Get Out Your Old Films
Library event celebrates value of home movies
Monday, August 7, 2006
H. Lee Waters' 1941 film of Kannapolis
Durham, N.C. -- On Saturday, Aug. 12, the lights in the Rare Book Room at Duke’s
Perkins Library will be out. But the library will be open for
business.
From 1-5 p.m., Duke will celebrate Home Movie Day, inviting amateur filmmakers to view and share their home movies and receive advice on preserving their 8mm, Super-8 and 16mm films. Duke’s visual materials archivist Karen Glynn, the event host, will be on hand with projectors and a crew of film experts to screen the prints and answer questions.
Between 30 and 40 people came to last year’s event, and the three movie projectors were kept running with their films.
“Strangers comment on each others’ films, ask questions in the dark, and ooh and ahh over the visual record of family and community life flickering across the screen,” Glynn said. “The act of viewing home movies for four hours on a hot August afternoon once a year generates community.”
Arani Roy, a graduate student in the Department of Neurobiology, is a volunteer for the event, which is free and open to the public.
“What impressed me most last year was the treasure trove of films people have in their homes that spills out in the open on that day,” Roy said. “One lady caught her breath as scenes of her grandmother doing garden work popped up.”
Until then, the woman had only seen her grandmother in photographs, Roy said.
The Duke event is part of the fourth annual international Home Movie Day celebration, which is being observed on the same day worldwide. Film archivists established the event to draw attention to amateur films, which are increasingly valued as cultural resources. By giving people a reason to pull out their old home movies, the archivists also get an opportunity to talk with them about preserving their films.
Nationally, film archivists from across the country will mark this year’s event by traveling to New Orleans to offer preservation advice to residents whose home movies were damaged by the storm.
“The home movies that survived the hurricane are an important historical record of the civic, social and cultural life of the city prior to Katrina,” Glynn said.
