Mad for Movies Made at Home

This weekend, around the world, attics will be rummaged, basements will be scoured, and memories will be revived as strangers unite to share their home movies.

Founded as an event in 2002, Home Movie Day (www.homemovieday.com) has caught on as an annual, international tradition, not just for those everyday amateur filmmakers who want to share a slice of their family histories, but for audiences that relish a chance to peer into the lives of others. As managed by organizers from Anchorage, Alaska, to Weston, Fla., and from Argentina to the Netherlands around the globe, Home Movie Day now boasts a list of more than 60 events around the world. New York City's Home Movie Day will be held at Anthology Film Archives on Saturday afternoon. Having seen the event unfold every year, Andrew Lampert, Anthology's archivist, said these sorts of films offer an intimate view of the inner workings of our culture.

"It offers a different history of the 20th century," Mr. Lampert said, pointing to the Zapruder film — the only existing video of the Kennedy assassination — as the most famous home movie of all time. "Last century was documented differently than ever before, in moving image documentation. If you think about it, it's so important to preserve these documents. If you want to know what the 1950s were like, you don't want to have to watch ‘Leave it to Beaver'; there needs to be a broader perspective, and these home movies give us an invaluable way of seeing everyday life in a different way."

Yet it was not this broader perspective that initially led to the creation of Home Movie Day — the voyeuristic thrills, it would seem, are just a bonus — but rather the material concerns of film archivists who feared a generation's worth of images might disappear forever. Mr. Lampert said the initial concept for Home Movie Day was forged by the Association of Moving Image Archivists as a way to raise awareness about a wealth of home movie footage that was in peril, either because people did not know the films existed or because the original film was first being converted to more modern formats — VHS, DVD, computer files — and then being discarded.

"We try to emphasize to people that these movies are part of our collective memory — and therefore also part of our collective responsibility to care for," he said. Even before 2000, Mr. Lampert said, archivists were realizing that fewer and fewer projectors were being produced and purchased, meaning that volumes of 16 mm and Super 8 footage were no longer viewable by the average person. Consequently, as average citizens went in to convert their outdated film to videotape, and more recently to digital formats, they often tossed away the original copies, thinking they had done enough to protect that footage.

"But if you have a VHS tape from the early '90s, you'll notice the dropout in the picture," Mr. Lampert warned. "With a DVD, all it takes is a scratch and it can't play; it's very fragile. But with film, if you store it properly in a cool and dry environment, it can last arguably hundreds of years."

So Mr. Lampert's version of the Home Movie Day, scheduled to run between 1 p.m. and 6 p.m. Saturday, is an event tailored for three constituencies: those curious about what footage is to be found on their outdated film reels, those interested in sharing their films with a wider audience, and those audience members who are simply intrigued to spend a few hours sifting through another person's world. As a courtesy, Mr. Lampert said, there will be trained archivists and lab technicians in the lobby of Anthology Film Archives to inspect visitors' films and offer tips on making transfers and conversions of these prized artifacts.

If attendees then want to project their 8 mm, 16 mm, or Super 8 films for the audience — and it must be the original film, Mr. Lampert warned, not VHS or DVD copies — the venue's staff will loop it and present it, unedited and uncut. "If people bring their films, they don't have to say anything as it's screening, but I try to prod people to speak up and narrate the movies they brought," he said. "So it becomes this very participatory, surprising event. It's not like going to see an Ingmar Bergman film, where everyone's silent, but you'll hear people saying, ‘Hey, who's that?' and you realize that sometimes people have never seen these films. Suddenly they are experiencing this incredible rush of memories they had forgotten about for years."

Recalling some notable family films from years past, Mr. Lampert recalled one man who, during the event's inaugural year of 2002, brought in a reel he had never watched and discovered it was footage of him as an infant, undergoing his circumcision, lying on the family's dinner table where he would eat dinner throughout his childhood. Mr. Lampert recalled another visitor who had operated a button store on St. Mark's Place during the 1960s and had become fascinated with the hippie movement, eventually deciding to take his camera out to the historic 1967 Central Park Be-In.

"It wasn't newsreel footage," Mr. Lampert said, "but it was first person footage shot throughout the park, really an invaluable perspective of a famous event."

Last year at Home Movie Day, one film captured a group of gay men vacationing together during the 1950s.

"It seemed like just another home movie, but when you think about that point in time, and how this would have been considered a subversive, amoral lifestyle during its own time, it was really remarkable."

On account of the various cultures and lifestyles represented by the city's many constituencies, Mr. Lampert said it's the diversity of the Anthology Film Archives presentation that is most remarkable. But if that's the selling point for luring curious viewers in search of a spectacle, Mr. Lampert said it's the notion of forgotten memories that entices so many curious filmmakers to dust off those old film canisters every year.

"There's something surreal about watching these movies," he said, "to see people on-screen, from different eras and cities who aren't all that dissimilar from you and me. It's exciting that way to watch someone else's home movie. But to see your own movie up there … there hasn't been a Home Movie Day without someone who's cried. I don't feel like I've done my job if someone doesn't need a hanky by the end of the day."