Home Movies

“We convert your old video and movies to DVD!”  I drive past this sign at least once a month, but this time it grabs my attention.  Hurry, I think, before that pile of VHS tapes ( and even worse, the 8 mm tapes that I never got around to editing and transferring) become so obsolete they’ll be trash.   So I drag myself down to the basement where the library of videos has found a home.  

It’s not a new problem.  My Opa Gustav was what we now call an “early adopter.”  If there was a new appliance or gadget, he got one of the early models.  Sometime in the thirties, he acquired an 8 mm movie camera.  We inherited it in the fifties - made of cold, black metal, so heavy I could barely hold it up.  When I was a child, I could rarely persuade him to dust off the portable screen and set up the equally heavy and ancient projector.  Fleeting images flickered into view:  my mother on a swing, a glimpse of her sweeping the courtyard. When this snippet jerked into view my mother whispered to me that when she was young,  her sister would shriek: “ Look at her, she’s a lefty!”  every time.    As an only child, I flinched at the obvious intent to injure.  Opa also owned two purchased cartoons, each about 5 minutes long, one of Mickey Mouse and the other of Donald Duck. His possession of these American imports hinted at a time before the War,   before Western decadence was censored by the Communist Party.   I have no idea what happened to these precious strips of celluloid.  They probably went out with the garbage when the medium changed to 16mm.

Sometime in the 80’s my father had his reels of movies (8 and 16mm) transformed to video.  It was this set of three VHS tapes, titled “Poser Family Memories”  that I first dug out and took over to my father’s.  At this age, he is often withdrawn and shows little reaction to anything.  The movies got his attention.  His eyes focused, and as the images slid by, he began to supply names and places.  

What struck me was not just the magic of seeing my younger self and a parade of people who exist only in memory.  As a memoir writer, what intrigued me was that I couldn’t remember most of these events.  When you head out with your camera, you record happy moments. Vacations, holidays, visitors.  Most of the time, you are not stealthy, so your subjects put on a show.  They smile, they wave, they put extra effort into enjoying being alive.  If we didn’t have home movies, most of these moments would evaporate.

Real memory records the mundane, the daily trivia, the odd detail.  The color of a longed-for bicycle, the light illuminating the living room rug, a dog seen daily on the way to kindergarten, the numerous complex hooks and eyes on my grandmother’s corset.  Or the dramatic.  Getting caught in a lie and punished.  The squealing tires from a crashing motorcycle just around the corner.  The look of surprised agony in my mother’s face when she told me about being teased for being left-handed.

But here’s the painful thrill of watching my mother unpack a picnic lunch for my six-year-old self, secure in some Bavarian meadow, South Carolina a distant place on some half-remembered map.  There I am, 16, lithe and perfect, but hunching my shoulders to protect my insecure heart.  And again, at 30, confident and sleek with new love.  My father, at forty, a few pounds overweight, with impossible dark hair.  With a shock, I  spot a once beloved dress that I haven’t thought about in years. 

What do these celluloid, soon to be digital, snippets mean?  Once watched, some of them enter the realm of memory as hand-me-downs - we remember seeing the movie of a fugitive event.  But they don’t have the texture of those moments deeply recorded in our cells.  You can’t smell your mother’s perfume, the way you can when you close your eyes and reconstruct a moment on the way to the airport to pick up your father. 

Which is real?