HFA Celebrates the Filmmaker In Us All

Long gone are the days when parents immortalized their children’s birthday parties with an old 8mm camera. Embarrassing moments of our youth are now captured by high-tech digital video camcorders, which push film movies into the esoteric, ‘retro’ corner already occupied by the Polaroid camera. But Home Movie Day, which was hosted by the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) last Saturday, seeks to rediscover and celebrate these old, forgotten film reels lying in dusty corners of attics and basements.

Created by the Center for Home Movies, Home Movie Day is an international event observed in 50 cities worldwide. Now in its sixth year, the event was first brought to Harvard by Elizabeth Coffey, Film Conservator at the HFA, whose involvement in the National Organization of Film Archivists led her to befriend the founders of Home Movie Day. “Part of the event is to educate people on the films’ value. They should be shown in public because they are not just boring old movies, they have cultural value and are just as important as any Hollywood film,” Coffey said.

The event, which was open to the public, consists of people bringing in their own reels of home movies to publicly display. “Home videos are a really personal and different kind of film. A lot of people have never even seen the movies they bring, or haven’t seen them since a long time ago,” Coffey said. “They don’t watch their own home movies because they don’t have projectors or don’t know how to use them. It’s a daunting process for people who are used to VHS.”

Coffey’s statement rang true for Lexington-native Reed Sturtevant, who first participated in Home Movie Day three years ago when it was held at the Boston Public Library. “You would see people come with big bags and boxes full of their home movies. I especially remembered this one man in his 60s, who brought home videos of past Christmases he had spent with his wife, who had since passed away,” Sturtevant said. Sturtevant went to that event with a film of his parents’ wedding, which he had never watched.

Part of the significance of Home Movie Day comes from its emphasis on movies made on film. With the growth of digital video technology, which is cheaper and easier to use, home movies made on film are becoming rare artifacts. Kate Bergeron, who works in the Harvard Office of Human Resources, also participated in the event and admitted that though she still makes home movies, they are now all on video. For Bergeron, the switch from film to video has had both positive and negative effects.

“Though with film there was always the danger you would leave a shutter open and your entire movie would just come out black, with video you just don’t get those happy accidents—those instances in which something accidentally does happen, but then you think, wow it looks really cool,” Bergeron said.

Sturtevant also pointed out this difference: “There’s a certain look you associate with old film. There’s something about that analog look you can’t duplicate, even with software.” In addition, Sturtevant feels that a social aspect of the home movie has been lost with the growth of video recording. “With home movies made on film you would actually have to wait to see what happens. You would wait weeks for processing and then you would watch them together with your family, like a ritual. Nowadays, people just e-mail videos to each other and watch them individually on their computers.”

Because home movies are becoming increasingly scarce, Home Movie Day also focuses on educating the public on how to properly preserve their old film. Film is an organic substance, which shrinks and decays over time if not stored properly. “A lot of people have old film lying in their attics, basements, or a box somewhere, but it should really be stored in a cool, dry climate,” said Coffey.

Amy J. Sloper, Assistant Film Conservator at the HFA, emphasized the importance of storing film for future use. “Film is the most stable medium. Even if you copy it onto VHS or DVD, you should keep the film because you can always go back to it and get it copied again. But if you only have it on DVD, once the DVD is corrupted, the information is gone,” she said.

In the future, the organizers of Home Movie Day hope it will continue to grow. Anyone can bring the event to their own city through registration with the Center for Home Movies, which will list the event on their website to help promote it. “All you need is a person who knows how to run a projector and check film,” Coffey said.

Sloper emphasized that the event, like the films it features, is meant to be a casual, low-key experience. She said, “It’s the same everywhere. It’s not any fancier in Hollywood. It’s a voluntary, low-budget community run event.” Coffey echoed this sentiment: “It’s a lot more fun than one might expect to watch other people’s movies.”