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Home Movies
If you’re under forty, chances are you have no memories of home “movies” that were made of actual movie film, ones that weren’t videotapes that played on your family TV set. Just maybe, if you’re forty-five or fifty, you might have distant memories of your dad periodically dragging out a projector and darkening the living room to show a few glowing memories of a previous year’s Christmas or summer excursion.
And if you’re anywhere near as old as me, you remember when home movies were kind of special, a magical look into the past, and a mark of having made it into middle-class life, a vanished world of long-ago outdoor weddings, family picnics and beach parties.
“Home movies” weren’t always synonymous with little rolls of 8mm. The first amateur movies were made in 35mm, the professional size, and then in a myriad of smaller, cheaper film gauges. Wealthy families of the early 20th century had servants to run the picture machine, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Diamond as Big as the Ritz”. Chances are, your family did not.
From 1923 on,16mm became the de facto winner, of the just-good-enough to be professional, just-cheap-enough to be amateur sweepstakes. After the armed forces adopted it during World War II, it became an expensive pro gauge, but for another ten years or so 16mm held on as the home movie choice of the upper-middle class and above. It’s one reason why mid-century famous rich families like the Kennedys, Fords, and Romneys have such sharp, clear, presentable film archives.
But 16mm cameras were almost all fairly large and heavy, very expensive to buy even back in amateur days, and complicated. They were for dedicated hobbyists, not casual family use. In 1932, a new amateur film size was introduced that would eventually take over the field of home movies, 8mm. This was a clever adaptation, for cheapness’ sake: The roll you loaded in the camera was actually 16mm film with twice the number of sprocket holes, filmed on one side and then flipped over to photograph on the other side. During processing the two halves were split apart side by side and then spliced together end to end. Sounds messy and complex? It was! But it used only a quarter as much film per minute. It made home movies affordable to the suburban middle class.
As the Depression ended, there was a mini-boom in 8mm color film right before the war. Thanks to the internet, we can now see some of those films, rare full-color glimpses of life in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Sports documentaries have been enlivened by amateur photographers filming pre-war major league baseball games in full, vivid color that makes the past look real, with people like you and me, not grey specters in a vanished, murky black and white world we can’t relate to. The green diamond of Yankee Stadium, the billboard of an orange bottle of soda pop, the blue skies—all of them were once as real as now. Paul Simon was right about Kodachrome; it made a summer day beautiful. It was literally made for them. Color film was “slow”; that is, it needed lots of light.
My wife’s family made 8mm home movies back then. A family outing to the Catskills mountains in the summer, circa 1938 had shots of dancing, comedy skits, and the usual hammy showing off that movie cameras always bring out in boys. Mel Brooks was not the first Jew to find humor in donning a fake mustache and mocking their most wicked enemy. We’re seeing the silent laughter of one of the only happy Jewish communities remaining in that world. Seeing these little four-minute films about eighty years later, there’s a poignancy about something we know and they can’t; the future. In a couple of reels, nearly every man in the ’38 movie would be in an olive drab or blue uniform, often filmed on leave, shyly grinning before shipping out. I only knew the vivacious young women on film as ladies in their sixties and seventies. If all family home movies have a master theme, it’s the Circle of Life.
The ‘50s were unprecedented boom times for the American economy, and for families, the real “wonder years” of the suburbs. Depression-bred parents enjoyed prosperity they’d never known. One big beneficiary of this baby boom was Eastman Kodak. At Christmastime, their snapshot and movie cameras included a card to place on the outside of the wrapping: “Open Me First”, so you could photograph Christmas Day with them. This was the single biggest annual use of 8mm film. Developing labs put on extra shifts each year to deal with the post-Christmas week rush.
It exposed, pun intended, one weakness of home movies of that era: it was tough to do it well indoors. Back then it required a row of hot, high powered lamps that put new meaning in the word “floodlight”, and that put off their dazzle-blinded subjects. Without the boost they gave, even a large, seemingly brightly lit place like a bowling alley, a church with stained glass windows, a school gymnasium, or a store with banks of fluorescent lights could look dim, greenish, and flickery on film.
This home movie fad wasn’t just an American phenomenon. Europeans had always been enthusiastic about it. As postwar austerity slowly lifted, children’s early steps were once again filmed everywhere, on Agfa film (Germany), Pathecolor (France), and Ilford (UK and Ireland).
Even the USSR and the socialist countries of central and eastern Europe would eventually have thousands of dads taking the family out to the country in the coveted Zaporozhets, the Skoda, the Dacia, or the Trabant, making 8mm holiday family films that on a human level are reassuringly like ours, but are now also visual testimony to the privations of everyday life there in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. This casual, unintentional preservation of the details of everyday life that fall below the level of interest of most artists and historians is one of the most valuable things about them.
Kodak stoutly claimed that home movies weren’t expensive, not really, when you think of all you got. In, say, 1960, with developing included, each four-minute roll of 8mm film cost about $4.00 and it could have something like fifty individual, six-second color pictures in full motion. That doesn’t sound like a bad value, but that four bucks in 1960 would be about $35 today, about $8 a minute, whether the pictures came out or not. And home movies were notoriously prone to not coming out the way you’d hoped.
That was one of the stubborn problems that Eastman Kodak confronted when they strategized how to further grow their market. They discovered a blunt, un-PC truth: housewives, in fact, women in general, did not like using home movie cameras. They were too large, too heavy, made for tripods, not handheld, and too complicated for easy use on family occasions, with fussy settings for exposure and focus. Furthermore, the results too often came out poorly for women or for men. Moms, who by then were taking most family snapshots, were particularly shy about potentially being blamed for poorly made movies. So as the ‘60s began, Eastman set about fixing most of those problems. The solution was a remodeled 8mm wide film called Super 8, introduced in 1965.
Super 8 had a smaller sprocket hole to move the film, and a thinner line between frames, which allowed a 30% more efficient use of the existing space. That meant a much better picture. All Super 8 cameras had electric motors, not spring-wound. They ran at 18, not 16 frames a second to reduce flicker. Above all, it meant easy loading, with Kodak’s patented drop-in cartridge. You never touched the film. Notches on the plastic cartridge set the proper film type. The first generations of Super 8 cameras all had automatic exposure and pre-set “universal” focus. For indoor filming, the new halogen lights fit on top of the camera, with a slot that moved the daylight color filter out of the way. Product design engineers aimed at a size and lightweight that could be carried in a purse, about the size of a transistor radio, and came close. They came up with a home movie camera that moms could love and did. For about the next 15 years, Super 8 was America’s family storyteller. It became as successful as Kodak and the whole amateur cine industry hoped, greatly expanding the number of users.
By the early ‘70s, faster color film and a new generation of camera design made it possible to film indoors with less added light. Then in 1973, Kodak made a great jump, introducing sound film cartridges for Super 8, a major revolution for home movies. Taking out and setting up the projector had always been a minor chore, so that too was thoughtfully redesigned. The new projectors sat flat, on a shelf against the wall, looking like an open reel tape deck. But by then, the sun was already beginning to set on 8mm film, no doubt a Kodachrome sunset.
One lingering issue was having to wait to see how the movies came out. In 1977, Polaroid finally unveiled its Polavision system of instant-developing Super 8 sound home movies. It was an ingenious accomplishment that, like the development costs of Polaroid’s flagship SX-70 camera, almost bankrupted the company. This time there’d be no happy ending, though. If Polavision had hit the market in 1967, it would have been a sensation. But ten years later, everyone knew that home video was right around the corner. Sure, video equipment was expensive, finicky, and could barely be used outdoors. That would change, and quickly.
By 1985, even Marty McFly was using a camcorder. Family tapes of the ‘80s and ‘90s are low resolution, squarish images that for many of us are now precious artifacts of distant times, and now-deceased relatives. They may not be technically perfect, but at least you hear their words; you’ve got your late aunt and your mom laughing together, sharing a joke at a wedding in 1994. Those VHS tapes, so modern-seeming when we made them, are now aging themselves, with fewer and fewer working machines left to play them on.
Even today, there are still a handful of people and small companies involved with Super 8 film, for artistic or retro reasons. With costly professional processing, it can look nearly as good in 4K as conventional movie photography. Super 8 lives, sort of. But when I think of home movies, I’m thinking of the flickering darkness of an earlier era, of sharing a few distant moments again, especially with those now departed. Like ghosts, they smile and speak to us from a silent, dreamlike realm of the past. They tug at our hearts, but their words cannot reach our ears.
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My younger brother had some old 8mm film converted to digital video, so I can see myself riding the horse, driving the tractor, and cleaning out the sheep-shed. Good times.
Back then, I didn’t like being skinny. Now, I wish …
Yeah, like Joan Rivers used to say, tell me about it.
Dad had an 8mm, and a projector. First steps, first walk down the sidewalk to school, me playing baseball in the backyard with a wiffle ball and bat (and running the bases Jimmy Piersall style — backwards). Birthday candles being extinguished. Oh, and a box of cartoons. Most of those were black and white, and nearly all of them were Disney. I’m not sure where they came from. For the most part though, Dad gets out the 35mm camera. He’ll still get it out from time to time, but now that I’ve shown him the camera function on his phone, it is seen less and less.
Films of manned space missions were duplicated en masse, really fast. Within a few weeks of Apollo 11 returning from the Moon, full color Super 8 newsreels were on sale.
I remember that at Christmastime, 1977, department stores showed off 10 minute sound cut-down versions of “Star Wars”, not available on videotape for years to come. It seemed amazing–you could see it whenever you wanted, even if it was little more than a trailer and clip reel.
Home movies still exist in Hollywood movies and television. There are quite a few scenes of someone–often a tortured soul–sitting in a room with a projector reliving the past. It’s kind of ironic because, as you point out, the point of home movies was to capture happy times.
As seen in “Minority Report”, even in the year 2054 Tom Cruise is watching holographic home movies in exactly the kind of scene you describe.
I have an amazing VHS copy of a 1940 4th of July ceremony in Paterson, NJ. My grandfather filmed it in color.
I’ll just say 1940 must have been a great year for flag makers.
Sounds great. Is there a preservation protocol for stuff like that?
We shouldn’t forget that Abraham Zapruder made the most famous home movie in history.
It’s best to get it professionally digitized. It’s not cheap. A good service will clean the film, repair if necessary and give you a choice of media for the copy.
Sadly, all my grandfather’s films were copied to VHS and the originals were tossed. My big regret though, there’s nobody left in the family who can identify people and places from 80 plus years ago.
My late sister had one of those companies put all of our parents’ 8mm films onto a CD and showed it to the entire family (nieces, nephews, grandkids, etc.) a couple years ago. Among many things, everyone got to see us doing the Twist in 1962 or so.
She wasn’t embarrassed, but I was, a little. God rest her soul.
I didn’t have to suffer through home movies as a kid, but my friend’s dad had a Super 8 camera. In middle school we would get out of actually writing reports by asking the teacher if we could make a movie instead. The results were usually pretty funny, although maybe not all that educational. And our projects were always late because we didn’t factor in the time to send it out to get developed.
I knew at least one family that had those, and saw ads for them in magazines and catalogs. So I knew they existed, but didn’t know about all that history. Thanks! It was interesting.
Exceptional article.
We had a Super 8. No sound, though. It’s been about 10-15 years since we last fired up the projector. Still works as far as I know. We loved home movie night as kids – even the one of my parents’ wedding in 1967. It’s nice to think about a world where ghetto Polish neighborhoods somehow had taverns with caged monkeys in them, presumably smoking and drinking whatever the guests fed to it. No expensive affair was that, just Church followed by dancing, eating, and drinking and having a general good time.
Aside from home movies I seem to recall some cartoons too. A few Heckle and Jeckle episodes for sure. I gather that just admitting such a terrible thing from the distant past could get me cancelled today, so I’d appreciate if you keep that just between you and me.
Many thanks, Mark!
My first college film project was shot on a Bell+Howell 8mm owned by my parents. It was perfect for the wannabe animator as it came with a plunger that triggered a single frame exposure and advance.
And the light kit! Holy cow. It was better than the lights at Wrigley. Our home on Christmas morning glowed like there were alien spacecraft in the living room.
The biggest problem there may be belts and rollers. One has a tendency to get brittle and the other warp or flatten out. Check it out while you still might be able to get parts.
Probably the best year? 1958. They issued a 49 star and then a 50 star flag within two years.
We couldn’t afford home movies until 1966, but from that point on, they are like yours–Irish, Italian and German Catholics are pretty similar to Poles when it comes to dancing, drinking and having a good time. I have a video transfer of the bishop arriving at our parish for Confirmation Day, and first Holy Communion. As home movies go, it’s great looking; long lines of kids in white, black and red. There’s no sound back then, but The Imperial March is pretty funny alongside it.
Belts and rollers are still obtainable because they’re… belts and rollers, and so have all sorts of industrial uses, with custom sizes obtainable if you know where to look and ask. They just aren’t sold as camera parts, so you have to dig a bit deeper, or improvise a bit. There are other wear parts, however, particularly in the mechanics, that are much much harder to source if they break.
I’ve been spending the last year and a bit relearning photography (I put it aside years ago when film developing got more expensive and I was broke), which has a lot of overlap with film and video. There is a lively trade still in old gear, with some vintage lenses going well into the thousands (Zeiss Jena 75mm F1.5 from the 1930s will run you about 3 grand on Ebay, for instance). It’s the same with various grades and types of film cameras – some particular brand or batch has somehow achieved legendary status for clarity, or construction, while others start with the old bargains and work their way up. And a lot of gear gets repurposed if its original camera rig or film type is shot, my favorite so far being a projector lens from a Bell and Howell being retasked as a 50mm F1.2 prime (not bad for 20 bucks!). (Personally I’m eyeballing an old Soviet Zenit Helios 44-2 F2 as those have some unique effects wide open).
My mother’s parents and grandparents shot 8mm movies when my mother was quite young. My father was an early adopter of the VHS camcorder – so early it looked more like a TV camera, with the camera itself on a shoulder rig and the recorder slung over his shoulder. Well, my grandfather brought down all the old reels, and my father rigged his camera to point at the projector screen and video the projected films. About a decade ago he transferred those to DVD. I need to now go through those and make backups – that’s 4 different types of media, altogether. The fun bit during the first transfer was that my grandpa and dad were drinking beers and keeping up a running commentary, so we have that in place of any original sound.
True–and when you see enhancements of the film, they have to include the area around the sprocket holes. because standard 8 photographed outside of the normally projected areas of the frame. AZ’s camera was springwound, which makes exact timings tricky since the spring winds down as the camera runs.
That would make it better, probably.
I can remember seeing a documentary of home movies made by people in the 1930s that were of historical interest. One was of an American who was a steel maker in Mexico. He would film indigenous people in the south of Mexico. Another was of an American doctor who went to visit his family in Poland in 1938. Tried to convince them to come to the US but to no avail. None survived the ghetto and death camps that awaited them.
My family never did home movies but a friend of my father’s had made home movies of their trip to the Brussels world’s fair of 1958. I never got tired of looking at those as a kid.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Gary. Much appreciated.
Since many modern SLRs are also good digital video cameras, the fact that a lot of “old glass” has common mounting is helpful. On the cine front, some people have been using Russian Krasnogorsk 16mm cameras as a poor man’s Arriflex.
Although my parents had an 8mm camera, my mother bought a Super 8 model one day and went nuts taking movies of everything. Drove me and my friends crazy! Fast forward to the advent of digital cameras. We bought one for her for Christmas, and she went nuts all over again. Our daughters never forgave us because my mother would constantly interrupt what they were doing to get pictures. Lucky for us we weren’t photogenic . . .
Both of my still cameras are quite suitable for home movies, vlogging (not that I do that) or other forms of videography, and the one major improvement would be in the lenses. The big distinguishing feature today is that true cinematic lenses for digital cameras are often massively more expensive than stills lenses. But that’s not a hard and fast rule. I’ve heard some film makers say that older SLR lenses can make for fine movie lenses today, but that older cinema lenses just do not give a good picture on digital sensors. I’ve not delved into that myself.
But I did find a good discussion of what goes into a modern cinema lens.
This is fascinating.