If your yearly suggestion to set up the 8-millimetre projector and watch old reels of the kids running around the yard naked is met with groans from your family, fear not, there is an audience for your work. This Aug. 11 marks the fifth-annual International Home Movie Day, a celebration that includes screenings all across the United States, in Canada and even Japan, of footage shot not by auteurs, but amateurs.
In Toronto, Home Movie Day (HMD) is hosted by the Film Reference Library, a division of the Toronto International Film Festival Group. In preparation for the big day's screening - which will take place at Cinematheque Ontario's Jackman Hall - the library invites all small-gauge chroniclers across the city to bring their 8-mm, Super-8 and 16-mm films down to the office from May 15 to July 20. (Videos are accepted if film no longer exists, though grudgingly.)
"Each film will be inspected to see if it's playable," says Sylvia Frank, director of the Film Reference Library. If necessary, repairs will be made, and then the film passed on to a curator who will decide whether it is an accidental masterpiece fit for the HMD celebration, or just an accident.
According to Frank, the highlight of last year's screening in Toronto was footage of a Boy Scouts retreat from the 1960s. Included were scenes of the boys paddling their canoes and sitting around the campfire roasting hot dogs, but, for Frank, what made the film special was the landscape. "The shots of a pristine Muskoka brought back a flood of memories," she said.
Frank, who calls these nostalgic narratives "the people's art form," believes, as HMD's founders did, that home movies deserve to be preserved alongside the work of more renowned cinematographers. The Library of Congress seems to agree with the sentiment - last year, a short film screened at an HMD event in New Orleans, Think of Me First as a Person, featuring scenes of a developmentally disabled boy as he grows up, was one of the 25 films entered in the library's film registry.
After the final frame has run out in Toronto, the film chosen to be the best of the lot will receive more than $100 worth in transfer services so the entrant can get digital copies made of his or her work. That might sound like a strange award for an event promoting the sacredness of film over newer media, but Frank calls these transfers "access copies," easier to play since people probably don't own the proper projectors any more. As for the original, Frank admonishes: "Never throw out the film. The film is the real thing."
So next time your family complains when you start digging through the closet for dusty boxes, just tell them Martin Scorsese called home movies "historical and cultural documents." That's from the HMD website, just below a request from cult-film director John Waters that shouldn't be ignored. "Home Movie Day is an orgy of self-discovery," he says. "If you've got one, whip it out and show it now."