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By Sam Watson
Press Film Writer Your damp basement or sweltering attic could be contributing to the demise
of important historical records - your family's home movies.
"It's the most endangered type of film," said Brad Reeves, a media
archivist at East Tennessee State University's Archives of Appalachia.
"The problem is, you have all this history, and people are not aware that
the film is endangered and rotting away in the can, and we're losing so
much of our history. They are losing family history."
So, Reeves and others in the Association of Moving Image Archivists are
promoting the second-annual worldwide Home Movie Day. Scheduled for Aug.
14, including a local event at ETSU's B. Carroll Reece Museum, Home Movie
Day is intended to encourage renewed interest in and preservation of old
home movies.
Organizers hope people will dig into their closets, basements and attics
to uncover forgotten tidbits of heritage, not only to halt decay, but also
to watch them, perhaps for the first time in decades.
Reeves, who joined ETSU about a year ago, always has been an old movie
fan, and his interest includes home movies. He considers the home movie a
lost art - a colorful, lifelike medium that far surpasses the quality of
its modern successor, home video.
"One of the things I noticed when I would go to flea markets and junk
stores were these boxes of old home movies," Reeves said. "People would
pass away, and their families would throw these things out."
Reeves and friends picked up the movies and started having home movie
parties to view sometimes engrossing moments of American family life.
"Right before your eyes, you could see life unfolding," he said, adding
that one box of reels spanned a couple's life together for 25 years. "You
could literally see them courting, getting married, having children,
children leaving.
During a stint at the National Archives, Reeves was privy to the most
famous home movie of all - Abraham Zapruder's footage that captured
President Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963. Reeves' boss took him
into the vault without telling him what he was about to see.
"And there it was - the actual 8 mm Zapruder home movie," Reeves said. "It
was, 'Wow, I can't believe I'm in the same room with that.' It was
unbelievable. Luckily, that's been preserved. A lot of this stuff hasn't."
For Home Movie Day, archivists will be at the museum from 2-4 p.m. to
offer area residents the chance to project some home movies and learn
about ways to preserve and properly transfer their movies to VHS and DVD.
Reeves encouraged home movie owners to take their home movies out of their
basements and attics and store them in cool dry places. He also suggested
replacing metal reels and containers, which contribute to decay, with
inert plastic.
For more information, call Reeves at 439-4338 or visit <a
href=http://www.homemovieday.com target=_blank
class=BodyCopy2>www.homemovieday.com</a> on the Internet.
For more stories, please visit http://www.johnsoncitypress.com. Thank you!
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