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In January, Rhonda Vigeant, co-owner of Pro8mm, provider of cameras, film, processing, digital mastering, and family archival services, began a weekly live Internet radio show and podcast called the Home Movie Legacy Project. The show appears every Wednesday at 4:00pm Pacific/7:00pm Eastern on the Rock Star Radio Network.
Each week features a guest talking about an aspect of home movies and amateur filmmaking, such as home movies from Vietnam, home movies as stock footage, and crowd-sourced funding for digitization projects. This week’s guest (May 7th), is “film whisperer,” archivist, scholar and woman-about-town Snowden Becker, who will discuss her career in home movies.
In addition to the podcast, Rhonda recently published the book “Get ‘Reel’ about Your Home Movie Legacy…. Before It’s Too Late,”
Source: Facebook, HomeMovieLegacy.com
Scattered, a new documentary by Lindsay Lindenbaum is partway through a Kickstarter campaign to put the finishing touches on it and get it ready for the festival circuit. Lindenbaum uses home movies and home videos shot by her father to look at his life, but also to question how home movies are used to reflect the past.
Home movies rarely tell the whole story of someone’s life. Instead, they show fragments of a story that the person behind the camera hopes and imagines his life to be. Years later, when one’s current reality has faded or has become too difficult to bear, one returns to these memories, to this abridged story, to one version of the past. SCATTERED takes an unflinching look at my late father–a man who was fixated on documenting his life on film and who became estranged from me as a child–and unravels the story that he tried to create with his camera, to reveal the story that actually was.
Source: Kickstarter and LindsayLindenbaum.com
No More Road Trips?, a new feature-length documentary by Rick Prelinger, had a “Work-in-Progress” screening tonight at the SXSW Festival. Prelinger, who almost single-handedly put industrial films and other type of ephemeral filmmaking on the map and in people’s consciousness, has been amassing a huge collection of home movies (9,000 so far) and has used them in his Lost Landscapes of San Francisco and Detroit screenings, which featured home movies from those cities. With No More Road Trips?, however, he crosses America from east to west, looking at both the rites of travel and how we viewed and documented the landscape. Prelinger describes the motivation behind the film in its blog:
Home movies about road trips are especially wonderful, and my fascination with these (especially with the view of the landscape seen through the car window) led me to make No More Road Trips?. These private views of the public landscape show much more than roads and roadsides. History is embedded in the travel films I’m using — traces of the Great Depression, World War II and Vietnam, changes in land use, the fate of the Rust Belt city and town, the transition from two-lane roads to freeways, and much more — all show up in my film.
Yesterday the Librarian of Congress announced the annual addition of 25 titles to the National Film Registry. The list included one home movie, The Augustas, by Scott Nixon.
Scott Nixon, a traveling salesman based in Augusta, Ga., was an avid member of the Amateur Cinema League who enjoyed recording his travels on film. In this 16-minute silent film, Nixon documents some 38 streets, storefronts and cities named Augusta in such far-flung locales as Montana and Maine. Arranged with no apparent rhyme or reason, the film strings together brief snapshots of these Augustas, many of which are indicated at pencil-point on a train timetable or roadmap. Nixon photographed his odyssey using both 8mm and 16mm cameras loaded with black-and-white and color film, amassing 26,000 feet of film that now resides at the University of South Carolina. While Nixon’s film does not illuminate the historical or present-day significance of these towns, it binds them together under the umbrella of Americana. Whether intentionally or coincidentally, this amateur auteur seems to juxtapose the name’s lofty origin—‘august,’ meaning great or venerable—with the unspectacular nature of everyday life in small-town America.
The original is held in the collections of the University of South Carolina and is available for viewing online on their website.
The Center for Home Movies, the umbrella organization for Home Movie Day and your favorite home movie blog (ahem, that would be this one).
Your donations will go towards supporting Home Movie Day and home movie preservation projects. Even the smallest contribution would help.
U.S. residents can contribute online using GuideStar and the Network for Good at www.tinyurl.com/CHMdonations.
Non-U.S. residents can pay via Chipin.
Thanks, on behalf of CHM.
- The New York Times published a very nice obituary by Margalit Fox.
- The Barstow family has posted video of Robbin’s memorial service, held at the at First Church of Christ in Wethersfield, Connecticut, on November 13, 2010.
- The Hartford Courant has posted a bio of Robbins in their “Extraordinary Life” column.
Photo by Wayne Sassano/Wethersfield Post
Variety has an article on youth & student film festivals.
“When students make films, it;s less to reach a wide audience, as may be expected at some of the more established film festivals,” he says. “They’re not trying to please anybody, they’re just trying to find their own voices.”
Get this one-of-a-kind recycled Super 8 clock on Etsy.
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
home & amateur 