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A new museum in Brussels dedicated to Rene Magritte features some home movies made by the Surrealist master.
As well as letters, posters, tracts and photographs there are films of Magritte and his friends fooling around with a Prussian helmet and tuba. “They were in their sixties when they made these home movies,” says project manager Virginie Devillez, “which is amazing. They were like kids.”
Source: Wall Street Journal
Dan Friedman interviews Peter Forgacs:
“It’s hard to explain the euphoria of ’89,” Forgacs explained intensely, “when it all ended.” With the fall of Communism, everything changed. Soon Western Europe came knocking at his door in the guise of a Dutch television company — the world wanted to know about the people behind the Iron Curtain and who better to tell them than the archivist of their home movies.
Source: The Jewish Daily Forward
In the early 50s, Ingmar Bergman got himself a cine camera, a 9.5 mm Bell & Howell, which he often used both privately and in his work. Images from the Playground draws upon this body of footage to create a rich and varied portrait of one of the greatest cinematic artists of all time. These images from the director’s grown-up playground are accompanied by Bergman’s own commentaries from various interviews. While actresses Harriet Andersson and Bibi Andersson – exposed to Bergman’s loving eye in these lavish documentary sequences – also contribute with vivid personal accounts.
Sources: Ingmar Bergman Foundation, Swedish Film Institute, Svensk Filmindustri
Rod Tatsuno, son of Dave Tatsuno, whose home movies of the Topaz internment camp, will give a presentation on his family’s life at the Ketchum, Idaho public library.
At the Topaz relocation center near Delta, Utah, Dave Tatsuno, of San Jose, Calif., managed to sneak in his Bell and Howell 8 millimeter camera and used color film to make home movies of his family. Little did he know that his favorite pastime would not just be a remedy for his family’s suppression, but his films would become a national treasure.
Source: Idaho Mountain Express
British filmmakers are working on a documentary about Detroit, its cars and music. It is scheduled to be shown on BBC TV.
No news there. Hordes of journalists have been poking around the city and suburbs since the auto industry crisis became international news last fall.
But the Brits are doing something different: They want Detroiters to help them make the project.
They are searching for made-in-Detroit home movies, be they 8 mm, Super 8 or video. They want the good, the bad and the ugly.
They want footage from union picnics, backyard barbeques, Thanksgiving parades, the 1967 riot, Devil’s Night conflagrations, and, basically anything that will show the world what it was like living in the Motor City during the 20th Century.
Source: Bill McGraw in the Detroit Free Press
The Fuji Photo Museum will present an exhibit on the history of home movies in their Tokyo site, from May 28th to December 28th.
The exhibition provides an explanation of the history of home movies with exhibits that include a 19th century zoetrope – a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static images, the world’s first Pathe Baby home film system and Pathe Baby Film Camera, and a Single 8 camera. The exhibition also features several reproductions of original images taken with a prewar Pathe Baby Film Camera which are shown on a large screen TV.
Source: FujiFilmSquare.jp
THOSE distant days that South Australians captured on their precious home movies are to live again during the 2010 Adelaide Festival.
The Festival’s artistic director, Paul Grabowsky, yesterday began an ambitious search for SA’s Super 8 movie gems.
The thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of metres of film will be edited down to six short films called Reel Life to be shown free in public spaces around Adelaide during the Festival.
Source: Adelaide Now
“What raises his work to a higher level is the deep ingenuity he brings to the minimal tools he has,” said Ross Lipman, a film restorationist at the Film and Television Archive at the University of California, Los Angeles, which is in the process of preserving Mr. Laverents’s films, including “The Sid Saga.”
Source: New York Times
See also Previous Sid Laverents obit
Relatives and archivists from the University of Georgia recently oversaw the restoration of more than a dozen of the Ethridge family home movies shot between 1930s and the 1950s.
The films, which were restored with a $11,100 grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, will make their public debut at the family’s Mule Day celebration Saturday.
Mule Day allows visitors to explore the century-old buildings and learn more about the history of the 200-year-old farm.
Source: Online Athens
The great amateur filmmaker Sid Laverents passed away last week in a San Diego County hospital, 9 months after celebrating his 100th birthday. Laverents, best known for his whimsical masterpiece Multiple SIDosis, which was named to the National Film Registry in 2000, was a superstar of the amateur film club scene before becoming widely known among film circles in his 90s.
home & amateur 