cinema for super and standard 8 and our 24 seat cinema for the 16mm) means no one is able to see everything, with some of the screens running simultaneously at times, but at least everyone who brings a film gets to see it. Therefore my report on what turned up is necessarily a little cobbled together.

A friend, Martin Pickles, sent me a precis of what he saw in the 16mm room:

“I saw three black and white 16mm films from the 1930s which were found footage by one filmmaker. The first had a Royal parade (a Coronation?) going along what looked like Shaftesbury Avenue. Then there was footage from the west coast of Scotland, including Mull, Iona and Oban with footage on a small ship, with well-dressed people playing games on deck. There was some colour footage of a Presbyterian gathering, which showed lots of young people having pillow fights and three legged races on a lawn.

“Then there was some colour 16mm from 1952 shot in Dorset with the filmmaker present (an older man with beard, white hair and glasses). He showed a house party full of young people (colour), young people on a beach, a walk round Avebury etc. There was also black and white footage of the house opposite him in Streatham being built. There was also b&w footage of the filmmaker cutting his 21st birthday cake.”

Ronald Grant, projecting the 16mm, said that the Presbytery footage was his favourite because it showed all sorts of hilarious group gymnastics by otherwise staid 1930s adults, which also jumped from black and white to colour within the same scene. I’m going to get in touch with the contributor and offer a transfer of this so hopefully I’ll get to see it myself soon - at the moment it sounds like our best candidate for the Best of HMD DVD.

In screen two we had a huge variety of material, from the avant garde (a woman who had in exemplary anti-preservation fashion hung her film in tree to let the sap drop on it and then buried it in the ground; another woman who had footage of a Fluxus happening in the 1970s) to the most personal of home movies which required the temporary evacuation of our corridor cinema. The material was not salacious, however, rather the contributor, who had not seen it since she was a child, felt it would be potentially upsetting for her to raise her familial ghosts and so requested this private screening. Other corridor highlights included some wonderful amateur narrative productions by Captain Zip, a movie maker and veteran of King’s Road Punk, some of which have already been preserved on video by The Wessex Film and Video Archive. One family finally got to see the premiere of some super 8 footage that had been returned from processing 17 years ago. In the meantime daughter Matilda had entirely grown up and was able to gaze upon her two year old self in pristine condition and vibrant colour. Another contributor had waited patiently since HMD 04, when he’d heard about the event too late, to bring along his cache of films made by a film industry insider which showed Reg Varney of “On The Buses” fame as well as other 1970s celebs.

A distinct trend visible is that already these movies are moving in to third party hands, with the inevitable loss of context that goes with that. Three of our thirteen contributors were people who had taken pity on the films in junk shops or flea markets without even having the means to show them but had at least started the preservation process by giving them a home and willingly sharing them with others.

As in 2004, Tom Adams of the Imperial War Museum did a fantastic job of projecting the 8mm material and we also gained a great volunteer in the person of Janine Lai who had seen our poster when she put it up in Peckham Library in her day job as librarian.

This is a response from Captain Zip one of our contributors who also includes many descriptions of what he saw:

Hello there. Just a quick note to thank you for such an incredibly splendid Home Movie Day - which I enjoyed enormously. What a pity it is only once a year. There was such a nice balance of the family and holiday and arty and more ambitious (to varying degrees) films. I had very good feedback from people regarding the two films of mine which were shown (it was so good to see them in a different venue). It would be interesting to know how well my Windsor newsreel copied in the camera that was pointed at it for so long. I enjoyed all the other films on show too.

It was just a pity that I didn’t get to see many of the 16mm films, but I must admit to staying in “screen two” because I didn’t want to miss any of my own films. Charles Laughton was right. All is vanity.

The film about a fly in the beer was very enjoyable. The picture quality had survived so well. It looked like it had been shot yesterday rather than in the early 1950s.

I was amazed by the picture quality of your garden party film (which seemed very well edited-in-camera), especially as you didn’t seem to have much depth of field to play with in what I presume were tight telephoto shots.

The standard 8mm films seemed to run a bit slow in places, so I felt like I had really been to Tunisia for the Miss Cinema 1972 and 1973 film. I tend to run slow in the heat too.

I quite liked the arty films, especially Laura’s water damage film and the shots of distorted reflections of London traffic and split-screen effect achieved by holding a hand-mirror in front of the lens. I must give that a try myself.

I keep meaning to make another in my series of London films, which I started in the 1960s, but can’t quite get motivated to spend the money on film stock when both my fridge and roof need mending.

Even the family footage was a joy. It felt very special to share someone’s Christmas from the ’60s.

I liked the film about whipping (or was it caning?) by the lady from New Jersey. Interestingly, I once made a film with the same plot called Kidnap Lark. I remember she was particularly impressed by my production standards, though I found my Dick Dawkins film a bit embarrassing as the style of humour had dated so much. I was hoping no one would object to what had become politically incorrect jokes. They just seemed funny at the time. But it was good to get laughs from the audience.

I’m still trying to work out the Brixton-Kenya connection in the wedding film. Maybe it was simply that they had their honeymoon there. I didn’t think of anything so simple on the day. I loved the museum itself too. What a joy to see one of Hepworth’s soundtrack discs.

I knew it would be a good day when I found a 2 coin on the tube on the way there.

It was good to touch base with Dave Wyatt again after so long, he being a chum from the days when I could afford to collect film.

We couldn’t figure out if the 15 inch Pathe disc was a soundtrack disc or not. He thought it wasn’t because it runs at 90rpm, but I pointed out that films would only be two minutes long in those days so it might have been.

Anyway, thanks again for a very pleasing day and I look forward to the next one.

Press tally:

Feature in The Guardian Guide (national newspaper listings mag)

Feature in Time Out (London Listings mag)

2 interviews on BBC London radio

Interview on Resonance FM available asPodcast here.

Online publicity:

FilmLondon
Archives Hub
Museums, Libraries, and Archives London
University of Teesside
Guardian Film
Film and Digital Media Exchange
Chain D. L. K.

Judy O’Rourke, in the Santa Clarita edition of the LA Daily News, describes the New Orleans Home Movie Day with her September 2nd article Big Easy Caught on Celluloid.

“The devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina placed the historical record of New Orleans at great risk,” said Brian Graney, one of the five decision makers and a film library technician for the UCLA Film and Television Archive, in Los Angeles. Its massive collections are due to be moved to Santa Clarita in a couple of years. “We contacted people and they were uniformly enthusiastic.”

Under normal circumstances, watching flicks at Home Movie Day gingerly transports viewers to times past, where people and places change gradually over the years. In New Orleans, fragile celluloid images were sometimes the sole remnants of a world wiped out in one fell swoop.

Read the complete article here.

The 2007 Annual Conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists will be held in Anchorage, Alaska on October 3-7. Among the screenings taking place there will be On Screen: A Celebration of Diverse Identities and Cultures in Amateur Film and Video. Coordinated by HMD LA volunteer Christopher Lane and hosted by AMIA’s LGBT Interest Group, Small Gauge and Amateur Film Interest Group, and Diversity Task Force, On Screen will showcase amateur works that feature under-represented groups of people from both inside and outside points of view, exemplifying the depth and breadth of diversity that exist in amateur moving images.

The presenters include Dirk Tordoff of the Alaska Film Archives; Pamela Wintle of the Human Studies Film Archives, Smithsonian Institution; HMD Los Angeles volunteer Lynne Kirste of the Academy Film Archive; Grace Lile of WITNESS Media Archive; HMD San Francisco host Stephen Parr of San Francisco Media Archive/Oddball Film+Video; Francine Lastufka Taylor of the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association; HMD Santa Fe volunteer Sibel Melik of the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Archives and Historical Services Division; and HMD co-founder/HMD New Orleans volunteer Dwight Swanson of the Center for Home Movies.

Dwight will be presenting Think of Me First as a Person (1960-1975), a home movie/documentary about filmmaker Dwight Core’s son, Dwight Core, Jr., who was born with Down Syndrome. The film was completed ten years after the original filmmaker passed away by his grandson, George Ingmire, who recovered the collection from his grandfather’s attic. George first presented this film at a Home Movie Day New Orleans screening. It was a standout film of the program.

On Screen will be held on Saturday, October 14, from 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm at the Egan Conference Center in Anchorage, Alaska. This screening follows the panel session In Focus: A Celebration of Diverse Identities and Cultures in Amateur Film, held earlier on Saturday from 10:30 am - 12:00 pm.