Take me back to home movies played backward
I miss home movies. I don’t mean YouTube, Reels or TikTok.
Long before cellphones, camcorders and VCRs (remember those?), some of my richer uncles owned 8mm movie cameras. They’d unleash those things at picnics and weddings and other natural disasters.
They mostly filmed outdoors because shooting indoors required the attachment of big, honkin’ floodlights. Anything shot indoors showed cousins shading their eyes and squinting into the camera.
At Christmas, the rich uncle would roll out a film projector and spool reels of film around springs and sprockets. He aimed the projector at bedsheet pinned to a wall.
One of us kids would be tasked to kill the lights. Uncle flipped the switch, and with a clickety whirring sound of the spinning film reels, we were treated to 10 minutes of fuzzy black-and-white images of aunts and cousins flipping across front yards, blowing out birthday candles and waving at the camera so hard it looked like their hands would fly off.
It was Facebook without the focus, Instagram without the instant.
In those prehistoric days, people didn’t carry video cameras in their shirt pockets. It was rare to see a movie camera. When one got pointed at you, you felt obligated to do a jig, make faces or clown around in exaggerated movement. Even typically stern-faced grandpas acted like knuckleheads in home movies.
Home movies had neither plot nor sound, so the group of us sitting on the floor in the dark shouted out silly lines for stories we made up that vaguely matched the action flashing on the living room wall:
“Your wig looks lovely today, my dear. But aren’t you wearing it sideways?”
“Are you going to eat that after the dog licked it?”
“Grandma told me to grin like an idiot. Is this fool enough for you? Not put that infernal contraption away; I’ve got cows to milk.”
The best part was when the reel finished and the rich uncle rewound the movie. Everything played in reverse.
We laughed ourselves silly as cousin Scott leaped backwards into a tree like a marionette yanked aloft by a puppeteer, as cousin Cindy galloped in reverse on horseback, doing the moonwalk decades before Michael Jackson wowed the world with it, or as the pail that Grandpa dropped in the first showing leaped back into his hand and all the spilt milk was sucked back into the bucket like it was suctioned by a lactose magnet.
Some of the uncles who couldn’t afford movie cameras resorted to slides. It was much the same concept with the projector, bedsheet and darkened room. You could load 80 to 140 of those things on a single carousel tray and project your vacation photos on the wall.
There was no quicker way to make company go home than to say, “While you’re still here, let me get out the slides of our trip to the museum of rubber bands and hairballs. I’ve winnowed the slides down to seven trays. We can whip through these in like two hours.”
Slides always came with a droning lecture from the photographer. There were no doofus antics. Since they were still photos, it was the same set of relatives posing in front of 6,437 sites boring sites, typically blocking whatever it was you were supposed to see, which is why the uncle had to explain in monotonous detail what you were supposed to see.
There was no swiping left. The uncle didn’t click the next slide until he was done telling the story about the donkey and the hubcap or how much those greedy people at the gates charged for admission.
The purpose of slides, I think, was to give everyone else in the room ample opportunity to take a nap.
It’s nice that now most people carry cellphones that not only can shoot videos with full color and sound, but can play them back instantly. But for sheer entertainment value, I wish we’d bring back the rarity and flighty ditziness of those blurry, black-and-white home movies.
Come on, Burtie, wave at the camera. Wave. You can smile bigger than that. Keep waving.
Got it.
Film Cole at burton.w.cole@gmail.com or the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.