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Meacham.
Brian Meacham, the archive manager at the Yale Film Study Center, threaded a film reel into an old Super 8 projector. He turned the projector on and for a second or two, the fuzzy image of a baby sitting on a beach flickered on to the screen, located upstairs in the New Haven Museum. The film was choppy. For a moment, the projector didn’t appear to be working.
Super 8 cameras were ubiquitous in the mid-20th century, the final step in the democratization of home movie making. They were the focus of Home Movie Day, a celebration of ordinary people’s documentation of their daily lives, held on Saturday afternoon at the museum as a few participants showed their own home movies to an audience of a dozen people.
But right this second, historical context wasn’t the primary concern. Meacham was just trying to get the projector to function properly.
“Like a Mac computer today, they deliberately tried to obscure some of its technical complexity,” said Ethan Gates, software preservation analyst for the Yale University Library, as Meacham fussed with the decades-old machinery.
Hancock, Gates, Meacham.
Bob Hancock, a 76-year-old New Haven resident, waited patiently with a film reel of his own. He’d been waiting for years, so what’s waiting a few more minutes due to a technical difficulty?
“It’s been sitting around for the last 25 years and I hadn’t seen it recently,” Hancock said. “I only [shot home movies] for birthdays, Christmas, and vacations.”
Meacham successfully coaxed the film projector back into operation. The baby came back onto the screen. She wore a blue bathing suit and a white frilly hat and sat on perfect white sand. She reached out to the camera. She smiled. The little girl was Robin Elizabeth Hancock, Bob’s daughter, and in 1987, Robin was almost a year old.
“We are in the Bahamas,” Hancock said, staring intently at the screen. On the film, his wife Betty picked up the year-old Robin and dangled her little toes in the blue ocean. “She liked taking baths, so we thought she’d like the ocean, but she didn’t want anything to do with it,” Hancock said.
A moment later, Robin was lying on the beach next to her mom, holding a bottle with both hands. “She’s a two-fisted drinker,” Hancock quipped.
The next moment, she was crawling and Betty held her up to take a few baby steps. The next moment it was Christmas, and Robin was opening a dolly with her grandmother. The next moment it was her first birthday and she had a cake with a single candle on it. The whole Hancock family was there in their Watson Street home, celebrating the little girl.
“I made the cake,” Bob said.
Bob Hancock didn’t edit the film together to feature these life events. He just picked up the camera when something important happened and started shooting from where he left off.
So what you had were moments, framed by Christmases and birthdays, of a little girl getting bigger and stronger. Robin sitting in the arms of a cousin who was more like a big sister. Robin opening a Cabbage Patch doll that her mother was more excited about than she was. Robin riding a tricycle around a Christmas tree.
In a matter of minutes in screen time, Robin got older. So did Bob.
Meacham said that home movies have become of increased interest for scholars. What better way to get a sense of what it was really like at a particular time and place? Ordinary people documented things that scholars would never have thought to chronicle, Meacham explained.
“They show things in a way that is unplanned, but is so valuable today,” Meacham said.
McCarty.
But for all of the home movie aficionados in the room Saturday afternoon, the films could mean something a bit different. “I find it touching to see these people and places from a time gone by,” said Andrea McCarty, audiovisual project manager at the Yale University Library.
In the 1920s and 1930s, because of the expense of the equipment, amateur films were generally made by people of wealth or status. Meacham pointed to fascinating footage of life at Yale in the 1920s as an example.
After World War II, the equipment becomes more mainstream and a great mass documentation of life begins. With the aging of the equipment and the lack of film knowledge, people stopped looking at their old home movies.
“You want people to come back to film and to not be afraid of it,” McCarty said.
McCarty is a collector of orphan films — the term for a film that was not made by a studio or some other enterprise with a vested interest in its continued life. She showed a film she bought at a tag sale. It might have taken place in California or Massachusetts in the mid-1960s. It could’ve been a store opening or a street festival, according to the chatter around the room (as it turns out, the film depicted a parade).
Whatever it was had enough importance for people to train their eyes on it and to note it in the most permanent way available to them.
Bob Hancock’s film was most assuredly not orphaned. One can say it was simply in storage for the right moment.
The projector clicked and the light flickered. Bob, now around 40 years old, was throwing little Robin up in the air. She was delighted.
Another birthday and Robin was dancing. The camera was on her, but you could see the adults dancing behind her.
Shortly thereafter, the reel ended.
Robin Elizabeth Hancock is now 37 years old and lives in New York.
When asked how he felt watching his home movies after all these years, Bob had a simple answer: “It’s an interesting experience.”
