Finding a safe house for home movies
Posted on: October 10, 2014; Updated on: October 10, 2014
By Steven Powell, spowell2@mailbox.sc.edu, 803-777-1923
Lydia Pappas has worked with enough archived film reels to know that long-forgotten home movies can make a modern viewer’s eyes go wide with wonder at any moment. And it happens pretty often in her line of work.
A curator at the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections (MIRC), Pappas oversees the archive’s regional film collections, which includes home movies donated by members of the general public from all over the Southeast and other areas. Pappas has uncovered her share of historic figures and events lurking among what the uninitiated might dismiss as mundane recordings of ordinary life.
Pope Pius XII, for example, graces the screen in one recent acquisition, an unexpected icon of the 20th century playing a brief supporting role in a South Carolina family’s European vacation trailer from the 1940s. Another collection includes shots of Will Rogers, whom a family from Aiken, S.C., knew through connections in the horse business.
In some cases, family members can be prodded to recall some of the details of the filming. But more often these days, the cameraman is no longer around to tell the tale.
Since 8 mm film was first sold for home use in the early 1930s and the even more popular Super 8 format was released in 1965, home movie aficionados have shot countless hours of footage that are now largely forgotten. With the popular commercialization of video technology in the early 1980s, working film projectors have become scarce and home screenings rare as hen’s teeth.
Homemade film reels are stored in attics, basements and closets all over the country, often in conditions hostile to their long-term survival. MIRC is part of a yearly international event meant to help preserve and archive that footage, co-hosting the Columbia location of Home Movie Day with the Nickelodeon theater this weekend.
Anyone with home movies or videos can speak with curators at Home Movie Day about how to best preserve the media. If they donate their films to the archive, MIRC will digitize the footage and put it on a complimentary DVD. A highlight of the event is a screening of a number of home movies provided by participants.
Pappas sees an inherent value in home movies beyond preserving recordings of well-known people and events.
“To me, it’s seeing how real people lived," Pappas says. "I love watching these screwball comedies from the ’30s and ’40s, but I know most people didn’t live like that. It’s contrived, it’s a setup.
“With these films we get to see what’s in people’s lives and what was important then. Mostly it’s kids, dogs, Easter, Christmas, but at the same time you get to see what car they were driving, what their house looks like, from the outside, from the inside, what was important to them. From a cultural standpoint, we get that kind of insight.”
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