I saw dead people

I saw some fascinating movies this week, movies that none of you will ever see.
I have my family’s Super 8 movies here in Austin. A few years ago, I thought I might transfer them all to video by hand using a projector and video camera. I wanted to find out if I could transfer them to digital media but at the time, people looked at me like I was crazy when I suggested it.
However, these days you can find all kinds of services to transfer Super 8 movies to digital files. I found a nearby local company, Dub King, that transferred the movies to miniDV format and then used the DV master to make me some DVDs and even a videotape (my grandparents don’t have a DVD player).
Eventually, I would like to get a miniDV deck (probably by getting a digital video camera) and edit the two hours of footage into something more interesting and watchable. In the meantime, though, we have the DVDs to enjoy, and we can always fast-forward past the parts where my dad overexposed the film at the beach when he was trying to film young women in bikinis, or the footage from my parents’ trip to Mexico that has no people in it, only scenery.

I am actually enjoying watching the DVD on my laptop more than I did on the TV. The laptop image is smaller but somehow it seems a little more personal. No matter which screen I watched the home movies on, though, I missed the clicky noise of the Super 8 projector in the background. I wonder if I couldn’t just find a sound file with the clicky noise and play it while I’m watching the movies. I know, that’s a little weird.
These are only half the Super 8 reels I have in Austin with me right now. I only had the ones from my parents transferred to digital video. I am waiting to do the ones from my maternal grandparents, because my aunt is supposed to send me a couple of reels to add to the batch. Also, I wanted to see the results of the transfer before we spent even more money on my grandparents’ films. (And my mom says I should let my grandparents pay for the transfer, especially since some of the footage looks like it might be dull for my family to watch … things like film of my aunt’s horses, friends of my grandparents playing golf, etc.)
The movies I did have transferred start with my mom’s graduation from LSU in 1964, but most of them are from 1969-1978. One final reel is from 1983, for my baby brother’s first birthday. My dad’s Super 8 camera was in bad shape and couldn’t be used indoors but we somehow managed to rig it for that one last reel. I am pretty sure I filmed that last one, because I am nowhere to be seen, and in 1983 I felt ugly enough to break the camera (which in retrospect was entirely ridiculous).
An embarrassingly large amount of the film footage has me in it, me as a baby and a small child, until my brother was born. I was an adorable little girl with ringlets and a big smile, wearing intricately smocked dresses that a variety of older relatives made and gave me. Later films show me in ratty t-shirts and shorts or jeans with long snarly hair, usually acting horribly overdramatic for the camera.
That’s not what I find fascinating about these movies, though. I like seeing all the details—Christmas films in which my brother or I receive toys that my parents still have and that my nieces and nephews still play with, relatives pulling presents out of D.H. Holmes bags with that iron-gate logo on them or Maison Blanche bags with Mr. Bingle on them, guys drinking out of old-fashioned Dixie beer cans. It’s surprising to see how dressed up everyone used to get for family holidays, with all the men and even the little boys wearing ties. One quick shot of my dad with a beard, another one of a certain uncle before he started wearing a toupee, an aunt who looks like she copied her fashion style from Liza Minnelli.
And I know everyone in my immediate family will get a kick out of seeing things like the very dated furniture and home decorations that my parents hung on to for years, such as the lamp made out of a liquor bottle, the other lamp modeled after a weathercock, the huge rooster that used to hang on the wall, and the hideous wallpaper that used to hang in the kitchen in the house we had in 1978.
But that’s not what got me about the home movies, that’s not the thing that I was surprised to see was most interesting to me, that almost made me cry a few times.
I was fortunate to have a lot of older relatives alive when I was growing up, including all my grandparents and two sets of great-grandparents. It is one thing to see these people in photographs, but quite another to see them waving and smiling at you on your TV or computer screen. Faded, yes, and often out of focus, but animated and laughing and alive.
I caught brief glances of Miss M., whose family lived next door to mine when I was a very little girl. We saw them all occasionally after we moved away, Miss M. and Mr. E. and their grown-up kids. I think I was 12 years old when Miss M. died very suddenly. I’d had distant relatives die before and went to their funerals, which were more like family reunions, but this was the first time I’d dealt with a close friend of the family dying, and not a relative. It was almost painful to see her again even in quick flashes on the screen.
I saw my great-grandparents Mammy and Pops out on their farm, where we rode ponies and horses when we were very young, and later on tried to fish in their pond, and where a peacock pecked my sister so badly that she still has a little scar. Pops died when I was in high school, and Mammy went right after I finished college, living her final days in a nursing home in Baton Rouge, unable to recognize any of us when we visited.
I saw Aunt E., who was actually my great-grandfather Grandpa M.’s second wife, and although I couldn’t hear her, her mouth never stopped moving the entire time she was on screen. Aunt Edith was an amazing talker who knew stories about everyone. She lost her voice before she died, and it was sadder than hearing that she’d died, watching her try to speak but not being able to.
I saw my dad’s parents. We used to spend Christmas Day at their house and I could see all of us in the back parlor, which was only used for special events, and then in the kitchen and the living room, being silly and making trouble. The baby in an aunt’s lap was my cousin who died when a drunk driver hit his car, when I was a freshman at LSU.
I saw my sister’s best childhood friend, who isn’t dead, but whom my parents never talk about around me because they’re so very disappointed in her. After her abusive husband left her and her child, my parents claim she was the victim of aggressive recruiting techniques by a bunch of lesbians, who were nice to her, and now she’s One Of Them. She broke her momma’s heart. Personally, I was pleased to hear how happy she was and what a wonderful turn her life had taken, but no one in my family wants to hear such a subversive point of view.
In home movies, no one is sad, no one is angry. Even when someone acts annoyed that they are being filmed (mostly a certain aunt who is notorious for that kind of thing), it’s not very serious, it’s all play.
It’s almost like a preview of an afterlife, where everyone in the family is young and happy and playful, if a little uncomfortably overdressed, not to mention that the clothes are hilariously dated. I can’t imagine people with beehives or pillbox hats in the afterlife, but you never know. I wouldn’t want to return to those times—I was much too young—but I wouldn’t mind seeing those people again, and not just on film.
I saw a wonderfully sad movie this week (The Iron Giant) and a movie with astounding visuals (Sin City) but the most poignant, memorable, visually attractive movies I saw this week were the ones my family took with their old Super 8 camera, the movies that hardly anyone outside the family would see or would want to see, for that matter. Too dark in some places, too light in others, often out of focus, with people’s heads cut off at times, but still the movies I will remember most.